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- Author: Nicholas Carr
- Full Title: Superbloom
- Category: #books
- By freeing the reader from his physical surroundings and local social group, the written word not only hastened the spread of knowledge; it fueled the rise of individualism. The reader, withdrawing into the solitary act of reading, could chart the path of his own intellectual growth. The book may have been “the first product of mass production,” as McLuhan wrote, but it “isolated the reader in silence and helped create the Western ‘I.’
- At the moment of his great epiphany—that striking vision of society liquefying in a welter of contending influences—his powers of prophecy failed him. He turned his eyes away from the more ominous implications of his argument. Unable to appreciate the blurriness of the lines that separate influence from manipulation, association from tribalism, he remained blind to the possibility that, by giving people ever greater power to filter information and form groups on the basis of personal whim or partisan passion, more efficient communication might breed factionalism, authoritarianism, and strife. It might destabilize or even fracture society.
- As the historian Stephen Kern has described, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. Rather than calming the crisis, they inflamed it. “Communication technology imparted a breakneck speed to the usually slow pace of traditional diplomacy and seemed to obviate personal diplomacy,” Kern writes. “Diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication.”26 Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication.
- “The moral qualities—prudence, foresight, intelligence, penetration, wisdom—of statesmen and nations have not kept pace [with the] rapidity of communication by telegraph and telephone,” the distinguished British diplomat Ernest Satow wrote in 1917, the war’s bleakest year. “These latter leave no time for reflection or consultation, and demand an immediate and often a hasty decision on matters of vital importance.”27 In a speech delivered thirty years later, at the end of an even deadlier world war, Harold Innis would express the seeming paradox more bluntly still: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”28
- Zuckerberg explained the News Feed’s rationale to his staff in a memorable sentence: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”11 The statement is grotesque not because it’s false—it’s altogether true—but because it invokes a category error. It yokes together in an obscene comparison two events of radically different scale and import. And yet, in his callous way, Zuckerberg articulated the essence of content collapse. Social media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all “content”—and it pours through a single channel with a single objective: maximizing “engagement.” News, entertainment, conversation, and all other forms of human expression would from now on be in direct competition, angling for both the consumer’s fleeting attention and the algorithm’s blessing.
- The protests themselves, as they swept back and forth across the network, growing in size and intensity, proved how effective a content-filtering algorithm could be in galvanizing people’s attention, stirring their emotions, and encouraging them to post, comment, and share. Outrage, anger, and mob action: all were signals of extraordinarily high engagement. And after the protests faded—the students soon realized that they liked the convenience of getting all content of interest through a single automated stream rather than having to traipse across pages—the engagement remained. All those zeroes and ones had come into perfect alignment.
- The ad embodied Schwartz’s “resonance theory” of communication. In an age of mass media, he posited, people have more information than they can handle. To seize their attention and influence their thoughts and behavior, you don’t need to give them more stuff to think about. You need to activate the information and attendant emotions already present in their memory. “In communicating at electronic speed,” he wrote, “we no longer direct information into an audience, but try to evoke stored information out of them, in a patterned way.” A successful message doesn’t deliver meaning; it calls forth meaning. “That which we put into the communication has no meaning in itself. The meaning of our communication is what a listener or viewer gets out of his experience with the communicator’s stimuli.” The Daisy ad presented a series of simple audiovisual stimuli—an innocent girl, a meadow full of flowers, a countdown, a mushroom cloud—intended to trigger responses latent in the minds of a targeted subset of the audience, in order to increase the odds they’d get out and vote for LBJ. It worked.
- The resonance theory helps us understand why mindless machines, through a statistical analysis of behavioral variables, can so thoroughly command people’s attention. The power of the feed algorithm doesn’t lie in the meaning of the messages it delivers—the algorithm knows nothing of meaning—but rather in its ability to match messages to individuals’ emotional triggers. It automates the striking of responsive chords. It gives everyone a custom stream of Daisy ads.
