Screen People

From America’s reality-TV-star-cum-ex-president to our expertly curated Instagram feeds, it’s never been less clear what’s real and what’s been simply fabricated for our entertainment.

SCREEN PEOPLE is a deep dive into what happens when we cede our reality to spectacle. Garber explains how the internet-inflected culture of the present moment conditions us, every day, to see each other less as people than 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 stagecraft – from ‘The Producers’, who edit our reality, to ‘The Props’, the strangers we turn into objects of our amusement, all the way through to ‘the Haters’, the worshipful Qanon-types who expect the prophecies of their anonymous leader to play out on live TV – Garber builds toward an argument as urgent as it is ironic: our fun is quickly becoming our emergency. And we can’t understand our politics without first understanding our culture.

Part critical investigation, part manifesto, part fan’s diary, SCREEN PEOPLE will be an eye-opening journey into the cultural underbelly of our present malaise.

Author Biography

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is the recipient of a Mirror Award for her writing about the media and a fellowship from the New America Foundation, and she previously worked as a reporter for the Nieman Journalism Lab, as well as a critic for the Columbia Journalism Review. At The Atlantic, she writes about the intersection of politics and culture (which often, but not always, means that she writes about reality TV). She is the author of On Misdirection: Magic, Mayhem, American Politics. She lives in Washington, DC.