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

by Megan Garber

From the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic, 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 against this phenomenon.

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 stagecraft—from “The Producers,” who edit our reality, to “The Props,” 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Sociology, Politics, Audiobook, Pop Culture, Social Media

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 21, 2026

Reviews

[Nathan Shuherk]

Currently this book has a 3.52 rating and only like 28 reviews and I feel like I’ve discovered a pure work of genius that no one understands. I was astounded and obsessed with this one. And I would’ve loved if the book had been a little more forthright about it not being specifically about smartphones - maybe even wishing I had this exact book for the almost entirely algorithmic society we’re living through - but this is one of the best media studies books I’ve ever read and I WANT MORE.
This work has already latched onto my brain, and I’m going to return to it often as it’s given me new appreciation and fascination with how to consider media (and also provided an incredible bibliography to help kick start a new hyper fixation that feels essential for living through the days in which we are all collectively asking “so… phones are, like, uh, kinda bad for us, right?)

[Mikala]

There’s a lot of sharp, well-researched thinking here about how screens, celebrity, and the attention economy shape our sense of self. Garber is at her best when she’s unpacking the idea that we increasingly see ourselves as characters in a never‑ending show, constantly performing for imagined audiences.

But as other reviewers have pointed out, this might have worked better as a long Atlantic series or a podcast than as a full-length book. The arguments circle the same points, certain examples get repeated, and after a while the structure starts to feel more like a very long essay than a cohesive, evolving book.

I also struggled with how narrow the cultural references were. Garber leans heavily on recent reality TV and social media “stars” as her touchstones. I almost exclusively read books and don’t really watch reality TV, so I often had no idea who she was talking about. By focusing so much on the last 5–10 years of pop culture, the book seems aimed at Gen Z/Gen Alpha even though they may not be the ones picking this up, and it risks alienating the elder millennials and older readers who actually are still reading books.

What I really missed was a deeper historical contrast. If we’re now living as “characters,” how does that differ from eras when books were the main storytelling technology, or before that, oral traditions? Have people always had a subset who live in fantasies and grand narratives about their lives, and screens just give those people more outlets? Or has the attention economy actually increased the number of us who slip into that mode? The book raises these ideas but doesn’t dig nearly as far back as it could.

Finally, it felt like a missed opportunity that The Truman Show never comes up. It’s an almost perfect cultural touchstone for this subject, yet the book stays mostly in the realm of recent reality shows and influencer culture. That choice contributes to the sense that the analysis is a bit temporally cramped.

Overall, I’m glad I read this and I think there’s important, troubling truth in what Garber is describing. I just wish the book had widened its lens historically and culturally and done more to bridge the gap between our current screen-saturated world and the older storytelling traditions that shaped us before the feeds took over.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile]]

It's not bad but it's not great.

IMO, do yourself a favor and read Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World instead.

[Tanja Berg]

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women are merely players..."

Said Shakespeare and he was surely not referring to our current day and age. Yet it fits. Not all of us are content creators. However, because of all our screens, we have started to view other people as characters on a set, rather than as real people. With detrimental consequences, such as a reality star POTUS.

The author tries feebly to state that all is not lost, that we can still define technology and use it in a way to better humanity. Well, I think not. We have resigned our fates to the tech bros and their AI's, manipulating us at every turn. It is impossible to know what is real and fake anymore, or at least, it's very easy to fall into traps unless you are deft at critical source analysis. Truth and fact doesn't matter anymore anyway, repeating lies gets you further.

I have started to dissociate from SoMe. My distaste for AI content is profound. I get my news from credited sources, that is, news paper interested in investigative journalism rather than click bait. There are a few left. Of hope for a better future though, not so much.

[Emily]

First things first, thanks to Grant for reading this so that it came across my timeline, much appreciated.

Garber has a remarkable ability to voice what feels intangible with such concrete precision; painting riveting imagery, while distilling such comprehensive analysis.