- For Mark Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley mates, the fundamental problem of communication was putting the most resonant message in front of an individual at the most opportune moment. The essential function of the mechanism of communication wasn’t transport anymore. It was manipulation—manipulation of information and by extension manipulation of those receiving the information. Before the feed, it was possible to argue that Facebook was a common carrier, a dumb network that transmitted messages without regard to their content. After the feed, Facebook was a different beast—part broadcaster, part wiretapper, part propagandist.
- While the companies may be motivated by private concerns, their moderation programs, like their filtering algorithms, have an enormous impact on public affairs. In addition to deciding the fate of obscene and violent material, moderators make decisions about speech in general, drawing lines, always subjective and often arbitrary, between what’s permissible and what’s not. In 2010, the law professor and First Amendment authority Jeffrey Rosen observed that “Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.”26 That power, now spread across many social platforms, is greater today. We may have stopped talking about the role of the public interest in governing decisions about what’s published and broadcast, but the public interest is still being taken into account. It’s just not happening out in the open, through established political and judicial procedures and institutions. The public interest is being interpreted in secret, by large corporations that see the public not as a polity but as a customer base. We’ve outsourced the stewardship of speech to Big Tech.
- Just as a potato chip or a cigarette is meticulously engineered to trigger certain biological reactions in the human body and mind—pleasure and craving, notably—so communication is now engineered to trigger similar reactions. What fills online feeds, research shows, is content that stirs strong emotions and provokes symptoms of “physiological arousal”—a quickened heart rate, tensed muscles, dilated pupils.34 The nervous system is put on alert, primed to respond to incoming stimuli. We feel compelled to scroll more, see more, share more. We’re drawn deeper into the feed. Whether we realize it or not, social media churns out information that’s been highly processed to stimulate not just engagement but dependency.
- A bit later in the seventeenth century, Johannes Vermeer expressed a similar sentiment in his extraordinary painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. The young woman stands before the large window, but she isn’t looking through it. She’s transfixed by the words on the luminous sheet of paper she holds in her hands. A letter, Vermeer implies, is itself a window, taking us out of our own narrow circumstances and into communion with a distant other.
- Beyond its social role, letter writing was for many persons an act of self-expression and, more deeply still, self-reflection and self-definition. Sitting down and composing a letter provided women and men with a rare opportunity to contemplate their daily lives and, through the careful arrangement of words and sentences, shape their experiences and emotions into a coherent and meaningful narrative. The slowness of the mail removed letter writing from life’s everyday toing-and-froing. The delay between writing and reading cleared a space for introspection, for organizing one’s thoughts without regard to society’s demands for immediate reaction and response. If, as William Wordsworth suggested, the origin of poetry lies in “emotion recollected in tranquility,” then the writing of a letter brought at least a little of the poetic sensibility into people’s otherwise busy days. The reading of books and journals had given individuals a means of constructing a distinct intellectual self. The writing of letters gave them a means of constructing a distinct experiential self. Letters served as testaments as well as sacraments.
- Once the network limits went away, the thinking went, the young would go back to writing full sentences and paragraphs. The old rules of spelling, punctuation, and grammar would come back into force. That was a misreading of the phenomenon. It mistook a secondary cause for the primary cause. The development of textspeak, like the earlier development of email style, was prompted less by space constraints than by time constraints. As the earliest IMers had realized, keeping up with the torrents of conversation pouring through computer screens demanded quick reflexes, nonstop skimming, and constant shifts of focus. Every second spent on one message left one less second for all the rest. Speed in reading and terseness in writing were essential to staying afloat on the information flood, which in turn was essential to maintaining a robust social life.
- Brevity also offered another important social benefit: it raised the odds that your messages would actually be read. Research dating back to the early days of email had shown that, as message flow intensifies, recipients start to ignore long, involved messages while continuing to read short, snappy
- Efficiency in expression—what the Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter has called texting’s “cult of concision”27—was never really about conserving bandwidth. It was about conserving attention. As network capacity expanded, transmission costs fell, and message flows intensified, textspeak did not become obsolete. It became all the more indispensable, not just for kids but for adults.
