In Real Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age

by Nev Schulman

If there's anyone who knows about the darker side of online dating, it's Nev Schulman. The 29-year-old rose to fame after his documentary Catfish, about an online flirtation of his which turned sour, became a breakout hit. He followed it up with a series on MTV which followed similar stories of digital deception across America.

Nev has become the go-to expert in online relationships for millennials, a generation who have never known a world without Facebook. His clout in this area springs from his own experience which led him to coin the term 'catfish', referring to someone who creates a false online persona to reel someone into a romantic relationship. Now Nev takes his investigation to the page. Woven throughout with Nev's personal stories this book explores relationships in the era of social media, delving deeply into the complexities of dating in a digital age and continuing the cultural dialogue his show has begun about how we interact with each other online.

In IN REAL LIFE Nev explores the pressing issue of connectivity versus genuine connection which is plaguing our relationships with each other, and he provides the advice that his fans have been desperately seeking.

• ISBN10: 1473608066
• ISBN13: 9781473608061
• Publish Date: 11 August 2016 (first published 1 January 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Imprint: Hodder Paperback
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[Leah]

I LOVE Catfish: The TV Show. It's so much fun to see Nev and Max uncover catfish time after time after time. They make such a great pair and I watch it as much for them as I do for the actual catfish stories. So I was dead excited when Nev's book was announced. I've had it since it was published, but have actually only just got around to reading it. It's the perfect companion to Catfish, and I never knew Nev had had such an interesting life.

In Real Life was such a good read. Nev makes tons of great points (of which I'll get more into later) but he also peppers the book with his own personal history and it doesn't make for great reading because he wasn't always the absolutely gorgeous, lovely Nev we all know and love. Sometimes he was a bit of a jerk and a bit of a playboy and when he was even younger he was a rascal, and it was strange to read about this side of Nev because it was like he was a totally different person. I mean, I don't know Nev (duh) but the feeling you get when you watch him on Catfish is entirely different and you can really see how much he's worked to change his life, to be a better person and I applaud him for that. There's no secrets in In Real Life, he lays his life out bare and I feel like I know him better knowing the man he used to be and seeing how far he's come.

The book is also, of course, about catfish. We learn more of Nev's personal catfishing story that started the whole mission off (and which I'm dying to see), we learn Nev's tips and tricks for what to do if you want to have an online relationship and figure out if it's real, and he's very wise about how our generation (the millenials) are glued to social media. It's actually really opened my eyes, because what he says is right: your online self can be any self you want to be. It isn't the real you. And we need to stop hiding behind our online personas, otherwise all these twenty-somethings glued to their iPhones are going to wake up in a year or two and be super lonely, with no friends. It's so true. I love my iPhone, but I'm weaning myself off social media because it doesn't make me feel better; if anything it makes me feel worse. It's like 100% of the time I'm just talking to myself. And I have that in real life, with no one to talk to, so I hardly need that online, too!

Nev is such an amazing writer, and this is a spot-on read for our age, in which social media is king but it's all just a popularity contest. This is a must-read for anyone who loves Catfish or who thinks being a King on social media is any kind of achievement (it isn't).