This book explores the sociology of contemporary technology, examining how the internet and social media—as a medium of communication—have eroded the distinction between fact and fiction and conflated truth with opinion. It goes on to discuss the sociopolitical, cultural, and moral impacts from creating, interacting, and reckoning with the digital age when embodying both the role of audience and performer.

Side note: we (Garber and I) must have the same reading list, because the theoretical foundation that this book builds upon was essentially the greatest hits from my undergrad and my ow personal academic book collection. I also felt really in-tune with the pop culture and media references #slay

[Cindy._.Lee]

BRB off to throw my phone into the ocean and run naked into the waiting woods.

[Grant]

Loved it

[Alicia]

This book was all over the place. Author made some good points, but you have to do some digging to figure them out. It feels disorganized, there was a lot of paraphrasing, and it would move to one topic to the next so quickly it gave me whiplash. Even the conclusion didn’t get to the point, it got lost in limbo.

[britt_brooke]

Another clusterfuck nonfiction read. I need more flow. I didn’t hate it, but I just wanted more analyzation, and maybe some editing down. Meanwhile, folks complaining about her weaving in politics should not be surprised, and that’s on them.

[Isabella McIntire]

This was one of those books that really would have been better delivered as a 10 part podcast series. It was an insightful dive into modern social media, reality TV, and politics. However, it meandered in a way that makes me wonder if she was just trying to reach a word count. I kept hoping she would discuss more of the impact of our ever-increasing screen time, but she spent more time waxing poetic before abruptly jumping to a modern example.

[docb]

Most of the complaints about this book are a) it’s too political and/or b) Garber didn’t explore the exact piece of media I wanted her to so bad rating!

It’s a deeply political book because our screen life is deeply political. Garber didn’t say much that felt new to me but the way she packaged it as a critique of our media life did feel relevant and poignant. Recommend!

[Lizzy]

Save yourself the trouble and just read Hannah Arendt yourself.

interesting premise, I just felt the argument never really developed over the course of the book. Admittedly, I listened to the audio book in 20 minute chunks.

[Katie]

This book was very obviously well researched. There was a wealth of history, explaining the origins of some concepts.

But I was really looking for a book that stuck with talking about why today’s Internet is the way it is.

The first two chapters were on a roll about modern internet and I highlighted so many passages that really stuck with me.

I was expecting the rest of the book to kind of keep on the same track but it quickly divergent to many topics such as theater movie, making television and celebrities. I understand that why we are here today has a lot to do with what happened in history… BUT.

I also feel like today’s Internet is going through changes that do not have to do with history.

[Harry Wilson]

Humorous and insightful throughout, Screen People successfully manages to thoroughly examine the effects of screens (and modern media as a whole) on modern society. Rather than just critiquing smart phones and coming off as an out of touch old crony, Garber manages to engage with the good and the bad from a perspective of relevance and ends with a product that I would consider both incredibly present and prescient, and very important to read.

[Caylea Housh]

3.5⭐️

[Books Amongst Friends]

Format: Audiobook & Library Hardback
Research & Messages: 3.75/5
Writing & Execution: 4/5
Book Overall: 3.75/5
Narration: 3.5/5
Enjoyment: 4/5

[Cassie]

Infuriating listen, at times, because of the subject matter, but it helped me process some of my own thoughts and is incredibly timely

[Andrea]

George Orwell nos quiso advertir y parece que lo tomamos como un reto

[DCR]

I don’t quite know what to write here. There were some insights, sure. Still, the book felt, at points current and, at other points, already dated. I suppose that speaks to rapid pace of the digital world and the extent to which screens do shape our experience of it: There’s so much information to take in that it’s hard to remember it all and events from only a few years ago feel like decades ago.

[Emily]

This is just my major in book form

[SusanJ]

Good title, lots to think about, annoying political bias.

[Ashley]

I don’t feel like there’s anything in this book that everyone doesn’t already know.

[Nicole Wagner]

Megan Garber's SCREEN PEOPLE tackles one of the most pressing questions of our digital age: what happens to our humanity when we increasingly encounter each other through screens rather than face-to-face? The book's central thesis is that screens give us tacit permission to treat other people as imagery, making them manipulable, compliant, and expendable. This idea is both provocative and uncomfortably relevant.

