Megan Garber on the Blurring of Reality and Performance

Your Fellows project will be a book, which expands on an article you wrote for The Atlantic, about how Americans’ demand for constant entertainment is reshaping culture, politics, and everyday life. Why did you decide to pursue the idea as a book-length project?

“Entertainment” has a double meaning. In one way, it’s something people consume: the stuff we turn to for escapism and togetherness and fun. In another way, though, it’s permission. We entertain arguments. We entertain ideas. The interplay between the two that captures a lot, I think, about the broader challenges Americans are facing right now, as the web has created so many new ways to be both passive consumers of the world and active participants in it. To me, that tension is important enough to explore at book length because, along the way, it captures so many others—among them the ever-blurrier lines between reality and fantasy, fandom and political identity, the people we dismiss as characters and those we see as fully human, complicated and worthy and real. We experience each other, ever more, through our screens. The book will explore the consequences.

You have used the phrase “banal theatricality” in your work, can you explain the concept? How do you think it plays into our current political moment?

The idea that social interaction is a performance is a very old one. But the current moment, I think, is changing “all the world’s a stage” from a metaphor into a mandate. There’s no business but show business, with the rules of the show stretching into everyday life. People now have “personal brands”; they “soft-launch” new relationships on social media; they buy t-shirts proclaiming their “main character energy.” Some—many—treat life itself as an endless performance. And the theatricality expands into politics in ways that have themselves become banal. We no longer accept that our actors and artists will be politicians by other means; we demand it. We expect professional politicians to manage their profiles as celebrities do, offering themselves to the public through both iconography and carefully calibrated authenticity. The policy decisions that actually affect people’s lives, meanwhile? Those, too often, are relegated to the backstage.

Who do you see as the audience for your book? What impact do you want it to have on the individual, on policy?

The transformations the web has brought affect every American, each in their own way; because of that, I think the potential audience for the book could be as broad as “anyone who believes that reality is worth fighting for.” And I hope what they encounter in the book’s pages can bring some clarity to a cultural moment that can feel, sometimes, dizzyingly chaotic. Words are the atomic units of democracy: We can’t create good policy without first defining, in precise and sometimes painful detail, the problems we’re trying to solve. We can’t move forward, meaningfully, without being able to articulate where we’ve been. “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it,” the great scholar Hannah Arendt wrote. With the book, I want to offer some language that can help people talk to, and more importantly with, one other—words that might bring just a bit more humanity to the story we’re writing together.

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