How Technologies Divide Us: A Q&A with Nicholas Carr

This piece is the first in a series in collaboration with New America.

In mid-2011, with the Arab world erupting in a series of revolutions and civil wars, President Barack Obama delivered a speech extolling the emancipatory potential of the Internet and social networks. In retrospect, that moment could be said to mark peak Internet optimism. A year earlier, the writer Nicholas Carr published a book in which he told a very different story. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, Carr warned that the Internet was, in fact, having far more deleterious consequences on both individuals and societies. The book would go on to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and would establish Carr as one of our leading commentators on the Internet and its (often corrosive) social, political, and cultural consequences.

Much has happened since 2011, and Carr is now out with a new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, in which he revisits and extends some of the ideas from that book. Superbloom is both a historical exploration of the impact of electronic media technologies (from the telegraph on) and a learned, often passionate exploration of why the Internet’s promise and idealism have so often fallen short. Today, social media and the broader digital ecology are widely recognized as exacerbating many of our social ills—from polarization to misinformation to authoritarianism and worsening teenage mental health.

Carr lives and writes in Williamstown, MA, where he also sometimes teaches at Williams College. I asked him to help me understand what went wrong—and if he sees a way out.

Your new book explores some of the broader forces and patterns underlying social media's corrosive effects. Can you help us understand how today’s social media landscape fits within a broader historical trajectory?

Society is formed through acts of communication. In fact, you could say, as the American philosopher John Dewey did a hundred years ago, that society is communication. So whenever a new communication system is invented and becomes broadly used, it doesn’t simply speed up the transmission of messages and other information; it changes social relations in deep ways. It changes how people inform themselves, how they express themselves, how they form relationships and associations with others, how they see the world and their place in it. We saw that with the telegraph and telephone in the nineteenth century, with radio and TV broadcasting in the twentieth century, and we’re certainly seeing it again with the internet and social media in our own century. So my goal with Superbloom is to try to expose those deep changes and explain what’s causing them, to show that Facebook and X and TikTok have antecedents. They didn’t come out of nowhere.

Are there things about today that are different—i.e., that make the lessons or practices we’ve learned from history less useful?

At the end of the last century, two momentous things happened simultaneously in the United States: information of all sorts was digitized and routed into homes and offices through a universal computer network, and regulatory controls over the media and communications industries were tossed aside. That led to what I call “content collapse” – all forms of information and human expression, which had once been segregated in different networks, systems, and artifacts, were suddenly supplied through a single network designed to maximize the speed and volume of information flow.

Conversations and correspondence, news reports, entertainment broadcasts, political debates, rumors, and propaganda, advertisements: they’ve all blurred together in a single stream, and they’re all in competition for a fleeting grip on our scattered attention. That’s a radical break from anything we’ve seen in the past. We welcomed the new system with great enthusiasm, but the bargain we struck with Silicon Valley was a Faustian one. What we’re now seeing, I argue, is that the resulting flood of information has overwhelmed the sense-making and emotion-regulating capacities of the human nervous system. We’ve erected at the very center of society a hyperkinetic communication system that is in profound conflict with human nature, human psychology, and human values.

How does AI fit into all of this—does it make some of the problems you identified worse, or does it potentially offer solutions?

No one knows how AI is going to play out. I think we’re probably in a similar situation with AI today as we were with the internet in the late 1990s. Then, too, there was huge excitement and enthusiasm and enormous financial speculation. Then, it all fell apart with the dot-com bust at the turn of the century. The stories we’d been telling ourselves about the internet weren’t the right stories. It wasn’t until a few years later, with the arrival of the so-called “social web,” that we began to see the true revolutionary power of the net. So, I don’t know whether the stories that we’re telling ourselves about AI now are the right stories. The technology’s ultimate effects may be very different from what we suspect.

But as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about media, I do think one of the most consequential and disruptive aspects of generative AI is its ability to mechanically create meaningful content – text, pictures, music, videos. We always assumed that as powerful as media systems are, the creation of content would remain the purview of human beings. Human expression could not be automated. That assumption is dead. Media companies already wield enormous power in society. Now that they can use machines to generate unlimited amounts of content in real-time and customized to individual desires, their power seems certain to expand still further. I don’t think we’re ready for that.

Tell us about the notion of “digital crowding,” which you write about in the book.

That’s a term coined by a British psychology professor named Adam Joinson. I think it helps explain why social media’s effects have been so different from what we originally anticipated — why, in connecting everyone together, social media has bred misunderstanding rather than understanding, strife rather than harmony. Psychological studies have long shown that when people feel physically crowded, they experience a kind of social claustrophobia, with symptoms of stress, fear, alienation, and, at worst, aggression. What Joinson argues is that those same antisocial reactions can be triggered in the online world, where everyone is pressing their virtual flesh on everyone else all the time — talking about themselves, sharing photos, proclaiming their opinions, arguing, and angling for attention. There may not be any bodies online, but there are a whole lot of presences.

With social media, Joinson concludes, “it is inevitable that we will end up knowing more about people, and also more likely that we end up disliking them because of it.” That seems, unfortunately, to be the case. We evolved to be social creatures, but we didn’t evolve to be neighbors with everyone else in the world.

You’ve been warning about the dangers of technology longer than many–at least since 2010 when The Shallows was published. Now, you’re thinking about this in a broader historical context. You’re perhaps uniquely positioned to step back and look at the bigger picture. So, I want to end by asking you about the balance of optimism and pessimism you feel when you consider the role of technology and especially social media in our world today. Are we just in some kind of natural cycle from which we might eventually emerge–or do you think this time is actually worse?

Well, there was actually a lot of history in The Shallows. I looked, for instance, at how the arrival of maps, mechanical clocks, and books changed people’s ways of perceiving and thinking about the world. Those examples, and there are many others from the history of technology, foreshadow the way the net has altered perception and cognition. I’ve long believed that what’s lacking in our current discussions about technology is a rich historical perspective. So in examining technology’s current effects, I always begin by looking backward.

As I was writing Superbloom, I came to see that there’s a thematic thread that ties it together with my two previous books, The Shallows and The Glass Cage. The three works examine how we came to apply industrial goals and measurements — efficiency, productivity, speed, profit — to the most subtle and distinctively human of our pursuits. The Shallows looks at the application of industrial ideals and measurements to thinking; The Glass Cage, to doing; and Superbloom, to communicating. The way computer systems have abetted the encroachment of the industrial ethos into the most intimate facets of human life strikes me as one of the most important stories of our time. And it’s a dark story. Some things should not be industrialized.

I don’t think there’s any natural cycle to technology. In the end, what happens comes down to the choices we make — or allow others to make on our behalf. Recently, at least, those choices have often been the wrong ones.