Glowface: What We Are Losing To Screens and How We Can Take It Back

by David Talbot

How long has it been since you looked at your phone or checked your emails? These simple acts are performed by millions upon millions of people numerous times each day. But the longer a person's face is illuminated by the glow of their screen, the more at risk they are of experiencing a negative impact on their attention span, productivity, memory and mental health, and the more at risk they are of becoming addicted to their screens, of becoming a 'glowface'.
Starting with his own powerful story of a twenty-year screen addiction, the author systematically looks at the cost of having instant access to information, entertainment and global communication. What have we parted with for the sake of this convenience?
Littered with anecdotes and rendering the results of research into everyday language, Glowface explores the following When we expose children to screens at a young age and for long periods of time, what effect does it have on their natural talents? What happens to our thought processes when we allow screens to constantly interrupt us? What is the impact on our lives when we work in careers built on distraction? What are the repercussions of electing and appointing leaders who reflect our distracted selves? As we increasingly hand our children's education over to screen devices, is it improving educational outcomes? When we use our screen devices to store and share our memories, what is the impact on our own memory? How enriching are our digital pastimes? What are our screen devices doing to our mental health?
Our talents, thought processes, careers, leadership, education, memory, leisure time and mental health - these are just some of the things that make us who we are, and each is being eroded by screens. Each is being stolen. Glowface makes readers confront this reality and gives them a reason to start to claim them back.

256 pages, Paperback

Published August 25, 2022

About the author

David Talbot is an American progressive journalist, author and media executive. He is the founder, former CEO and editor-in-chief, an early web magazine, Salon. Talbot founded Salon in 1995. The magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. It was described by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Net's "few genuine must-reads".

Since leaving Salon, Talbot has researched and written on the Kennedy assassination and other areas of what he calls "hidden history." Talbot has worked as a senior editor for Mother Jones magazine and a features editor for The San Francisco Examiner, and has written for Time magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and other publications.

Talbot was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He attended Harvard Boys School, but did not graduate after falling afoul of the school's headmaster and ROTC program during the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz, he returned to Los Angeles, where he wrote a history of the Hollywood Left, "Creative Differences", and freelanced for Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. He later was hired by Environmental Action Foundation in Washington, D.C. to write "Power and Light," a book about the politics of energy. After he returned to California, he was hired as an editor at Mother Jones magazine, and later, by San Francisco Examiner publisher Will Hearst to edit the newspaper's Sunday magazine, Image. It was at the Examiner where Talbot developed the idea for Salon, convincing several of his newspaper colleagues to join him and jump ship into the brave new world of web publishing.