The author draws a compelling parallel between how clocks don't just measure time but reshape our relationship to it, and how screens don't just mediate our social interactions but fundamentally transform them. Where does the avatar end and the person begin? This question haunts the entire work, particularly as the author examines how tech platforms operate with the logic of reality TV producers, prioritizing engagement and attention over material benefit, factuality, and ethics.

The book's strength lies in its synthesis of ideas from heavier thinkers and philosophers, making complex concepts accessible and immediately relevant to our current moment. The author reminds us that humans have survived as a species through networks and shared stories, but the internet has too often become a tool of division and dehumanization. At its best, it represents millions of people finding meaningful new ways to connect, share stories, and have fun together. Yet we desperately need to humanize the digital town square in a way that encourages us to take care with the impact we make, the language we use, and the way we consider one another across digital spaces. People will often say things in a crowded comments section that they'd never say in a crowded town hall. We can't tell anymore what's authentically human online and what elements are bots, simulation, and algorithmic manipulation, and the mean is skewing towards feeling "not real," thereby encouraging careless behavior and disregard of human consequence. The references to threats the Uvalde gunman made on social media app Yubo in weeks leading up to the massacre, which were reported but apparently ignored by the platform, were particularly chilling and underscored the real-world consequences of treating digital interactions as somehow less real than physical ones.

However, the advance reader copy I received felt somewhat unfinished. I noticed repeated sentences throughout, which created a jarring reading experience. I'm uncertain whether this was intentional stylistic choice or incomplete editing. More significantly, the thesis, while powerful, wasn't always clearly articulated. The book sometimes read more like a collection of highlighted points and examples than a fully developed argument.

Despite these structural concerns, SCREEN PEOPLE is an important and timely work. It asks the questions we need to be asking about our screen-saturated lives and provides a framework for thinking about the human cost of our digital transformation. The philosophical tenets the author captures would pair beautifully with an ongoing podcast or magazine column that could relate current events back to these timeless concepts, a way to keep the conversation alive as our digital landscape continues to evolve.

Thank you to the publisher for providing an advance reader copy.

[Adam‘’s book reviews]

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

This book examines how social media shapes meaning, authenticity, and trust in a digital environment where users are both consumers and producers of content. The author argues that this dynamic affects nearly everyone, not only in personal and cultural spaces but also in public and political ones, where social media increasingly shapes how ideas, identities, and disagreements are expressed. Organized into short chapters, each chapter presents a central idea, which the author explores through subsections rather than a single continuous narrative.

The central premise—that we cannot always know whether online content reflects genuine belief, performance, persuasion, or a pursuit of engagement—is clearly stated. The book situates social media within a broader historical context, noting that even radio, early movies, and television introduced pressures to project idealized selves and compare oneself to others. The major difference today is that these pressures are interactive: everyone participates, producing content for views, likes, and attention. This affects virtually everyone, as people are constantly exposed to curated versions of life that suggest perfection, even though no one actually lives that way. The book also notes a growing backlash, with some stepping away from social media and choosing to live simpler lives, less connected to screens and constant visibility.

Another key idea the book explores is how screens can contribute to the dehumanization of people, particularly within social media spaces and political discourse. When interactions take place primarily through screens, individuals are more easily reduced to positions or opposing sides rather than seen as neighbors with shared, everyday experiences. This shift encourages an “us versus them” mindset, where disagreement becomes abstract and personal context is lost. The book suggests that this distance can make empathy more difficult and nuance easier to ignore.

From my perspective, the book may resonate most with readers who are newer to these ideas or who want an accessible introduction to media dynamics. I had hoped for deeper exploration of topics such as political manipulation, disinformation, or platform power, but the chapters focus primarily on foundational concepts.

In my opinion, this makes it a good book for communications or political science classes, or for those beginning to consider how social media affects people and culture today. It offers a clear, accessible introduction to social media and performance culture, providing useful insights into how digital media shapes behavior, perception, and social expectations.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperOne for providing an advance copy

[Richard Derus]

Real Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic, 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 against this phenomenon.

