Yves here. The book discussed below, Superbloom, does not seem to blaze new trails in techno-skepticism, save perhaps for emphasis. It focuses on the issue of digital overstimulation and the consequences for users as well as in the real world.
I am not convinced that this is the big downside, although it clearly is a cost. IMHO, the “nose immersed in smartphone” phenomenon has damaged social skills, by reducing interaction (kids don’t know how to flirt and therefore are not getting laid much, a pretty dramatic outcome) and even the impulse to be sociable. It also has arguably reduced cognitive skills, such as memory and visualization (readers have commented that they find younger people have trouble using maps). It seems also to have reduced situational awareness.
Even in settings when people are not in “nose in phone” mode, they seem to be habituated to being narrowly focused in front of them. I have had people bump into me, sometimes hard, when I have been in their field of vision in stores or the gym. That almost never happened a few years ago.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, a science writer in San Jose, California, and the author of “What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.” She is working on a book about the science of setting a sustainable pace in an overclocked world. Originally published at Undark
It was all Mother Nature’s fault, you could say. After winter rains in Lake Elsinore, California, reawakened countless dormant poppy seeds in early 2019, spring blossoms crowded in thickly enough to turn the hillsides bright orange — a fleeting “superbloom.” Recognizing an Instagrammable backdrop when she saw one, influencer Jaci Marie Smith reclined across the floral carpet in orange overalls and hit post. “You’ll never influence the world by trying to be like it,” her photo caption read.
In March, posts like Smith’s and #superbloom hashtags fueled a global frenzy. So many sightseers and influencers crowded into Lake Elsinore, snarling traffic and pulling up blooms by the handfuls, that officials declared a public safety emergency. As residents and others ripped into influencers for unleashing viral havoc on the small town, some took down their poppy posts, while others offered excuses and mea culpas. A meme that had begun in innocent enthusiasm curdled in an internet minute, setting people against each other and leaving a wake of real-world destruction.
We’re living in a perpetual digital superbloom, contends technology writer Nicholas Carr — a state of sensory and communication overload we can no longer control, one that’s sowing division and damage on a global scale. And like the poppy field that hypnotized Dorothy’s “Wizard of Oz” crew, this social media-fueled superbloom lures us in with enticements that are nearly impossible to resist. “Poppies are lush, vibrant, and entrancing,” Carr writes in “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.” “They’re also garish, invasive, and narcotic.”
This is familiar ground for Carr — at least, as familiar as any fast-morphing digital terrain can be. Carr’s stance as a techno-skeptic has been consistent for decades, though it’s evolved as digital communication modes have bloomed and receded. His 2010 book “The Shallows”, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, argued that the online world is distracting and prevents deeper engagement with texts, and he followed that up in 2014 with “The Glass Cage,” a reflection on how interacting with our computers changes us.
In “Superbloom,” Carr expands on a central theme of “The Glass Cage”: While we view our digital devices as helpers serving up knowledge and entertainment, they exact an unacknowledged toll in the process, altering how we think, act, and communicate. We are far different humans in an era of texting, posting, and like-seeking, Carr argues, than we were when limited to letters and phone calls — and not for the better.
He contends that when we communicate mostly in one-line messages and hot takes, the kind that titillate and propagate from one human node to the next, our capacity to engage more intently and thoughtfully withers. “What we sacrifice are depth and rigor,” he writes. Thus, “we rely on quick and often emotional judgments while eschewing slower, reflective ones.”
This is a fair point, if only true in some online contexts: Masters of the 140-character social media quip win plenty of fans elsewhere with their books and long essays. What’s more convincing is Carr’s analysis of why our instant access to one another online, which we often assume is an advantage, has led to more social breakdown rather than less. In fact, he presents research showing that when people have high levels of close contact — something the internet allows on a colossal scale — they tend to turn against each other.
In real-world studies of community dynamics, neighbors seem more likely to be enemies than friends because they see each other’s flaws close up. And once we recognize that someone else is different from us, other research shows, we focus on further ways they’re not the same, a so-called “dissimilarity cascade” that can lead us to dislike them.
Likewise, in virtual space, “we’re all in one another’s business all the time,” Carr writes, later adding, “With an almost microscopic view of what everybody else is saying and doing — the screen turns us all into peeping Toms — we have no end of opportunities to take offense.”
Social media, in other words, packs us into a virtual hole-in-the-wall dorm room, dodging other people’s laundry piles and half-eaten noodles. In this agitated, overwhelmed state, it’s little wonder we’re prone to unload on anyone in the vicinity. Carr also raises more familiar points about how social media breeds anger and division by serving up upsetting yet engaging content, territory that books like Gaia Bernstein’s “Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies” cover in depth.