- Textspeak is worth celebrating. Ingenious and playful, it testifies to the strength of the human urge to communicate and the vigor of the human capacity to adapt to new media. It testifies as well to the irreverence and nerve of the young. Without any planning or expert guidance, without any parental oversight or permission, without even knowing what they were doing, schoolkids came up with an efficient (and fun) way to converse over computer networks, drawing on the entire history of communication, from grunt to glyph, to create a novel language. Turning a complex technological system to their own purposes, they learned to socialize in a new environment. Texting, as McWhorter put it in a 2013 TED talk, is “a miraculous thing.”
- Neighbors become enemies, the condo researchers discovered, for a very different reason: “environmental spoiling.” The closer you live to another person, the more exposed you are to his habits and opinions. If you find those habits and opinions irritating—he doesn’t bring in his garbage cans, say, or he doesn’t clean up after his dog, or he puts up political signs supporting candidates you loathe—you’ll resent him for degrading your surroundings. And because his proximity guarantees his irritating habits and opinions remain always in view, your resentment, and your antipathy, will fester. Because of that antipathy, moreover, you’ll take pains to avoid running into him when you’re out and about. So the casual contacts that promote empathy and fondness never happen. Enmity, once provoked, becomes self-reinforcing.
- The old taboo that checked our urge to talk about ourselves in public faded away when we found ourselves looking into a screen instead of another person’s eyes. With the rise of social media, oversharing became the new norm. Facebook, Snapchat, X, and other platforms have been painstakingly designed to encourage self-expression. By emphasizing quantitative measures of social status—follower and friend counts, like and retweet tallies—the platforms reward people for broadcasting endless details about their lives and opinions through messages, posts, photos, and videos. In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet. In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am!
- But by blurring conversation and broadcasting, social media takes social penetration to an extreme. It gives people enormous incentives to talk about themselves, before a mass media–sized audience, and few incentives to secure their privacy or respect the privacy of others. It’s all sword, no shield.
- As for the rather small set of voters who spend a lot of time reading, thinking, and talking about politics, the research reveals that their heightened engagement rarely broadens their minds. They’re actually the ones most inclined to narrow and fervent partisanship. The more news they gobble up, the more convinced they are that they’re right and anyone with a different view is wrong.
- Polarization is not, as is widely believed, a simple effect of algorithmically generated echo chambers or filter bubbles. While politically engaged people do become more extreme in their views as they amass more evidence backing those views, they also welcome, and rapidly share, stories about opposing positions held by rival groups. Rather than pushing the partisans to question their beliefs, however, the stories just make them more certain they’re right. Different points of view are seen not as opportunities to learn but as provocations to attack. Once a group has established its position, all information, con as well as pro, tends to reinforce it. You don’t need an echo chamber to be an extremist; you just need a lot of information and your own skewed perceptions.
- Though the findings go against the common wisdom about the benefits of exposing people to diverse points of view, they’re consistent with most other studies of voters. In forming opinions and casting votes, people are motivated much less by political ideology than by group identity.45 Opinions emerge from affiliation, not vice versa. People may like to believe that their political views reflect a careful, reasoned analysis of the issues, but usually they’re by-products of tribal allegiance. They’re rooted in emotion, not reason. A group identity provides a quick, intuitive way to make sense of a world that resists intellectual explication.
- What we’re doing when we gaze upon our Zoom reflection, observing ourselves speak and listen, act and react, is not admiring our reflection but trying to decipher how our image appears to others. In that gaze, we become both watcher and watched.
