Digital Culture and Media Saturation in And Yet: The Double-Edged Scroll

Thematic Claim: Living Through the Screen

In And Yet, Kate Baer portrays digital culture and media saturation as a corroding force that fragments attention, commodifies emotion, and substitutes authentic living with performative consumption. The collection’s speaker moves through a landscape of endless scrolls, hostile comments, and curated wellness products, all while struggling to hold onto real connection with herself and her family. Yet the poems do not offer simple condemnation: they also expose the speaker’s own complicity, her hunger for belonging, and the small acts of grounding that survive inside the noise.

The Toxic Feed: Headlines, Hate, and the Morning Scroll

Three poems form a vivid triptych of media saturation. In “Reasons to Log Off” (chapter 21), Baer piles together the absurd and the threatening in a single feed. The speaker recalls a college classmate who shamed pizza-eating, then a cousin posting a photo of a loaded gun, then a Pride walk where one comment threatens death and another offers prayer. The poem’s rapid juxtaposition — a recipe with cauliflower, a weight-loss ad, a request for money — mirrors the disorienting rhythm of social media. The speaker cannot separate the trivial from the violent; each swipe carries the same weight.

“Daily Planet” (chapter 26) compresses this chaos into a single, breathless line of news fragments: “Babies are full of microplastics / New research shows / #MeToo isn’t going anywhere.” The poem lists crisis after crisis — Black Friday, police shootings, vaccine protests, oil spills — without full sentences or emotional commentary. The form itself performs the flattening effect of media saturation, where everything becomes an item to be consumed and forgotten.

“Mourning Routine” (chapter 43) brings the saturation into the speaker’s most private moment: morning. She “scroll scroll, swipe swipe, tweet and delete” — a ritual she calls “the stupidest thing / I’ve ever done.” The result is “an inconclusive terror made / from all the bad words from all the bad bros.” The poem names the digital habit as addiction (“free drugs”) and ties it directly to the loss of a grounded self, leaving the speaker scrambling to face her children and the ordinary demands of a day.

Performance and Wellness: The Commercialized Self

Media saturation in And Yet is not limited to news feeds; it also infiltrates how the speaker is supposed to perform health, motherhood, and happiness. “Not a Diet Diet” (chapter 60) parodies the language of online wellness programs: “first the pitch / not like the rest! / the words of a left wing celebrity / genetically disposed to a smaller waist.” The poem mocks the pseudo-scientific, pyramid-scheme structure of modern diet culture, where self-improvement becomes a product to be marketed and recruited for.

“Burnout” (chapter 9) extends this critique to the online performance of motherhood. The speaker declares she can no longer participate in “world breastfeeding week / memes about tired mothers / nurseries dressed in millennial pink.” She rejects the curated advice on sleep training, noise machines, and “tricks for making time for daddy.” The poem’s repeated “I cannot” becomes an act of refusal against the saturated discourse that turns parenting into a brand. The final line — “what it is to be a good mother / when mother is already heavy enough” — suggests that media pressure adds to the burden rather than lightening it.

Complicity and the Poet’s Own Platforms

Baer does not place the speaker outside digital culture. Several poems reveal her active participation and the risks it carries. “Writing Poems High/On Twitter” (chapter 68) dramatizes the fear of online backlash. The speaker imagines saying “Jesus fucking Christ” and knows she will be written off: “The zealots will say, everything / she’s ever said about gays.” The poem captures the chilling effect of a hyper-vigilant audience, where a single phrase can cost the speaker her credibility. Yet she continues to write and post, caught between expression and self-censorship.

“Just Like Us” (chapter 77) offers a wry meta-commentary. The speaker watches “a writer from the Most Prestigious Programs / link into the room, pull out her phone, / and search for a name in the Metaverse.” The poem acknowledges the temptation for poets to “write as if they haven’t lived in the / modern world” — but Baer’s speaker explicitly wants more of this digital reality in poetry, not less. This embrace of the contemporary, despite its mess, is a key tension in the collection.

The poem “40” (chapter 64) asks why certain real struggles — stress-induced erectile dysfunction, the grief of ordinary love — are absent from public conversation. The speaker implies that media saturation fills the air with easier topics while the difficult, unshareable pain goes unspoken. She herself is complicit, writing from inside the same silences.

Character and Symbol Connections

The central character throughout this thematic cluster is the speaker-poet persona — a woman who is a mother, a writer, and a consumer of digital culture. Her struggle is internal: she both craves and recoils from the screen. Other characters appear only as fragments: the cousin with a gun, the husband implied in “40,” the children who call her away in “Mourning Routine.” These fleeting mentions underscore the way media saturation reduces real people to data points or interruptions.

The most relevant symbol from the collection is the phone itself, which appears repeatedly as a portal to the Metaverse, a source of hate, and a tool for avoidance. In “Just Like Us,” the phone is the device that links the writer into an artificial room. In “Reasons to Log Off,” it is the screen that delivers both a recipe and a death threat. The glitter heels from the earlier poem “My Ambition Goes Off to War” can be read as an oblique parallel: they represent a desire that is too impractical for the real world, much like the speaker’s hope for genuine connection amid the digital feed. The train in that same poem, whose smoke fades into clouds, suggests a departure that never returns — much like the attention lost to an endless scroll.

Complexity and Contradiction

The collection’s greatest strength is its refusal to settle into simple critique. The speaker is not a victim of technology; she is a willing participant who recognizes her own addiction (“the stupidest thing / I’ve ever done”) and yet continues to do it. The poem “And Yet” (chapter 35) encapsulates this contradiction: after acknowledging that “the war will always be in you,” the speaker still turns to everyday acts — picking trash, calling her aunt — as anchors. The title phrase itself, repeated throughout the book, signals stubborn persistence even inside despair.

Moreover, Baer’s own medium — a printed poetry collection — paradoxically critiques the digital while relying on its absence of screens. The poems are themselves a form of slow, careful attention that opposes the speed of the feed. This formal irony adds another layer to the theme: the book becomes a space to think through what the screen makes impossible.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the structure of “Daily Planet” reflect the experience of media saturation?
   The poem is a single run-on line of news headlines without punctuation or commentary. This mimics the relentless, undifferentiated flow of information on social media and news apps, where tragedy, celebrity, and trivia arrive with equal weight.

2. In “Reasons to Log Off,” what does the juxtaposition of the cauliflower recipe and the death threat achieve?
   It shows how digital feeds collapse the mundane and the violent into the same space. The effect is both absurd and unsettling: the speaker cannot process either properly because context is stripped away.

3. Why does the speaker call her morning phone ritual “free drugs” in “Mourning Routine”?
   The phrase suggests an addictive, cost-free dopamine hit that quickly turns into anxiety. It highlights the cycle of seeking relief from boredom or loneliness only to end up more agitated — a pattern familiar to heavy social media users.

4. How does “Not a Diet Diet” critique online wellness culture?
   The poem parodies the language of influencer marketing: “recruit five friends / sign for a year / this is your chance / to find a better / be a better / you.” It exposes the commodification of self-improvement and the pressure to monetize personal transformation.

5. What is the significance of the phrase “and yet” in the context of digital culture?
   The phrase, which titles the collection and recurs in several poems, represents the speaker’s refusal to give in fully to despair or cynicism. Despite the toxicity of the feed, she continues to seek connection, write poems, and tend to her ordinary life. It is the persistent “and yet” that keeps her from logging off entirely — and that also keeps her engaged with the flawed, human world.