Yet as digital technologies extend ever deeper into our lives, it’s more critical than ever for us all to understand how online exchanges foment social breakdown — and “Superbloom” stands out for its appeal to a broad swath of readers. Where so many technology books seem like sealed capsules, accessible only to those who know the lingo, Carr’s vivid, jargon-free prose hits right in the solar plexus. “We’re not hostages with Stockholm syndrome,” he writes of our relationship with social media. “We’re being given what we want, in quantities so generous we can’t resist gorging ourselves.”
Carr likens artificial intelligence chatbots to the poet William Butler Yeats’ “rough beast” slouching toward us with a “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” and mocks tech magnates’ promises that AI will make the world a better place. “The rough beast,” he sarcastically observes, “turns out to be Mary Poppins.”
However hard-hitting and sound its claims, “Superbloom” might feel too apocalyptic were it not for Carr’s closing plea to hold the line. He says it’s too late to change the online systems we’re embedded in — a judgment that seems a tad dour, given how rapidly those same systems have themselves changed over time. But he rightly notes that to peel away from a virtual world that’s more image than substance, users must deliberately resist its empty charms, much as the rebels of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” rejected the happiness drug soma.
The human brain is far better evolved to function in the real world, and the impact we can make in it is much likelier to fulfill us. “Salvation, if that’s not too strong a word,” Carr writes, “lies in personal, willful acts of excommunication.”
Still, he calls for judicious online withdrawal rather than Luddite-style divestment, for staking out a position “not beyond the reach of the informational flow, but beyond the reach of its liquefying force.”
While digital pessimists can come across as Cassandra-like, their warnings have never been more resonant. For Carr, the rough online beast is no longer merely slouching in our direction. It’s already devouring us. “Superbloom” frames the choice ahead in the starkest possible terms: Do we consent to being swallowed, or find a way — however quixotic and improbable — to escape the maw?
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“I have had people bump into me, sometimes hard, when I have been in their field of vision in stores or the gym.”
I mean that could be a way for people to meet and get laid again.
Didn´t romcoms teach us (argh!) that to expertly bump into the other is an art?
Smartphone up, nose down, problem solved.
p.s. is this seriously a social issue?
Any young people around who can answer? Hello?
It’s not just young people who focus only on the screen in front of them but old people as well. I was at the doctor’s reception last week and nearly everybody – mostly older people – had their head down in a mobile and I was reflecting how a generation or so ago, people would just be talking to each other, even if strangers. Especially with strangers. And now? People can get themselves seriously hurt because they turn off the real world and concentrate on that little screen. A few months ago I saw this guy concentrating on his mobile as he blindly walked up behind a horse who got started and kicked the guy flat on his back. Not the horse’s fault of course but how do you miss walking up to something as big as a horse?
I did not make the point clear. They were NOT using phones when they bumped into me. Not a single one, and it’s been at least a half dozen in the last six months.
I attribute this to smartphone use conditioning them not to use their peripheral vision.
Yves, it could also be due to the use of ear buds, the wireless types. Often I’ll hear people talking, but no one around. “Oh, I get it” they’re on their phone or listening to a podcast, blankly walking. Reminds me of those early videos with people on their phones as the gorilla walks by, not noticed by the phone-oid.
Wait until people have a sending/receiving chip in their neck. We won’t know if we’re being recorded and/or scanned as they walk by speaking to seemingly no one.
Speaking of podcast, Techtonic with Mar Hurst. A generally skeptic tech podcast that uses source documents, not just a lot of ranting. Check it out.
No, none were wearing ear buds. I am sure you mean to help, but this comes off as denying what I reported, that I had not been observant and missed an important factor.
I had a revelation when reading your description of people bumping into you …. When driving nowadays I find way more people pulling out into oncoming traffic when it is not really prudent, often forcing me to break in order not to hit them. This was never much of a thing in the past. I don’t think I exaggerate to say it happens at least once every time I am out these days. I am on high alert when seeing cars in driveways or at intersections when I have the right away straight through. That phone induced forward only focus would explain the poor judgement on display! In fact, in general I would say that I find driving more stressful than I used to and that need to always be on high alert is part of the reason.
On top of this conditioning, the slowed processing speed that is among the neurological effects of Covid can apparently affect useful peripheral vision. A similar phenomenon was observed in people infected with HIV. @dbdugger frequently cites the research on this.
No doubt this is also a cause.
It is definitely a ‘thing’ that under ’30’s seem to have weaker general spatial awareness, mostly due to using sat navs and google maps. I live in a touristy area and I’ve seen people, clearly lost, staring intensely at their phone when the place they are trying to find is directly within their eyeline. Whether this applies to peripheral awareness, I’m not sure. I suspect that people just walking and cycling less weakens peoples general spatial awareness.