- The self collapses into, and must compete with, everything else in the feed, from news stories to celebrity memes. Media programming used to be something we looked at and listened to, something presented to our senses from the outside. Now it takes shape within us, its production exerting a formative pressure on our being. Media today works “from the inside,” the French philosopher and semiotician Jean Baudrillard argued in The Perfect Crime, “precisely as a virus does with a normal cell.”22 We consume media, then media consumes us. We’re not just actors playing roles anymore. We’ve been required to take on the jobs of producer and impresario, hawker and emcee, for a show that never stops. Even when we’re not posting, we’re scouting locations and looking for material.
- The effect is a strange, needy sort of solipsism. We socialize more than ever, but we’re also at a further remove from those we interact with. The sympathetic imagination that Cooley and Goffman took for granted—the ability to get inside the heads of others, to sense their perceptions and feelings through direct observation—weakens and warps when the others are hidden behind screens, their thoughts and emotions filtered through algorithms. Rather than relying on empathy and intuition to navigate social relations, we’re forced to decipher others’ attitudes by tracking and evaluating explicit, often quantitative measures: follower counts, numbers of likes and shares, the time that elapses before responses arrive, the types of emoji that appear in a comment, the number of exclamation marks that punctuate a reply. Even the presence or absence of a period at the end of a text message becomes laden with meaning, another clue to how we’re perceived. The more mediated our lives become, the more we come to see ourselves, and others, as abstractions.
- Whether an artificial intelligence will at some point exhibit signs of true intelligence (whatever that may be) is an interesting theoretical question, but it’s beside the point when it comes to contemporary media. What the AI is churning out is already intelligible and pleasing to us, and that’s what counts.
- Machine-made text and images will become all the more important if, as we’ve already seen with video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, social media users shift toward more traditional consumer roles in the future, contributing less original content themselves.
- Myths are works of art. They provide a way of understanding the world that appeals not to reason but to emotion, not to the conscious mind but to the subconscious one. What is most pleasing to our sensibilities—what is most beautiful to us—is what feels most genuine, most worthy of belief. Every society, every group even, creates its own Spiritus Mundi. History and psychology both suggest that, in politics as in art, generative AI will succeed in fulfilling the highest aspiration of its creators: to make the virtual feel more authentic than the real.
- “When man is overwhelmed by information,” Marshall McLuhan saw, “he resorts to myth. Myth is inclusive, time-saving, and fast.”35 A myth provides a readymade context for quickly interpreting new information as it flows chaotically around us. It provides the distracted System 1 thinker with an all-encompassing framework for intuitive sense-making. Mythmaking, more than truth seeking, is what seems likely to define the future of media. The reason extraordinarily strange conspiracy theories have spread so widely in recent years may have less to do with the nature of credulity than with the nature of faith. The theories make sense only when understood as myths. Believing that Washington politicians are vampiric pedophiles operating out of a neighborhood pizza joint is little different from believing that a chaos-sowing god stalks the Earth in the form of a bear.
- The material world, with its spatiotemporal boundaries and its many frictions, tames the seeking impulse. Once we grow accustomed to a particular place, to a set of physical surroundings and a group of people, the novelty wears off. Environmental stimulation subsides, the mind calms, and our thoughts come under our control. We gain focus. We begin to explore narrowly rather than widely, deeply rather than superficially. Our seeking instinct tells us that the familiar is without interest, but once the instinct is subdued, we begin to discover the rewards of looking long and hard at the world we know. The possibilities of art, science, and philosophy open up. The story of civilization is, among other stories, a story of the taming of the seeking instinct.
- The overriding goal of social platforms has from the start been to find new and more efficient ways to feed us novelty. The major design innovations that have shaped the social media interface—the pull-to-refresh function, the infinite scroll, the multidirectional swiping, the autoplay routines—are all intended to make seeking easier and more efficient. Our compulsion to discover new stuff once required us to go out and walk around. Now it’s gratified with a flick of a finger. And the algorithms make sure our seeking is always productive. Even if we’re not looking for anything in particular, we’re always finding what we want. As we acclimate ourselves to a more intense level of stimulation, we yearn, like gamers, to level up again. Stimulus inflation becomes self-reinforcing. The seeker is never satisfied.