A Q&A with Megan Garber

This month, New America announced the Class of 2025 New America Fellows, an impressive group of 15 scholars, journalists, and filmmakers selected from a large pool of competitive applicants. This year’s fellows delve into an exciting range of topics, from immigration and prison reform to U.S. intelligence abroad and the dynamic world of high school mariachi competitions.

Among this year’s talented fellows is journalist Megan Garber, known for her sharp analysis at the intersection of politics and culture. Her work explores the nuances of modern society with a unique perspective that challenges conventional thinking.

In this exclusive extended Q&A from The fifth design—the Fellows Program newsletter featuring exclusive content about and from our Fellows—Megan Garber gives us an exciting sneak peek at her upcoming project exploring our relentless desire for entertainment and its troubling connection to the rise of misinformation in popular culture. Dive into the Q&A to see how Garber’s sharp observations and groundbreaking ideas are poised to challenge and inspire new ways of thinking about our future.

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Your Fellows project will be a book, building on an article you wrote for The Atlantic Ocean about how americans The demand for constant entertainment is changing the culturepolitics and everyday life. Why did you decide to use the idea as a book-length project?

“Entertainment” has a double meaning. On the one hand, it’s something that people consume: the things we turn to for escapism, togetherness, and fun. On the other hand, it’s consent. We entertain arguments. We entertain ideas. The interplay between the two (arguments and ideas) captures a lot, I think, about the broader challenges Americans face right now, as the Web has created so many new ways to be both passive consumers and active participants in the world. For me, that tension is important enough to warrant a book-length exploration, because it captures so many other critical issues along the way — including the increasingly blurred lines between reality and fantasy, fandom and political identity, the people we dismiss as characters and those we see as fully human, complicated, worthy, and real. We experience each other, increasingly, through our screens, and the book will explore the implications of this shift.

In The Atlantic Ocean article, you refer to Newton Minow’s highly critical description of television in 1961 as “a vast wasteland”. How would you characterize our current media landscape?

In some ways I disagree with Minow’s diagnosis, partly because I’d be hypocritical not to. I’m a lifelong TV lover; as a kid growing up in a fairly small town, TV shows were part of my upbringing, their characters expanding my social circle, their stories offering early lessons in the unwieldy breadth of the world. Newton Minow loved TV, too, I think. But he was an idealist who believed that the medium that was shaping his moment could be more and better than it was, a source not just of distraction but of democratic engagement. With that one little “big” he foresaw a lot: TVs now hang on the walls of homes as works of art and are carried in pockets and purses. They are, to borrow a phrase, “everything, everywhere, everything at once.” Where does TV end and life begin? I’m not entirely sure. That’s partly why I’m writing the book.

You have used the term “banal theatricality” in your work, can you explain the concept? How do you think it fits into our current political times?

The idea that social interaction is a performance is very old, but I think the current moment is changing “all the world’s a stage” from a metaphor to a mandate. There is no business But show business, and now the rules of the show extend to everyday life. People now have “personal brands,” “soft-launch” new relationships on social media, and buy t-shirts proclaiming their “lead character energy.” Some—many—view life itself as an endless performance. This theatricality extends to politics, to the point of banality. We no longer just accept that our actors and performers will be politicians in other ways; we demand it. We expect professional politicians to manage their profiles like celebrities, offering themselves to the public through both iconography and carefully calibrated authenticity. Meanwhile, the policy decisions that actually affect people’s lives are too often relegated to the background.

Do you think the metaverse as it exists now plays a role in combating populism and preserving democracy, and not just in fueling division?

I see the metaverse not just as a technological concept, but as a broad cultural one: a desire for entertainment so far-reaching and politically powerful that it doubles as an ideology. The changes it brings, like those of the web itself, are both beneficial and problematic in ways we are only beginning to understand. But the simple fact that people can now speak for themselves, in their own words, images, and voices, is a revolutionary shift. Every day I am dazzled by the creativity, humor, weirdness, and wisdom on display in the endless talent pool of social media. When this human energy is marshaled into civic engagement, it can make politics far more participatory and human. It can amplify consciousness-raising, collective action, and other efforts that have been central to the justice movements of the past. In essence, it can turn a group of people into an audience, something that is both basic and crucial in a democracy.

Who do you see as the audience for your book? What impact do you want it to have on the individual, on policy?

The transformations wrought by the Web affect every American, each in their own way. That’s why I think the potential audience for the book could be as broad as “anyone who believes that reality is worth fighting for.” And I hope that its pages can bring some clarity to a cultural moment that can sometimes feel dizzyingly chaotic. Words are the atomic units of democracy: We can’t create good policy without first defining, in precise and sometimes painful detail, the problems we’re trying to solve. We can’t move forward meaningfully without articulating where we’ve been. As the great scholar Hannah Arendt wrote, “We humanize what’s happening in the world and in ourselves only by talking about it.” With the book, I want to offer some language that can help people talk to — and, more importantly, of—another, who offers words that might just bring a little more humanity to the story we write together.