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 stagecraft—from “The Producers,” who edit our reality, to “The Props,” 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, Plot Twist 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My key take-away from this read was the new-to-me framing of social media as "two-way screens." I find that idea very useful in understanding the intense and very recent driver of our twentieth-century discovery of the joys of staring at things coupled with our ancient desire to be heard.

It's an important text but I felt it might just end my life as a sentient being from the numbing effect of too many wrong examples that don't amplify the argument (or even sometimes make sense to me) coupled to no examples of things that badly need explication.


HarperOne wants $14.99 for an ebook. Borrow it from the library.

[Richard Thompson]

Yes, of course we have a problem that in the service of entertainment, engagement and commercial success all modern media, but particularly (in ascending order of both specificity and damage) video, the internet, mobile devices, social media and Instagram have taken our society into a universe of performative, curated inauthenticity that is damaging to both the viewers and the practitioners. That's not news. We've been aware that we were going down this road since before Guy Debord wrote "The Society of the Spectacle" in 1967. And though it is also true that on some level we are and always have been actors in real life social relationships all the time, a lot of other authors and pundits have correctly observed that this problem has gotten exponentially worse in recent years. As Jean Beaudrillard explained in "Simulacra and Simulacrum", we have reached the point where there is no longer any there there because the simulacrum has entirely replaced the underlying authentic experience. So this book offers nothing much new in the substance of the material it presents and the problem that it describes.

But the bigger issue for me that gets the book one star was the style in which it is presented, which falls into the very traps that it condemns. It is written in a way that is designed to outrage and engage. It's angry. It's too cool for school. It delivers information as entertainment. It's all a big wink wink to those of us in the know. Ugh. Either Ms. Garber has gotten so poisoned by social media herself that this has become the only way that she can express her ideas, or she thinks that her readers have been so poisoned by it that this is now the only style that they are able to consume, or maybe, despite her dislike for this mode of expression, she admires its effectiveness. Or maybe, I hope, the entire book is intentionally written at a level of sarcasm so subtle that it can only be appreciated weeks after reading it. In the unlikely event that I discover this to be the case in a week or so, I'll come back to add a postscript to my review.

The books that most rub me the wrong way are not the ones that I disagree with or consider analytically wrong, but the ones like this one that are correct in substance but are so wrong in method that I'd rather not have the author on my side.

[Paul]

Every time I read another book about the perils of social media I wonder why it took so long. Most of these works tend to be either denunciations by semi-luddites overwhelmed by (evil) technology or regretful apologies of reformed social media junkies. Megan Garber is much more the latter, not the former. "Screen People" sounds a rather belated alarm but it does contain some fascinating insights.

Garber, who covers media & entertainment for The Atlantic, casts a wide net here. And she knows her stuff. Among many others, she makes the excellent point that a few social visionaries saw this coming almost 50 years ago, especially Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and Christopher Lasch's "Culture of Narcissism." To a certain extent (and I've read both), these works take a more academic approach than Garber - it's generally easier to hurl thunderbolts from the proverbial ivory tower - whose view is obviously much closer to the ground. Her anecdotes are illuminating and her thoughtful scholarship goes down easy.

As someone who was in the room when social media blew up the complacent media universe, I often wonder why more of us weren't more prescient about where all this was headed. Too many, including Garber, don't appear to have seen the oncoming train until the online world started to impact presidential elections. It's doubtful the genie's going back in bottle anytime soon.

A brief quibble about the subtitle: "How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency." The best part of the book looks at the why and how this all happened, but Garber's finger of blame points more to the social media industry's (and politician's) manipulations than to "ourselves." Sure, it's hard to disregard the human facts of loneliness and egotism, but it's also a bit like throwing a lighted match into the barn, then wondering why it burned to the ground. And there aren't many solutions proposed for this "State of Emergency."

But I digress. "Screen People" is an excellent cautionary tale well worth your time.

