All Talk

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr; W. W. Norton, 272 pp., $29.99

One night in October 1952, an electrician named Frank Walsh crept down the stairs of his Long Island home, drew his gun, and blasted a hole in his family’s television. His wife and kids had been watching with the volume too high, keeping him awake, and he’d had enough. His wife called the police, but the cops declined to arrest him: it wasn’t illegal to shoot your own TV. A cheeky newspaper story (headline: “Obviously Self-Defense”) brought the story to the public, and Walsh became a minor celebrity. He even appeared on a television game show where, naturally, he won a new set.

Social critic Nicholas Carr relates this anecdote in his eye-opening new book, Superbloom. To Carr, it perfectly captures the absurdity of mass media. Rather than inspiring reflection, Walsh’s violence simply got appropriated and repackaged into more “content.” In fact, Carr writes, “firing a gun at a television would become a cultural trope, replayed endlessly in books, movies, songs, cartoons, and, of course, television shows.” Before long, the snake swallowed its tail, and people began copying what they’d seen onscreen and shooting their own televisions. Elvis Presley blasted so many sets that he had a “television graveyard” at Graceland.

Carr takes his title from a botanical phenomenon, in which some long-needed rainfall causes a desert to erupt with flowers. Carr suggests that “we live today in a perpetual superbloom—not of flowers, but of messages.” At its core, his book pleads with us to slow down and examine what happens when we consume and produce media too quickly, especially social media.

The chapters are a hodgepodge. Some rehash the handwringing of Carr’s previous books and articles (e.g., “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”), whereas others ramble on about the nature of the “hyperreal” or the breakdown of the self. Grand pronouncements abound. He declares that “textspeak” (b4, tl;dr) is dangerous because it compresses communication to the point that “open-ended, contemplative ways of thinking—the philosophical, the ruminative, the introspective”—become “marginalized,” if not impossible. But can we really pin all this on a few lols? Most people have never enjoyed deep thinking, and the ostracism of philosophy is hardly new. Athens sentenced Socrates to death in 399 BCE.

Superbloom is much stronger when the focus shifts to exposing some deeper, longstanding truths about human psychology. Consider our repeated naïveté about new forms of media. In the mid-1800s, people declared that telegraph wires, by fostering instant communication, would unite the world in harmony—a false hope. But that didn’t stop Guglielmo Marconi a half century later from declaring that radio would usher in a new era of harmony and tolerance and make war impossible. Similarly starry-eyed pronouncements accompanied the early spread of the internet.

Soberingly, Carr argues that the opposite holds true: that increased communication among people usually sparks discord and anger. In ye olde days of letter writing, diplomats rued the poky pace of messages, but that pace also gave them time to reflect and think twice before firing off something ill-advised. In contrast, after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914, diplomats were in instant communication via telephones and telegraphs. But instead of calmly talking things through, they mostly bullied and threatened one another. Indeed, some historians have essentially blamed rapid-fire communication for the outbreak of the First World War.

Carr also punctures the belief—held by 80 to 90 percent of people, according to surveys—that the more we get to know someone, the more we’ll like them. Back in 1976, three psychologists interviewed the residents of around 200 condos in Southern California and found that although next-door neighbors were likely to be close friends, they were also far more likely to be enemies. It turns out that the more we know about someone, the more we discover things we don’t like. And unfortunately, negative reactions (disgust, anger) are stronger and more tenacious than positive ones. One spat or unwelcome revelation can wipe out years of goodwill.

Although those problems long predate the internet, social media makes them worse. Nowadays, Carr writes, we’re all “virtual neighbors … in one another’s business all the time … [and] we have no end of opportunities to take offense.” Many pundits today trace our overheated political rhetoric to progressives’ and conservatives’ existing in different bubbles or silos, but if Carr is correct that “a communication network might serve as a vector of enmity even more than of friendship,” then perhaps more siloing would actually cool things off.

Reading Superbloom, I was reminded of a common explanation for today’s obesity epidemic. Sugars and fats were scarce and precious in the Stone Age, and modern metabolisms haven’t yet caught up to a diet in which we can eat cheesecake with every meal. Similarly, there’s a mismatch between our revolutionary new communication tools and our caveman temperaments. The big question is whether we can do anything about this misalignment.

Carr traces much of the strife of social media to two innovations: Facebook’s News Feed, which provided an infinite scroll of algorithmically curated content, and Twitter’s retweet button, which allowed people to rapidly amplify and spread messages. Carr’s proposal for lessening the danger of social media involves adding “friction” to these processes: banning infinite scrolling and autoplay, and imposing small fees and time delays on reposting or retweeting messages. He likens such measures to speed bumps on roads: even a tiny barrier would “encourage more deliberation and discretion.” Unfortunately, Carr concedes, such measures are unlikely to be enacted: feeds and infinite scrolling are good for companies’ bottom lines, and users love them.

In the end, then, just as Frank Walsh’s gunshots did nothing to stop the scourge of television, it’s hard to see any practical way to curb the specific harms of social media. (Even if you posted a criticism like this review, it would just get swallowed up in likes.) But we can at least be less naïve about the next shiny new communications tool. It almost certainly will not engender harmony and understanding. We have, Carr concludes, “been telling ourselves lies about communication—and about ourselves.” It’s time we stop.

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