Book Review: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr (2025)
I recently finished reading "Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart" by Nicholas Carr (2025), and there was quite a bit in it that I wanted to unpack.
I started reading it because I felt like I was seeing myself and everyone around me struggling with increasingly-fragmented views of the world. I found it to provide some important context for how I viewed technologies of connection.. and their effects on us.
It's pure selfishness on my part -- I want to engineer a more intentional life for myself that lets me be more deliberate in my thought, my actions, and my feelings. It's too easy to coast on auto-pilot, letting the world's distractions pull me from feeling to feeling (zomg, did you see what Politician X did this morning?!?!). Particularly when those strong emotional feelings serve little purpose. Yes, I can get very angry about things I can't change. But if I really can't change them... what good does the anger do? I need to focus on things I CAN change. And not waste brain cycles and sanity on the things that I cannot.
I'm going to pick a few sections of Superbloom and give you a window into why I enjoyed it so much. I could have picked lots of others.. it's well worth reading if you're interested in this sort of thing.
Medium of Technology
Carr provides a solid foundational view into how technologies of connection evolved over history.
We remember the mass media era as a time of uniformity—everyone saw the same hit movies and TV shows, listened to the same Top 40 songs, read the same wire-service news reports—but what we forget is that it was also a time of great formal variety in the tools and artifacts of communication. ... Communication devices were specialized—like hand tools or kitchen gadgets. You couldn’t record an orchestra on a typewriter, or take a photograph with a telephone, or mail a letter through a radio.
This is an interesting point. Before the introduction of smartphones and constantly-online computers, we used different devices for different purposes. We could intuitively rely on boundaries to our experience just based on the media we were using. Sitting down at a typewriter meant that you were heading into a headspace to write. Sure, the phone could ring, but that wasn't the typewriter's fault. Now, we sit down in front of a typewriter that wants to also tell you about this one attention-grabbing headline that will make you angry. Or let you alt-tab your way to writing nothing at all.
My takeaway: I need to consider investing more of my time in more deliberate, less multitasking/context-switching activities.
Each medium entailed a different style of expression, a different degree of timeliness, a different level of intimacy, and a different set of social norms and expectations. When you chose a medium, you also chose a way of speaking. The medium was part of the conversation.
I love the distinction that Carr makes here. We used to adjust our style of communication and our emotional vulnerability based on the actual device/medium we were communicating in.
Now I text my wife, then I get a text from work where someone is demanding something ASAP. I have to switch my context, switch my emotional vulnerability, and then switch them back when I switch recipients. All in realtime. Probably all while doing something else at the same time.
And I'm doing so much at once because.. um.. why is that again? I keep forgetting.
Oracles and Orphic Words
“People are not in general influenced by long books or discourses,” the American poet John Jay Chapman wrote in an 1897 essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson, “but by odd fragments of observation which they overhear, sentences or head-lines which they read while turning over a book at random or while waiting for dinner to be announced. These are the oracles and orphic words that get lodged in the mind and bend a man’s most stubborn will.”
Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires. It’s successful because it gives us what we want. As a machine for harvesting attention, its productivity is unmatched. As a machine for bending the will, it is a triumph of efficiency. In engineering what we pay attention to, it also engineers much else about us—how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world.
Chapman's quote hit me way too close to home. Carr also cites a number of research studies showing that perhaps just because I read a lot of news and try to understand the world.. that doesn't actually mean that I do a better job of staying objective. In fact, it might actually do just the opposite. It's so easy to simply ingest information in ways that confirms existing beliefs. Yes, we all say that, I know..but deep down, we all kinda believe that we're personally DIFFERENT.. that somehow we uniquely stay objective. I'm calling bullshit. Certainly on me. And probably on you, too. Sorry about that.
I think it's easy to fall into the mental trap that if we could simply EXPLAIN things well enough to someone, they'd see another perspective. Or that if they explained it properly to us, we would. But I'm increasingly skeptical. My gut feeling (and gut feelings are also a huge problem Carr addresses, referencing Daniel Kahneman's work and others) is that Chapman's quote from 1897 is dead on.
Think of any slightly-contentious discussion you've had about a topic with someone recently.. did you find them referencing isolated little headline-level statements while trying to have a nuanced discussion? Did you catch yourself doing it?
Final Thoughts
Carr's "Superbloom" doesn't provide any easy solutions to these problems. I can't judge him for that.. there likely aren't any easy solutions. I'm not even sure there ARE solutions, per se. But what it did provide.. is a new perspective on understanding the nature of the problem. And that might help me figure out how to improve my own life a bit. I can't change the world, but I can damned sure figure out where that volume knob is hiding and turn it down a bit.
inkhorn (30 Mar 2025)
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