5 ms·

Review: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

99 points by pseudolus 2y ago

bell-cot 2y ago
A point not made about that #superbloom: When many people feel anxiety and insecurity about the future, then web-scale social media catalyzes a nasty, desperate scramble - to be at least a relevant-sized fish, in a planet-sized pond.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  There isn't much beauty left in lots of people's day to day lives that isn't gate kept behind a dollar requirement. I can't blame people for wanting beauty in their lives.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    I'm a regular volunteer in natural areas, in SE Michigan. Unless it's right next to a big university campus, and their friends are there, it's amazing and sad how few people show any interest in adding some free, open-to-the-public natural beauty to their lives. From the article's description (of #superbloom), I'd say that nobody actually wanted beauty in their lives. But everybody wanted to visit a trending-now location ASAP.
    - steve_adams_86 2y ago
      I do this as well where I live. We have some beautiful spots right in the city. When I go and help do ecological restoration, very few people are around. Some paths go by these areas, but no one stops. They're going somewhere. I don't blame them; my days are packed too. My local subreddit is FULL of people wondering where these places are. They hate living in the city because it's ugly or they miss rural life. Some even ask how to help. No new volunteers show up, though. No uptick in people visiting these areas. We've got this one beautiful ravine that needs so much work done, and we can't really get funding or a go-ahead at all until it's clear we'll have the resources. This means volunteers who have stuck around for a few jobs and expressed an intent to return. We've got around 10 people, but would need more like 20. I'm not sure it's possible. We put up signs, put out social media, get people in the group to reach into their network. No luck. If people won't visit the beautiful places, what are the chances they'll help restore the parts that need our help? It's rough. Oh well, just have to keep at it. It makes a real difference.
      - bell-cot 2y ago
        > My local subreddit is FULL of people wondering [...] Some even ask how to help. No new volunteers show up, though. Oh, yes. I'm in a local volunteer group here. We have just under 1,800 "members" on Meetup - supposedly interested in regularly doing Good Deeds with us. But there are less than 18 members who ever show up and do things. Evidently the other ~1,782 had Good Intentions...that mysteriously vanished when they clicked "Join". Or only care about polishing their online images. Or something. A great many things were different back in the early '90's. One of which was that branding yourself as a volunteer do-gooder required you to actually show up and do some work. Somehow, our group had far more actual workers back then.
        steve_adams_86 2y ago
        Oh, nice. You’ve been at it for a while now. I’d love to have some of the insights you have. Though, I guess they don’t help you grow the group much if you’re only 18. Yet, I have no idea how we’d get to 18. The most successful group around here has about that many volunteers (I’m one of them), but they’re focused on a huge range of land trusts outside of the city. Given the city is small, it still seems insane that so few people want to contribute. My kids have no interest. Friends have no interest. But it’s literally the only way things get better… For example. A creek nearby smells awful and is full of drug paraphernalia and garbage. The city has expressed with clarity that they aren’t touching it. The only solution is people like you and I taking a Saturday to clean it. Yet we’re not actually allowed to unless the city approves it (more specifically the Parks branch), which requires meeting their criteria such as number of people involved, short enough time frames, available expertise, etc. Sometimes I think I might just go guerilla and pull a bunch of crap out on my own, take it to the dump on my own, whatever. Okay, I got that out of my system. If you have any advice on making groups like this more effective, I’m all ears. Bringing coffee and muffins to the work events certainly helps.
        sriacha 2y ago
        Really seems like the best route is to go guerilla, no?
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      You sure it's not the equivalent of the local 'what to do this weekend' section of the newspaper? I know people from the bay area would see my posts get all excited then sad when they learned where I live now and too far away, and none of them were trending or made to look cool by boring old me.
    - asdff 2y ago
      It really depends on the natural area in question. Not everyone is really motivated to build up the skills required to do things like navigate via map and compass to actually tackle natural terrain safely. People die every year in the Angeles National Forest and its almost always because they didn't prepare for the conditions and didn't let anyone know that they were hiking that weekend and therefore where to aid search and rescue when the missing persons report is filed. However I think smaller urban/suburban trails have probably never been more popular. You know the sort of 1-3 mile loop in the hills or woods trails with a convenient parking lot. Those are filled with trail runners, dog walkers, people pushing strollers, etc.
ryukafalz 2y ago
