Screen People
How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 21 Apr 2026
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- 13,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 13,99 €
Publisher Description
'Incisive' - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
'A brilliant, funny, omnivorous excavation of how technology and entertainment have warped humanity '
SOPHIE GILBERT, PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST AND AUTHOR OF GIRL ON GIRL
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From an award-winning staff writer for the Atlantic, Screen People is an eye-opening look at how the current media landscape conditions us to see everyone as characters in ongoing entertainment - and how we can fight back
Whether it's our expertly curated Instagram feeds or the reality-television-star US President, the line 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 and explains how today's internet-inflected culture incentivises us to see one another as characters in a show, and how some of our most chronic and harmful social conditions - loneliness, depression, mistrust, misinformation and cynicism - stem from our demand for diversion.
In ten chapters, each themed around an element of entertainment 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.
Screen People shows why Garber is one of the most respected and widely read journalists of our day. This book is an urgent, dazzling look at how we entertained ourselves into our current predicament and shows how we might find our way out of the chaos.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atlantic staff writer Garber (On Misdirection) provides a scathing but unfocused examination of how the radically shifting contemporary media environment has warped Americans' interactions with one another and the world. Writing in response to feeling "chastened by the giddy optimism I once felt for the Internet," the author seeks to identify the cause of the current influx of misinformation, alienation, division, online bullying, and "surreality." She chalks it up to the oddity of social media's "two-way screens." In contrast to television's one-way screen, which creates distinct divisions between "those who were watched and those who did the watching," the internet, particularly social media, confuses these boundaries, making all users "actors and audiences," and encouraging the mistreatment of others because they "don't seem real." This environment has not only turned politics into show business, best exemplified by the rise of Donald Trump (though Garber argues this occurred even earlier with former actor Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton's televised sax-playing), but all interaction now carries the pressure of entertainment (she cites the bored response to the January 6 hearings). However, this incisive argument is muddled by frequent, somewhat off-topic asides on major news events as well as TV shows and films, ranging from Love Is Blind to the 2017 P.T. Barnum bio-pic The Greatest Showman. This meanders more than it makes it case.
