Yves here. The book discussed below, Superbloom, does not seem to blaze new trails in techno-skepticism, save perhaps for emphasis. It focuses on the issue of digital overstimulation and the consequences for users as well as in the real world.
I am not convinced that this is the big downside, although it clearly is a cost. IMHO, the “nose immersed in smartphone” phenomenon has damaged social skills, by reducing interaction (kids don’t know how to flirt and therefore are not getting laid much, a pretty dramatic outcome) and even the impulse to be sociable. It also has arguably reduced cognitive skills, such as memory and visualization (readers have commented that they find younger people have trouble using maps). It seems also to have reduced situational awareness.
Even in settings when people are not in “nose in phone” mode, they seem to be habituated to being narrowly focused in front of them. I have had people bump into me, sometimes hard, when I have been in their field of vision in stores or the gym. That almost never happened a few years ago.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, a science writer in San Jose, California, and the author of “What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.” She is working on a book about the science of setting a sustainable pace in an overclocked world. Originally published at Undark
It was all Mother Nature’s fault, you could say. After winter rains in Lake Elsinore, California, reawakened countless dormant poppy seeds in early 2019, spring blossoms crowded in thickly enough to turn the hillsides bright orange — a fleeting “superbloom.” Recognizing an Instagrammable backdrop when she saw one, influencer Jaci Marie Smith reclined across the floral carpet in orange overalls and hit post. “You’ll never influence the world by trying to be like it,” her photo caption read.
In March, posts like Smith’s and #superbloom hashtags fueled a global frenzy. So many sightseers and influencers crowded into Lake Elsinore, snarling traffic and pulling up blooms by the handfuls, that officials declared a public safety emergency. As residents and others ripped into influencers for unleashing viral havoc on the small town, some took down their poppy posts, while others offered excuses and mea culpas. A meme that had begun in innocent enthusiasm curdled in an internet minute, setting people against each other and leaving a wake of real-world destruction.
We’re living in a perpetual digital superbloom, contends technology writer Nicholas Carr — a state of sensory and communication overload we can no longer control, one that’s sowing division and damage on a global scale. And like the poppy field that hypnotized Dorothy’s “Wizard of Oz” crew, this social media-fueled superbloom lures us in with enticements that are nearly impossible to resist. “Poppies are lush, vibrant, and entrancing,” Carr writes in “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.” “They’re also garish, invasive, and narcotic.”
This is familiar ground for Carr — at least, as familiar as any fast-morphing digital terrain can be. Carr’s stance as a techno-skeptic has been consistent for decades, though it’s evolved as digital communication modes have bloomed and receded. His 2010 book “The Shallows”, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, argued that the online world is distracting and prevents deeper engagement with texts, and he followed that up in 2014 with “The Glass Cage,” a reflection on how interacting with our computers changes us.
In “Superbloom,” Carr expands on a central theme of “The Glass Cage”: While we view our digital devices as helpers serving up knowledge and entertainment, they exact an unacknowledged toll in the process, altering how we think, act, and communicate. We are far different humans in an era of texting, posting, and like-seeking, Carr argues, than we were when limited to letters and phone calls — and not for the better.
He contends that when we communicate mostly in one-line messages and hot takes, the kind that titillate and propagate from one human node to the next, our capacity to engage more intently and thoughtfully withers. “What we sacrifice are depth and rigor,” he writes. Thus, “we rely on quick and often emotional judgments while eschewing slower, reflective ones.”
This is a fair point, if only true in some online contexts: Masters of the 140-character social media quip win plenty of fans elsewhere with their books and long essays. What’s more convincing is Carr’s analysis of why our instant access to one another online, which we often assume is an advantage, has led to more social breakdown rather than less. In fact, he presents research showing that when people have high levels of close contact — something the internet allows on a colossal scale — they tend to turn against each other.
In real-world studies of community dynamics, neighbors seem more likely to be enemies than friends because they see each other’s flaws close up. And once we recognize that someone else is different from us, other research shows, we focus on further ways they’re not the same, a so-called “dissimilarity cascade” that can lead us to dislike them.
Likewise, in virtual space, “we’re all in one another’s business all the time,” Carr writes, later adding, “With an almost microscopic view of what everybody else is saying and doing — the screen turns us all into peeping Toms — we have no end of opportunities to take offense.”
Social media, in other words, packs us into a virtual hole-in-the-wall dorm room, dodging other people’s laundry piles and half-eaten noodles. In this agitated, overwhelmed state, it’s little wonder we’re prone to unload on anyone in the vicinity. Carr also raises more familiar points about how social media breeds anger and division by serving up upsetting yet engaging content, territory that books like Gaia Bernstein’s “Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies” cover in depth.
Yet as digital technologies extend ever deeper into our lives, it’s more critical than ever for us all to understand how online exchanges foment social breakdown — and “Superbloom” stands out for its appeal to a broad swath of readers. Where so many technology books seem like sealed capsules, accessible only to those who know the lingo, Carr’s vivid, jargon-free prose hits right in the solar plexus. “We’re not hostages with Stockholm syndrome,” he writes of our relationship with social media. “We’re being given what we want, in quantities so generous we can’t resist gorging ourselves.”
Carr likens artificial intelligence chatbots to the poet William Butler Yeats’ “rough beast” slouching toward us with a “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” and mocks tech magnates’ promises that AI will make the world a better place. “The rough beast,” he sarcastically observes, “turns out to be Mary Poppins.”
However hard-hitting and sound its claims, “Superbloom” might feel too apocalyptic were it not for Carr’s closing plea to hold the line. He says it’s too late to change the online systems we’re embedded in — a judgment that seems a tad dour, given how rapidly those same systems have themselves changed over time. But he rightly notes that to peel away from a virtual world that’s more image than substance, users must deliberately resist its empty charms, much as the rebels of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” rejected the happiness drug soma.
The human brain is far better evolved to function in the real world, and the impact we can make in it is much likelier to fulfill us. “Salvation, if that’s not too strong a word,” Carr writes, “lies in personal, willful acts of excommunication.”
Still, he calls for judicious online withdrawal rather than Luddite-style divestment, for staking out a position “not beyond the reach of the informational flow, but beyond the reach of its liquefying force.”
While digital pessimists can come across as Cassandra-like, their warnings have never been more resonant. For Carr, the rough online beast is no longer merely slouching in our direction. It’s already devouring us. “Superbloom” frames the choice ahead in the starkest possible terms: Do we consent to being swallowed, or find a way — however quixotic and improbable — to escape the maw?
