By Madison Malone Kircher SCREEN PEOPLE: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency
by Megan Garber
Published by HarperOne
304 pages $27.99
February 26, 2015, is a date that has been immortalised in the annals of the internet. It is the day a digital debate broke out after a BuzzFeed piece asked people to decide whether a dress was white and gold or, rather, black and blue, tearing the online world into warring factions. It is also the day two llamas broke loose from their handlers in Arizona, prompting a televised police chase.
And so it is here that Megan Garber begins her new book, Screen People. That day, she writes, “seemed to herald an era of ever more fractures and ever less fun,” as we all “grew angrier, louder, lonelier, wearier.”
There’s been no shortage of ink — both liquid and digital — spilled in analysing February 26 over the ensuing years. (As a reporter covering internet culture in that period, I’m guilty of having added my fair share.) And this starting point makes it clear from the jump just whom this book is for: If you self-identify as extremely online and have already been reckoning with the ways our lives are now altered by the power of digital intermediaries, much of Screen People will feel familiar.
However, for the more offline, Garber’s reflections on the pixelated panopticon and its powers to impact everything from individual lives to presidential elections, make for a thorough, if sometimes meandering, introduction. (The author is a writer for The Atlantic, and Screen People occasionally reads like a collection of overstuffed essays.)
Garber’s core argument is that the language and ethos of traditional entertainment have, thanks to the personal Hollywood studio neatly contained in your cellphone, seeped into every aspect of our lives. Seemingly no action or experience can avoid being, at best, perceived and, at worst, perceived and then broadcast, to the world.
She describes how “minidramas” occur almost daily now in public spaces, from airplanes to high school hallways. We chase “main character energy,” with baby gender-reveal parties and wedding videos engineered not for posterity or nostalgia but, rather, for instant virality and the chance for fame. Asking someone to the prom is now its own cinematic genre. Doing it for the ’gram, Garber writes, has given way to simply “living for the ’gram.”
“On our screens, we are both actors and audiences, both showrunners and extras, sometimes the stars and sometimes the scenery,” Garber writes.
Garber cites both Charles Darwin and ChatGPT in laying out how we got so comfortable turning ourselves into “content,” a word she describes as “meant to split the difference between news and entertainment” — although, in reality, content “blurs and blends” and defies easy categorisation, a “designation that declines to designate much of anything at all.” Garber provides a sharp analysis of the way fact and fiction overlap on our screens to create a world that, while real, is not necessarily reality.
Each chapter is broken down into entertainment-adjacent categories like “The Scripts” and “The Stars.” In “The Twists,” Garber grapples with the recent arrival of artificial intelligence into everyday hands. That chapter — the final chapter — is a particular standout, ruminating on the nascent technology that gives “tacit permission to treat other people as imagery; manipulatable, compliant, expendable.”
The book is at its strongest when Garber gets hyperspecific, forcing the reader to wrestle with the fact that the far-reaching power of the screen has touched all parts of life. Typing, she writes, has become an act to be watched, tiny dots pulsating on your phone screen as you try to read your interlocutor’s mind. And mere online ordering, a faceless experience divorced from the human being tasked with assembling your purchase, has given way to a trend of ordering incredibly complex Starbucks drinks, which are then shared digitally by both consumers and
While Screen People is packed with topical and historical references to everyone from P T Barnum to Susan Sontag to Taylor Swift, after a few chapters, readers might find themselves casting about for a narrative through line. For a book about how
we have all turned one another into characters, Screen People suffers from a lack of them.
In the final pages, Garber returns to February 26, 2015, a “great day on the internet” that would set the tone for our screenified future. “If we act wisely, though, its greatest days will lie ahead,” Garber writes, a hopeful ending that one can’t help wishing was where the book began.
The reviewer is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
©2026 The New York Times News Service
 "Our 'screenified' future: How screens turned people into performers online")
