Screen People
- Virtual
- 12PM – 1PM EDT
Megan Garber offers 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.
The line between fact and fiction—between what’s real and what’s fabricated for entertainment—has never been more blurred. Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency explores what happens when we cede our reality to spectacle. Garber explains how today’s internet-inflected culture conditions us to see one another not as people but as characters, and how chronic social conditions—loneliness, depression, mistrust, misinformation, and cynicism—stem from our demand for diversion.
In ten chapters themed around elements of entertainment, from “The Producers” to “The Extras” and “The Haters,” Garber argues that this comedy of daily life is quickly becoming tragedy—and that we can’t understand our politics without first understanding our culture.
Like The Anxious Generation but about our media diet, Screen People is an urgent, page-turning look at how we entertained ourselves into our current predicament—and how we might find a way out.
Join the New America Fellows Program for a conversation with 2025 New America Fellow Megan Garber and New America’s Senior Director of Birth to 12th Grade Policy Lisa Guernsey about Screen People.
Speakers:
Megan Garber
2025 New America (Emerson Collective) Fellow
Author, Screen People
Lisa Guernsey
Senior Director of Birth to 12th Grade Policy at New America
Copies of Screen People are available for purchase here through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.