We live in an age of screens. They are everywhere: in our living rooms, on our streets, in our pockets. They’ve given us access to information beyond our wildest dreams—at the same time as they have spiked rates of mental illness, shortened our attention spans, and fundamentally transformed the ways we interact with one another.
Or, as Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber puts it in her new book, they have turned us into Screen People. It’s not just that we spend our lives looking at screens, she writes, in an excerpt adapted from the book; it’s that we’ve begun to behave as though we’re constantly being watched through them. We’ve self-isolated, retreating from any real-world interactions that can’t be edited or rehearsed to perfection.
In this environment, Garber asks, has “feeling seen” transformed from a blessing into a curse? And why, in an era with more options to connect to each other than ever before, are we increasingly, irrevocably, choosing to be alone? —The Editors
February 26, 2015, was an exceptional day on the internet. That afternoon, BuzzFeed writer Cates Holderness republished a picture she had come across on Tumblr: a dress, horizontally striped and topped with a matching bolero, hanging against a window. The post had a simple headline—“What Colors Are This Dress?”—and a brief explanation: “There’s a lot of debate about the color of the dress.” It concluded with a poll inviting readers to weigh in. Was the garment in question black and blue. . . or white and gold?
The dress quickly acquired the name recognition typically reserved for megastars: It became, simply, The Dress. Some saw one set of colors. Some saw another. There was no nuance to be found. Teams formed and clashed, each side absolutely sure that it saw the dress as it really was, and baffled by the other side’s delusion. Celebrities weighed in. So did politicians. So did God (or, at any rate, the widely followed Twitter account @TheTweetOfGod): “The color of a dress? Really? That’s what you’re asking Me?” it thundered.
