I just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s new book Superbloom. Here are some highlights.
We spend our days sharing information, connected as never before, but the more we communicate, the worse things seem to get.
Paraphrasing Charles Cooley:
Every new medium creates a new environment. As we adapt to the environment, it shapes our perceptions and thoughts, our relationships with others, even our sense of self.
Quoting Harold Innis:
Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.
That quote is from 1948.
On the advantages of segregated and limited devices, each specialised to handle individual forms of media:
The specialized technology served as a means to sort and segregate information and regulate the pace and timing of its delivery.
...Like the legal and regulatory system that surrounded it, the analog media system was imperfect, but its very messiness helped maintain communication’s human scale.
On social media:
Open-ended, contemplative ways of thinking—the philosophical, the ruminative, the introspective—have also been marginalized. That’s one of the reasons our culture has become so politicized in recent years.
By turning us all into media personalities, social media has also turned us all into rivals.
On the dangers of techno-optimism through the retrospective lens of letting social media ‘innovate’ unchecked:
These misperceptions had consequences. They prevented society from undertaking a careful, clear-eyed assessment of the risks presented by the net and, subsequently, social media, and they removed from public discussion legal and regulatory options that might have tempered some of the technology’s ill effects.
Quoting Walter Lippmann, on his concept of each of us having our own internet-fuelled “pseudo-environment”:
People all “live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.”
Did I say internet? That quote is from 1922, from Lippman’s book Public Opinion. He was making a more general (yet prescient) point about human nature that connective technology exacerbates.
On LLMs:
The next wave of innovations—larger language models, more convincing chatbots... will only drive us further into the emptiness of hyperreality.
OpenAI’s recent research on ChatGPT-induced loneliness seems to get at a similar conclusion.
And finally, an underwhelming suggested response to our predicament:
We have speed bumps on roads to slow people down and safeguard the public; why not on the net?