Screen People

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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, from the popular and award-winning staff writer for The Atlantic . Whether it's our reality-television-star President or our expertly curated Instagram feeds, the line between fact and fiction—between what's real and what's fabricated for entertainment—has never been more blurred. Screen People explores what happens when we cede our reality to spectacle. Megan Garber explains how today's internet-inflected culture conditions us to see one another not as people but as characters in an ongoing show, and how some of our most chronic and harmful social conditions—loneliness, depression, mistrust, misinformation, cynicism—stem from our demand for diversion. In ten chapters, each themed around an element of entertainment—from "The Producers," who