There may also be a social issue too – perhaps its just my imagination, but in recent years I seem to have noticed an increase in young women in particular who simply hold a line when walking on a path, and not doing the usual half shuffle move to give way that people normally instinctively do on a narrow path. A couple of times in recent years I’ve been pretty much barged off narrow pavements by younger women. In some cases it may be just discreet earbuds meaning they aren’t paying attention.
I believe it.
Wonder if this transfers from a peripheral vision phenomenon over into habits of inquiry…less “divergent thinking”?
How bout connection to “minimal self” concept (Lasch)?
That is a very interesting question. I don’t know either way but I will keep my eye out for any research.
I have found that all of these people banging into me has led me to be much more attentive to my full field of vision when other are around.
Last week I was ensconced in a hot springs that holds about a dozen people with no wi-fi or cell service, and we all crave information, and yet it has to be of the old fashioned kind, so the conversations flow back and forth not unlike in Plato’s day.
I don’t know where else this could occur in this day and age, strangers talking to one another.
Living in an urban area in flyover country, I use mass transit and have had some very interesting conversations with total strangers while riding the bus. Similar experiences riding my bike on our city’s excellent network of bike/ped trails. Ivan Illich’s concept of conviviality might help break the screen trance – at least temporarily. “He argued for the creation of convivial, rather than manipulative tools.”
Back in the late ’70s. early-mid ’80s I used to hitch a LOT – my logbook shows some 30,000 miles hitched.
That was a great way to meet people, including some luminaries:
Dave Dee of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzie)
John Hurt
Kenneth Clark (in Beja, Portugal, ex-UK Chancellor – REALLY surprised!)
Also had five women take me to their place or a hotel for, ahem…
Plus several blokes who tried it on, but never felt unsafe.
I also did a couple of what I called A-Z hitches: start at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and visit the alphabet, ending there too. Did it four times – twice each A->Z and vice versa. I used to do swear words too: Frome-Upton-Crockerton-… you get the idea…
Wouldn’t try it now though – just qualified for Medicare…
Social skills have gone to shit, for sure.
I had a “getting to know you” lunch with a new technician (millenial), and I doubt he would have realized if I had left the table– nose in phone whole time, one word or abbreviated answers to open-ended questions without looking up. Had I chosen him to be my trainee, he would have earned an extra $10 an hour.
I started seeing similar behavior in my daughter as a young teenager– nose in phone, detached, oblivious to the physical world around her, and it drove me nuts.
Yes, if they were a prospective trainee, perhaps mention to them their behavior and how it will restrict their job possibilities in the future. Young people, even into their 20s are often wondering how to fit in with adults and (though they won’t admit it) are looking for guidance.
Very good point, and while I’ve had some excellent, intelligent, and mature client-focused trainees who were only in their early to mid-20s, that was not to be one of them.
I was in a discussion earlier today regarding the importance of positive role models, and, even greater, of having actual mentors: many of our youth are in dire need of these. As is said, one of the most valuable things that you can offer a person is your time.
I have a friend whose daughter just finished second yr university. COVID isolation and the death of a beloved grandparent in high school caused some mental health problems and she is a shy kid naturally. Before she went off to Uni her mother and I were talking to her about making friends. Her Mom mentioned how easy the phone made it to arrange lunch and break meetings with classmates and residence mates. She said she was planning on going to the cafeteria by herself most days because her phone meant she didn’t need company! Broke my heart, but Mom rationalizes it, saying they’re just different from us. I recently saw the kid after not seeing her for quite some and she actually physically flinched at my happy, effusive greeting from across the room. It was weird. I do go back and forth between thinking that the kids are alright, just different (typical next generation view of the kids getting worse) and thinking, that indeed, they are highly socially inept and it can’t be good for them.
Here’s my fave…I used to live in a 5-story, 15 unit apartment house. The top three floors were residential. During the teens it changed from one or two geezers per apartment to two or three twenty/thirty somethings per apartment. I lived on the fifth floor, so I got to see everybody regularly. When the elevator doors opened, the young people would spot my wife and I and immediately the hand would come up and the head would go down. Saying a cordial “good morning” or “good afternoon” appeared to be just too much social interaction for them.
I followed the predominantly yellow bricked road to Death Valley NP in 2005 and saw more cars stopped along the road than you can shake a stick at, seas of yellow-the waves breaking way up high and a feast for the eyes, if only temporary.
Sunrises and sunsets are even more fleeting moments in time, whereas you had a fortnight to witness the best superbloom in Death Valley in the past 60 years.
Flowers represent the spring, and possibilities to come~
“Flowers represent the spring, and possibilities to come~”
Are you perhaps foreshadowing a USian version of the Arab Spring?