[Keely]

In Screen People, journalist Megan Garber explores the multi-faceted ways in which the interactive screens of the internet have contributed to category collapse, blurring the lines between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real life and entertainment, and so on. Drawing heavily on the thinking of past cultural and technology critics, Garber weaves a compelling argument that our screen-based lives are diminishing our humanity by creating a world in which it's all too easy to treat other people as mere content, as props for our own stories, or as flattened/not-quite-a-person entities we only care to interact with through the medium of a screen.

I'm so glad I stumbled across this insightful (and sometimes distressing) book. I've read a fair number of books that raise the alarm around the harmful effects of digital media, but Screen People approaches that general subject area with nuance and carves out its own niche. Garber packs her argument and extensive research in so densely that I did occasionally feel like I was drinking from a fire hose, but it all resonates with my experiences and observations of interactive-screen life. And I can't stop thinking about it. This is a book I'll be mulling over for a while. I'll also be looking into some of the thinkers whose ideas Garber draws from: George Orwell, Neil Postman, and Walter Lippman, among others.

I did like that Garber tries to end on a hopeful note, pointing out that we can choose a different path from the one we're on. But I wonder how hopeful she really feels. In her closing, rather than pointing to any concrete hopeful signs she's seeing today, Garber points back to the "Day of the Dress" in 2015. I found myself wishing for a little more reassurance, or maybe some discussion about what it could look like to become better, wiser screen people.

[Christina Davis]

As a fan of Neil Postman's writing, I found this to be a great book building on our more modern expansion of screens into our day-to-day lives and what it means for individuals + our society at large. Much of this information wasn't new to me but to have it all packaged together really drove home the point of how much screens have transformed the way we interact with each other and our world.

I really appreciated how much the author touched on a variety of topics affected by the proliferation of screens - most notably the show-ification of our language about our lives ("do it for the plot," "main character energy"), the incentivization of information to be interesting and simple rather than true and complex (infotainment), the flattening of reality into personal theater where others are simply characters (NPCs) who don't receive any acknowledgement, the radicalization of our discourse because we don't see others as people, and the enmeshing of surveillance into our lives so completely that we no longer see it as a violation.

I highlighted many lines in this book but one that sticks out, especially when considering social media, is this: "The medium is the moral. And the medium, here, offers tacit permission to treat other people as imagery: manipulable, compliant, expendable."

I will note that there was more repetition of ideas across the book than I would've expected, as if it needed to be structured in another way so a point could be made succinctly rather that repeated in various sections. But maybe in this environment where screens have diminished the ability to focus on and retain information, this is actually the right move.

Thanks to NetGalley & HarperOne for the opportunity to read this book!

[Michaela Henry]

Thank you Megan Garber, Harper One Publishing, and NetGalley for the ARC!

I loved the premise of this- an exploration of our current spectacle of a society, and how social media has shaped the way we see, interact, and come to expect entertainment from one another. Garber makes fleeting references to things that float around in my head when I think of these sort of things. The detachment in how we treat someone on a screen versus in person for example. Yet though the short chapters allowed me to read quickly, I found at times that they were too underdeveloped- stopping short of a conclusion that would tie everything back together. In this way, ironically, sometimes the chapters just felt like scrolling through Instagram Reels. You'd get surface area talking points without always exploring deeper into a broader context.

Garber also uses a lot of anecdotes. I don't necessarily have a problem with this- I was familiar with a lot of her references (especially when it came to early internet culture like that one black/blue or gold/white dress). However, I don't think they were always tied back to her point in ways that made sense for me. In general- the book could benefit from more cohesive editing. Many of the chapters felt more like a think piece from The Atlantic rather than a chapter in a book.

In general, I think it had some thought-provoking points. I would even say I may have learned a new thing or too! Yet there's something about the organization of this book that keeps me from giving it more stars.

This would pair nicely with Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger: A Trip to the Mirror World" (in the same way a nice, expensive wine (Klein) would go well with pretty much any discount cheese from Aldi (Garber))