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

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. (Apr.)