A response to The Harper Review’s Winter 2026 proposition, “The party’s over.”
Dear editors,
It is not simply that “the party” isn’t over, but that it dominates our lives to such an extent that we expect everything to be one. A party is marked by its lack of sobriety—metaphorically and otherwise. A party seeks to molt the somber weight of reality, instead opting to replace the drudgery of daily life with simple enjoyments and petty dramas. The later part of the twentieth century saw such an increase in the flow of and access to information that it came to be dubbed the Age of Information. This was done with good intentions. The hope was that increasing the amount of information that people had access to would lead to a more educated population, which would in turn lead to greater prosperity. However, we failed to anticipate the party this would start, in which the quantity of information increases without any regard for its quality. Despite the noble intentions, the Age of Information has suspended us in a state of perpetual weightlessness, deprived of our conduits of meaning.
Social media platforms have learned that the best way to stave off boredom is to keep users constantly jumping to new bits of content. As a result, they are primarily concerned with whether there is enough content to keep users engaged and put less thought into whether any of that content is any good. But this incentivizes a way of consuming media which prevents users from ever reflecting on what they’re watching and from allowing it to develop an emotional significance.
This problem is anything but new. We were warned of this phenomenon forty years ago through Neil Postman’s terror over what he called the “now … this” media culture in his prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman’s concern is that the phrase “now … this” is used to transition from one story to the next, but the phrase implies that the story you were just watching isn’t important anymore. The fact is that it takes time for our emotions to digest our experiences and extract meaning. This applies as much to great books as it does to natural disasters. The “now … this” news culture kills any chance there might have been for you to build a lasting emotional connection to the story that flashed on screen. It doesn’t matter how many people died in war or famine that day, since none of it is worthy of your attention—at least not any more than whatever feel-good palate cleanser follows up the tragedy du jour. The culture primes you to mouth that the tragedies of the day are “just horrible” and then to move on. A derivative commentary on events is seen as everything there is to do about them. The wake of tragedy sees only the endless cycle of “Did you hear about X?” and “Y was terrible,” softly killing the bravery to take action.
The “now … this” way of engaging with the world has been carried beyond television news through the popularity of social media and has come to define the way we engage with culture and even our relationships with others. The nature of social media is that no single post is worth your pause and reflection. Updates on faraway wars hold equal insignificance to mukbang videos in this deluge.
Without the ability to form lasting emotional connections, life is a party devoid of significance. Social media has amplified this decontextualized, “now … this” culture to the point where “the party” is just getting started as our only way of life. There is no chance of escaping it. It borders on delusion to think that you can leave the party by cutting down on your screen time. The party is ever-present and inescapable, even for you, hypocrite reader. There is nothing the president can say that is egregious enough, no famine dire enough, and no conflict bloody enough to grab your attention long enough for you to care. All you can do is distract yourself in the endless party dominating our lives.
Bitterly,
Deniz Kurdi
Image: Diego Velázquez, The Triumph of Bacchus, oil on canvas, 1628–29 (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain).