Who Are Screen People? Unfortunately, They’re Us

You’re reading this on a screen, either your computer or phone. Maybe an iPad, if you’re in the under-8 or over-50 demographics. And my guess is whatever you’re doing after you read this will happen on a screen, too. Then this evening, you’ll likely unwind by watching something on yet another (bigger) screen. These rectangular pieces of glass, backlit by endless pixels, form the walls of modern life.

And, according to Megan Garber, our ubiquitous exposure to and use of screens changes things. In her new book, Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency, which came out this week from HarperOne, she suggests that the world of screens has generated a wasteland of performance. Performance because we’re all characters now. A wasteland because playing a character all the time produces all sorts of dysfunction. Megan and I talked a few weeks ago about her book and about our screened-in world.

Fundamental to your argument is that screens change things, both the world around us and us as humans. In what ways do screens change things?

Have you noticed how the word “human” itself seems to be at this point a cliche? We praise a person as “such a good human” and marketers talk about “human-made” goods. I’m always interested in language because it can give forensic clues about a culture at large. If it seems right that “human” is a cliche, I think that does reflect a lot of the anxieties that I’m talking about in Screen People. The internet can function like a kind of CAPTCHA test, presenting an ongoing demand that we always have to sort of prove our humanity. Interacting through screens, almost by default, can put our humanity in doubt.

But I think that there is a broader cynicism about what it really means to be human online. And language that goes out of its way to humanize people is acknowledging that. For so long, we did not need to clarify humanity. And yet now, being human is one possibility among many. That’s the idea I’m getting at in talking about screens. Screens change things: They turn people into objects. They turn humans into pieces of media. They turn three-dimensional bodies into two-dimensional images. In one way, those transformations are incredibly basic — they’re just how screens work, and just what they do — but they are also, I think, quite profound. They’re the basis of a lot of this moment’s particular problems. They’re affecting a lot of the ways that we see each other and encounter each other and regard each other on screens, and I think also in the real world.

Are these changes necessarily bad? Are there goods?

It can be an extremely good thing. Just the simple fact of connection that the screens allow across space, across time, with very few logistical concerns, is huge and transformative. And I think largely for the good. Human connection as a broad proposition is a good thing. And there are, of course, a lot of other goods that spin out from that.

The bad of it is that because we don’t know exactly what we are on screens, we face a lot of moral questions and ambiguities and cynicisms. Cruelty is kind of banal on the internet. We have epidemics of loneliness — even in this age of endless connection — and extremism and cynicism, and the list can go on. All of those things on some level relate to the screen. But even the bad stuff has a bright side, I think. Nothing about the internet is inevitable — so, provided we go about it wisely and intentionally, we can undo some of those negatives. It’s just that so many of the standards we rely on, for etiquette and sometimes even for ethics, assume that human interaction is something that takes place in person. We now have to rethink those systems and assumptions — to include all the encounters that take place, now, across the distance of the screen.

There exists a persistent idea that technology is value neutral and its uses — not the technology itself — are what fall into ethical categories.
I would say that technologies have always been changing. They’ve always been in flux. People have experienced wrenching technological changes — with the printing press, say, or even the television — in the past. So there’s some neutrality in the historical sense that disruption is what big new technologies, very reliably, do. They shake up existing paradigms, they shake up the existing moralities, in some sense, and leave people to deal with the chaos that ensues. That’s what we’re experiencing right now. That’s why “chaotic,” as a description of pretty much anything, is its own kind of cliche at this point. The chaos we live in can be good and it can be bad; it’s also to be expected given the enormity of the internet. But it’s also a problem to be solved, since chaos is so deeply unsustainable.

I take your subtitle as an allusion to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Do you see yourself as updating that work for a digital age or how are you interacting with Postman’s arguments?

Postman was certainly an inspiration for the book. Just as background for any readers who aren’t familiar with his work, Amusing Ourselves to Death was a book from 1985 in which Postman effectively makes the argument that American culture is giving way to entertainment, ceding too much of particularly our political discourse and our cultural discourse to the demands of entertainment — the demands of television.

There can sometimes be an impulse, I think, to treat Postman as a scold. What I found to be so powerful about his work is that it’s not really an argument against entertainment. If it were, I think very few of us would find it compelling, because entertainment is wonderful. Entertainment is art and it is the culture we share. But Postman’s genius is to understand that when entertainment ceases to become escapism, when it ceases to become entertainment on its own terms and becomes instead a value system, things go wrong. He made a very good case about what he calls a “super ideology” as the function entertainment plays in American lives. And that was the idea I tried to riff on and apply in Screen People. I think his ideas have only proven themselves to be more and more correct as the years have gone on. Now we sort of take it for granted that entertainment is a value system, and we don’t really even question it that much. We defer so readily and seamlessly to the screen and to the demands of the show, and expect that things are better when they are entertaining and that they are worse when they are boring.

You see that play out in a very literalized way on the internet, where people talk about “main characters” and “non-player characters,” about their individual character arcs and their personal plot twists. And the bit never ends; everything is kind of the shtick. And to me, one of the operative questions there is, What does it actually mean to be a person in that context? One of the reasons that the subtitle talks about emergency is that I think more and more people are conceiving of themselves as performers full stop, rather than people, and conceiving of others as performers who owe us some kind of show.

At the very beginning of the book, you wonder about why people are rude online, about the ways social norms deteriorate online. Did you find an answer to that question?

One answer, I think, comes down to a Postman-like analysis: We are unkind to each other in part because we don’t really see each other as part of the same reality. We don’t really see each other as fully real, but instead as characters, and it’s all kind of a show. So, sure, let’s bully someone online, that won’t really matter because it’s not really a person and it’s not really bullying.

There’s also something called the “online disinhibition effect,” this idea that some people see online environments as fundamentally distinct from in-person environments. That basic difference, I think, is systematized again and again and again online. And it comes back to the workings of the screen and it comes back to the fact that screens objectify us even as they impose distance on us. Even though we are in theory connected, we are also just fundamentally separate and distant. Physical distance can become moral distance. Those distances can encourage cruelty — just think of how much easier it would be to say something mean about someone behind their back than to their face. And screens, however much they overcome distance, also impose it. That can make kindness and empathy more challenging, at least in the short run.

But you end Screen People with an optimistic charge to those of us living in screenland. Can you explain?

A quote that I thought about a lot as I was writing the book is the one from Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, who said that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think it’s beautiful and correct in so many ways, but I think today it really does strike me less as a romantic rendering of technology’s power and more as a threat and a warning. The internet is a machine like any other. It is undersea cables and it is glass screens and metal boxes, and it is machinery. And yet the way we talk about it very often belies its physicality. We talk about ether and the information that lives in the cloud. And especially, we talk about the algorithm, which is this formless entity that affects everyone but answers to no one. That kind of language exposes a broader kind of helplessness we bring in relation to the internet very often where we see it almost as an inevitability or a mystical force or a foregone conclusion rather than one more machine built by humans in human control — that we can change if we want to.

So one of the things I wanted to do with the book is push back against the idea that the internet is unknowable and therefore unwieldy, with “the algorithm” acting as this almost godly force in our lives. The internet is a very human thing. We do have power over it. Yes, it’s not like every individual person can decide what the internet is. But I think as collective users, we can shape what the internet will be. We should not be defeatist about it.