Are Technologies of Connection Tearing Us Apart?

Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. But his new book looks at how social media and digital communication technologies 'are changing us individually and collectively,' writes the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The book's title? Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.
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.... 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....'

At root, we're the problem. Our minds don't simply distill useful knowledge from a mass of raw data. They use shortcuts, rules of thumb, heuristic hacks — which is how we were able to think fast enough to survive on the savage savanna. We pay heed, for example, to what we experience most often. 'Repetition is, in the human mind, a proxy for facticity,' says Carr. 'What's true is what comes out of the machine most often....' Reality can't compete with the internet's steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards. The ease of the user interface, congenial even to babies, creates no opportunity for what writer Antón Barba-Kay calls 'disciplined acculturation.'

Not only are these technologies designed to leverage our foibles, but we are also changed by them, as Carr points out: 'We adapt to technology's contours as we adapt to the land's and the climate's.' As a result, by designing technology, we redesign ourselves. 'In engineering what we pay attention to, [social media] engineers how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world,' Carr writes. We become dislocated, abstracted: the self must itself be curated in memeable form. 'Looking at screens made me think in screens,' writes poet Annelyse Gelman. 'Looking at pixels made me think in pixels....'

That's not to say that we can't have better laws and regulations, checks and balances. One suggestion is to restore friction into these systems. One might, for instance, make it harder to unreflectively spread lies by imposing small transactional costs, as has been proposed to ease the pathologies of automated market trading. An option Carr doesn't mention is to require companies to perform safety studies on their products, as we demand of pharmaceutical companies. Such measures have already been proposed for AI. But Carr doubts that increasing friction will make much difference. And placing more controls on social media platforms raises free speech concerns... We can't change or constrain the tech, says Carr, but we can change ourselves. We can choose to reject the hyperreal for the material. We can follow Samuel Johnson's refutation of immaterialism by 'kicking the stone,' reminding ourselves of what is real.

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