Are these gloomy forecasts about the modern information ecosystem just reiterations of old fears? Plato lamented that writing would erode our minds; the printing press was denounced as a diabolical device. Newspapers were accused of peddling filth and debasing public morality; television was going to rot our minds.
But Carr makes a persuasive case that this time is different. With older media, the friction of the interface provided some space for reflection and hierarchizing significance. What was on the front pages or what led the news bulletins was what we heeded most. Music had to be sought out and didn’t come with an infinite stream of more. Digitization has become a “universal solvent” for all information, fed to the same device on the same platform with a convenience and ease that becomes a curse. We have evolved to seek, says Carr, but with the internet, there is no natural curb to that desire, and never any sense of satiation. 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.”
The temptation to blame every current sociopolitical failing on communications technologies should be resisted, though, and just occasionally Carr’s argument goes beyond the evidence. He accepts the contested claim that false stories spread faster than true ones and cites social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s disputed (if plausible) argument that social media can be identified as a cause and not just a correlate of depression and anxiety in young people. Carr’s claim that “open-ended, contemplative ways of thinking—the philosophical, the ruminative, the introspective—have been marginalized” warrants further interrogation. And when he quotes media scholar Ian Bogost as saying that social media offer only a “sociopathic rendition of human sociality,” one has to ask: Is that really all it does? Do we not initiate and cultivate friendships this way? Didn’t communication technologies help relieve the isolation of pandemic lockdown? Additionally, Superbloom is heavily predicated on the American experience. For many people globally, hyperreality offers no escape from hardship, drudgery, peril, and war.
All the same, the case Carr makes is compelling. Is there an antidote? He does not believe we can simply reshape and constrain the technologies. It is too late for that—it would be like putting a path across a park that no one wants to follow. 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.