14 Ways to Die by Vincent Ralph follows Jessica, a 17-year-old girl who just became the star of a new YouTube reality series: The Eye. The show follows five different people, each with interesting stories to tell. Each day of the week, a participant live streams their days, using the time to tell their stories. Jessica wants to help solve her mother’s murder, but instead of solving her case, Jessica becomes the new target.
Heart-shaped Lies is a young adult mystery novel that follows three girls through a hectic trip to Florida. These three girls : Navaeh, Kiara, and Priscilla are all intertwined through the viral prank star, Tommy. When Tommy mysteriously dies after a video that exposes Tommy cheating on his girlfriend, Kiara, with Priscilla and Navaeh, a full-fledged investigation breaks loose. Who saw Tommy closest to the time of death? Was it really an accident? Or maybe it was all the alcohol he had that night?
The Social Network is a movie that goes on a step by step journey of the creation of Facebook through the eyes of Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. The plot accelerates through flashbacks of their time as Harvard students with the intermingling of the present day lawsuit happening over dividing up the shares of Facebook. I found this movie extremely captivating, as I never truly understood how a platform as big as Facebook came to life and what the motives were behind the creation of it.
In the current world, humans use social media as a way to break away from the real world to live in untrue experiences. The unnamed narrator of Fake Accounts plots to end her relationship with her boyfriend after a tame experience with him. The narrator, being a blogger for a website, realizes how she is stuck in a cycle where she has difficulty wanting to experience challenging activities.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is a contemporary fiction novel that explores the impacts of social media and the internet as well as family tragedy. The narrator of the book has recently become internet famous, and the first half of the book chronicles her thoughts and actions as someone who is extremely online. She refers to social media as “the portal” and is constantly creating posts, whether humorous or political or both.
Plum Winter gets excited when she finds out her cool influencer sister, Peach Winter, gets invited to a festival on a private island. Plum decides to invite her two friends, Marlowe and Antonia, to attend the festival. When they arrive to the island, it’s the total opposite of luxurious; it’s abandoned. Soon, the other seven influencers start to die. Now Plum and her friends have to find the killer before it’s too late.
CeCe Ross and her girlfriend, Silvie, are known to many people as social media influencers. But when Silvie breaks up with CeCe, she wonders if Silvie is not the only thing she will lose. Things seemed to being going good for Cece when she meets Josh, a boy who doesn’t partake in social media. But trouble brews for CeCe when she can’t seem to separate her private and public life.
Jess is a 17-year-old girl whose mother had been the first victim of the Magpie Man, an infamous serial killer. She decides to participate in a YouTube reality TV show to use her platform and try to catch the Magpie Man. In order to gain a contract with the show, she has to compete with four other teens to see who could gain the most attention. Will Jess be able to outshine her four competitors? Will she be able to catch the Magpie Man? Read more to find out!
It’s perfect, but is it real? Influence follows the lives of four teen influencers who live what seem like perfect lives: Delilah Rollins, a newbie who shot to fame after posting a viral video, Jasmine Walters-Diaz, a former child star who’s tired of hiding her real self, Fiona Jacobs, an aspiring actress who harbors a dark secret from her past, and Scarlet Leigh, the quintessential mean girl of the group. In the whirlwind of events and auditions and shoots, the tension escalates and one of the girls ends up dead.
