Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency

An eye-opening look at how the current media landscape has incentivized us to see our fellow citizens as characters in an ongoing entertainment—and how we can fight back, from the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic.

Whether it’s our reality-television-star President or our expertly curated Instagram feeds, the line between fact and fiction—between what’s real and what’s fabricated for entertainment—has never been more blurred. Screen People explores what happens when we cede our reality to spectacle. Megan Garber explains how today’s internet-inflected culture conditions us to see one another not as people but as characters in an ongoing show, and how some of our most chronic and harmful social conditions—loneliness, depression, mistrust, misinformation, cynicism—stem from our demand for diversion.

In ten chapters, each themed around an element of entertainment—from “The Producers,” who edit our reality, to “The Extras,” the strangers we turn into objects of our amusement, to “the Haters,” the worshipful Qanon-types who expect the prophecies of their anonymous leader to play out on live television—Garber argues that this comedy of our daily lives is quickly becoming tragedy. And we can’t understand our politics without first understanding our culture.

Like The Anxious Generation but about our media diet, Screen People shows why Megan Garber is one of the most respected and widely-read journalists of our day. It is an urgent, page-turning, and dazzling look at how we entertained ourselves into our current predicament, and how we might find our way out of the maze of misinformation and chaos.

"A timely study of the internet’s toxic effects on American society … Anybody who spends time online will sympathize with Garber’s insightful, well-curated consideration." - Kirkus Reviews

"A thought-provoking, pertinent book." - Booklist

"A brilliant, funny, omnivorous excavation of how technology and entertainment have warped humanity, finding new meaning in everything from gender reveals and The Masked Singer to QAnon and Marshall McLuhan. Are we doomed? Not as long as Megan Garber is here to show us the light.” - Sophie Gilbert. Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Girl On Girl