6 Planet of the Screen People: When Our Phones Shape How We Understand The World By Luis Polanco Consider the phenomenon of dance challenges on social media and short-form video platforms like Instagram and TikTok. There, creators with the smallest of followings to those with audiences in the millions create dances for others to replicate in their own videos. The light-hearted trend of dance challenges spiked during the COVID lockdown when most people were stuck at home with nothing to do, and it has continued to be a successful marketing tactic for talent who need to promote a new song, movie, or TV series. Many might view this type of silly phenomenon as an innocuous fad that brings people together while creating content. For journalist Megan Garber, this type of trend also represents an aspect of the contemporary media landscape that raises questions about how people relate to one another. In Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency (HarperOne, 304 pgs., 2026, $27.99), Garber presents a timely argument about how people’s relationship to screens shapes their relationships with other people. She is particularly interested in how we all — whether we’re journalists, content creators, or even your neighbors — become “characters” to one another mediated through our screens. Garber, a Washington, D.C.-based staff writer for The Atlantic, where some of the writing in the book originally appeared, brings in examples from popular culture, political commentary, reality TV shows, social media fads, and online fringe groups, among others, and in doing so suggests that the effects of all these different types of interactions with screens boil down to the same thing. Instead of more connection, community, and adherence to evidence-based communication, she sees loneliness, fracture, and paranoia about what is true. To provide context for her argument, Garber draws on media theorists such as Canada’s Marshall McLuhan (who famously quipped that “the medium is the message”) and America’s Neil Postman. Internet optimists might have once believed that the Internet would correct the passivity that television engendered due to the fact that people are not simply consumers or audiences, but co-creators of shared narratives. But Garber suggests that the Internet carries forward much of the passivity and spectatorship that television did without following through on the ethos of participation that early Internet evangelists promised. The Internet was supposed to level the difference between creator and audience, but instead it has created screen people who embody the worst aspects of both: idle spectatorship and emotional reactivity. “Audiences are empowered only to watch and to react,” Garber writes. “They can clap; they can heckle; they can leave. The structures of social media—the narrow economies of reaction they offer to their users—mimic in large part those limitations: clap, like, log off.” She adds, “Under the guise of empowerment, the platforms often assume passivity and encourage it. They entice. They lull. They can turn citizens into passive audiences.” Garber suggests that the “producing” of content such as reality TV programming, which is itself heavily edited and stylized to create specific effects on audiences, applies to other aspects of our current media landscape. For example, the tech companies behind our social media platforms continue to accrue data from users and consumers to design an algorithm that engages them with video after video. However, even the language of “engagement” poses a problem to Garber. “Adopted for algorithmic purposes, though, ‘engagement’ makes little distinction between love and hate, between conversations and screaming matches,” she writes. “When engagement is the metric, questions about benefit and harm, social good and social ills, cannot apply.” In one chapter, Garber looks at how political parties in the U.S. have utilized political rhetoric to target specific demographics of citizens. Garber says that social media purports to offer its users a form of connection but instead leads them to further isolation that relies on creating an us-versus-them dynamic and imagining that reality is being produced by government actors. Garber claims to dive into the uncertainty and chaos created by the current media landscape in order to shine a beacon of light on the possibilities of changing our relationships to our phones and hence other people, as well. However, much of the writing in the book is undergirded by a foreboding tone, as if to inspire further fear and paranoia that she claims to find troubling about the current state of media consumption. For example, on the topic of deepfakes, AI-created images and videos that distort reality, Garber writes, “The ability to create the fakes is spreading and democratizing, which opens exciting new avenues for human creativity, but also means that anyone can create a piece of media that further destabilizes the lines between the real and the merely ‘real.’” What are we screen people left to do? In the conclusion of Screen People, Garber recommends believing in the power of language, as any journalist would. “Language can help people talk to—and more important, with— one another,” she says. “It can bring a bit more humanity to the story we’re writing together.” American journalist Megan Garber delivers a razor-sharp analysis of how our lighthearted and playful consumption of media has a toxic effect on our relationships with others. Under the guise of empowerment, the platforms often assume passivity and encourage it. VIDEOAGE September 2026 Book Review
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