Anyone who has felt a twinge of regret when their smartphone reminds them how much time they've spent looking at a screen the previous week will appreciate Screen People, Megan Garber's well-informed account of how electronic devices have come to dominate modern lives. Asserting that "screens change things," Garber, a staff writer for the Atlantic, delivers a thoughtful, high-level survey of all the ways they are doing so.
At the outset, Garber acknowledges her considerable debt to '60s media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his aphorism "the medium is the message," and to scholar and cultural critic Neil Postman and his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Far from aging poorly, McLuhan's and Postman's ideas about television's culture-shaping effects have only become more urgent in the age of interactive media, as technology rapidly evolves, and so does society's relationship to it. Now, instead of functioning as passive receivers of content, "we are both actors and audiences, producers and consumers, directors and extras in the show," she writes. "We become one another's critics. We become one another's fun. We defer to entertainment as a value system."
Writing from the perspective of a cultural journalist who grew up in the 1980s and '90s, and emphasizing breadth rather than depth, Garber supports her argument with timely material drawn from diverse sources, including news, politics, social media, artificial intelligence, and reality television (a subject recently covered comprehensively in Emily Nussbaum's Cue the Sun!). She's as comfortable sharing thoughts gleaned from the writings of Walter Benjamin and George Orwell as she is assessing the enduring influence of P.T. Barnum or how The Apprentice turbocharged the political rise of Donald Trump. In these disparate but converging electronic spaces, users and consumers are pulled "constantly, between the possibilities of fact and fiction." That tension, she asserts, "is both enticing and misleading," and, increasingly, deeply disorienting.
Garber recognizes that powerful economic, political, and, above all, technological forces are driving these fundamental social changes, and it seems there is precious little one individual can do to resist their power. Nonetheless, for all its darkness, she concludes her book on a cautiously optimistic note. "We will decide. We will determine what it means, in the end, to live among screens," she says. The challenge, in her view, is to decide how society would like to shape itself in that decision. Armed with some of the insights she shares, perhaps the task of meeting that challenge and reclaiming essential humanity will seem a bit less daunting. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Journalist Megan Garber explores the ways our encounters with life through our immersion in screens have shaped our reality.