Courtesy of Chris Stedman
Chris Stedman
For Chris Stedman, 2016 was a definitive year. A breakup, a job change, and his move back to Minnesota after almost a decade of being away caused him to reassess what it meant for him to be his authentic self online.
“I started to post online as if it were business as usual, but I could feel this split between my online and offline self,” he said.
It became evident to Stedman that to understand this tension between who we are on and off our screens, he would have to explore his own relationship with social media and the internet, and so he did. Last year saw the release of his memoir IRL, which questions the difference between our digital and real-world identities. It’s the second book by the Augsburg professor who teaches in the department of religion and philosophy, whose first book Faitheist documented his journey from being an evangelical Christian to an atheist.
The internet was present in Stedman’s early years, but going online still existed as a separate activity. Stedman reminisces of the days of riding his bike to the public library in order to connect online. Today, he explains there's a fundamental change where opting to disconnect has become a very intentional choice, and being online all the time is simply the norm. While Stedman isn’t one to say that the internet is good or evil, he says the internet has been a place to seek community.
“Looking at my own experience as a queer person, the internet was the first place I ever came out to anyone,” he says. “I have continued to find a sense of community with the queer community online. I’m hoping anyone who reads IRL can find it to be useful in reflecting on their own digital lives.”
Not long after Stedman finished IRL, his world changed again when he received a scheduled email from his friend, Alex Small, saying he had committed suicide. Along with the email was a set of mysterious audio files of Alex talking to someone who sounded like Britney Spears, which for those who have followed the Free Britney movement, it isn’t too far off to speculate considering how celebrities have found their own anonymous community online.
After Alex’s death, when the funeral and other family affairs were taken care of, Stedman still felt like something was unfinished. “I had one question on my mind, and it was ‘why would he send me these files?’ I actually started to joke like ‘what if I made this into an investigative podcast’ and my friend was like, ‘no you should.’ I kind of just shrugged it off but I really wanted to understand why he sent me these files.”
Over the course of 2020 and into 2021, Stedman began his digital detective work and started his latest project, the four-episode podcast series, Unread, which is almost a companion of sorts to IRL.
“I had already spent the last few years trying to figure out what it meant to be a person online, then I spent the next year digging to see what it meant for someone like Alex to be in the online space,” Stedman says. “Most of all I wanted to capture all the joy and light that Alex brought into people’s lives, and I hope that comes through in the show.”
With the help of an investigative journalist and those who were closest to Alex, Stedman’s four-episode podcast embarks on an exploration of grief and loss. In the first episode of the series, “Email My Heart,” he introduces the elusive Alice, a friend Alex met online whose laugh is nearly identical to that of Spears. Listeners join Stedman as he falls down a rabbit hole to find out who this online stranger is and what she meant to his friend.
“If you have ever lost somebody and felt stuck with the questions of what happened,” Stedman says, “if you love Britney Spears or don’t, but you want to understand why she is so important to so many people, and if you’ve had a friend who has changed the way you saw the world, this podcast might speak to you.”
Resources for suicide prevention
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
- In Minnesota: Contact the Greater Twin Cities United Way at 651-291-0211
