HOW MUCH BETTER is the world since the arrival of what Nicholas Carr calls our modern “technologies of connection”—cell phones, personal computers, the internet, social media, artificial intelligence? As we watch these systems undermine democracy, flood our lives with misinformation and deepfakes, transform our children into screen-obsessed zombies, and threaten to eradicate us entirely, we might be tempted to respond with a hollow laugh.
But to what extent are these bleak scenarios real? What about being able to navigate by GPS almost anywhere in the world, or call for help when stranded in the middle of nowhere, or stream any song we desire? The cost-benefit calculation is complicated and nuanced, requiring us to find a course between apocalyptic visions of civilizational decline and the naive utopianism of Silicon Valley.
Carr established himself as an astute commentator on information technology in his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in which he argued that Google and the internet are, in the words of his formative essay in The Atlantic, “making us stupid.” In his new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, he expands that analysis to encompass social media and digital communication technologies, asking how they are changing us individually and collectively. As the book’s subtitle implies, the diagnosis is not promising. But if these systems are indeed tearing us apart, the reasons are neither obvious nor simple. Carr suggests that this isn’t really about the evil behavior of our tech overlords but about how we have “been telling ourselves lies about communication—and about ourselves.”
Carr takes his title from an event in 2019, when weather conditions produced an unusually abundant bloom of poppies in a canyon near Los Angeles. When an Instagram and YouTube influencer posted pictures of herself among the flowers, the hashtag #superbloom went viral, and before long, the place was overrun, a traffic officer was injured, online discourse curdled, and the media began speaking of “Flowergeddon.”
Carr argues that the #superbloom event exemplifies the problems with these new media. “We spend our days sharing information, connected as never before, but the more we communicate, the worse things seem to get.” Isn’t that just the opposite of what was supposed to happen?
“Well before the net came along,” says Carr, “[the] evidence was telling us that flooding the public square with more information from more sources was not going to open people’s minds or engender more thoughtful discussions. It wasn’t even going to make people better informed."
“Every new medium,” wrote social theorist John Durham Peters, “is a machine for the production of ghosts.”