Good article. I think I need to add this book to my reading list now. I'm not sure I fully agree with the conclusion, though, that we can't change the tech and can only change ourselves. I think there's a lot of room to explore variations on tech that are healthier for us and for society. Adding friction as mentioned in the article is one example, but I think there's more we can come up with if we treat our attentional and societal health as a primary goal. This probably does, to some extent, involve changing ourselves too. Frictionlessness and seamlessness are comfortable, and rejecting those will probably always involve some conscious effort. But we don't have to do it all alone, as individuals! Those of us with the skills to do so can try to build healthier tools so that people have alternatives when they go looking.
argomo 2y ago
Reminds me of an old Bruce Sterling quote: "politics pulls us together, technology tears us apart". That always struck me as being directly opposite of our intuitions as technologists. As a species, we need a wider exploration of how to structure online spaces in a way that builds and sustains social capital instead of usurping it. That's difficult to do with out resorting to censorship and ideological totalitarianism. And it's probably not compatible with the ad-funded addiction-driven business model of most modern platforms. One historical example of note here is Wikipedia. It was a complete failure as a for-profit product, but it skyrocketed in significance when it opened up and adopted the relatively new social interaction model of the wiki.
- asdff 2y ago
  By far the biggest issue with the internet is the power it represents. And there is no avoiding that when it is by definition a way into the hearts and minds for every person connected to it on earth. It will always be ripe for advertising, for propaganda, for misinformation, because the incentives are just too damned great to not let it be. It was one thing when it was 25 years ago and internet users represented a small fraction of the worlds population compared to today. A fraction that might have gone unnoticed from a certain degree of mass advertising and propagandizing that always seeks to put itself where it can get in front of the most eyeballs, but that is no longer the case so long as so many people use the internet. I'm not sure what the solution is beyond niche little forums (tribes) that somehow tip toe the line of having the website be supported at all and also not growing too big to be of much interest for advertising and other forms of propaganda. And even then, how do you discover these little tribes? All the discovery mechanisms for internet content today are centralized or gated away from the upstart individual. Search engines, social media, even advertising in the meatspace takes serious capital. People don't have their own sites with webrings linking to other sites anymore. They have social media profiles and even then most people just lurk after highschool and college vs use it to share actual content or ideas. Search engines favor directing you to mass media and social media results for queries rather than small sites and forums. I feel like what is left of these niche interest and niche forums are doomed to die out in a few generations, since its so hard to actually come up into this world and find these refuges on the web unless you knew about them from years ago when the internet was smaller and signal to noise ratios were much higher. Kids today aren't even interested in using the web, let alone a desktop OS. At least there are still computer science college programs but who knows how long that will be the case everywhere in the chatGPT/cut everything era we find ourselves in.
burningion 2y ago
I think of "social" media as a fundamentally isolating experience. On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own, personalized feed. As their feed becomes more personalized, it gets more and more isolated from a common, shared cultural context. According to Wilbur Schramm's theories of communication, human to human messages must occur over a shared cultural context, and social media shrinks that shared cultural context. LLMs as a platform could shrink this shared cultural context even more, unless we become more deliberate about fighting back against this "shared experience" shrinking: https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/social-media-is-the-final-film/ https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/social-media-is-the-f...
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  It's a bummer that there's a whole generation that doesn't know how much fun it was for everyone to watch and discuss the same episode of the same show at the same time week to week. And yeah, now imagine everyone watching their own personalized media. Under the surface it's so empty.
  - goromo 2y ago
    [dead]
  - pesus 2y ago
    Are there even any more shared cultural moments/experiences like that anymore? The closest thing I can think of is maybe large sporting events, but even then, they seem much less impactful than before.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      I’d say movies.
    - airstrike 2y ago
      Sports are also totally about betting in the 21st century, at least in the US
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
was that "medium is the message" (or massage) ? by Marshall McLuhan, as noted here: https://zandercutt.com/2018/07/16/the-cosmetic-class/ https://zandercutt.com/2018/07/16/the-cosmetic-class/
devindotcom 2y ago
I look forward to reading this. But anyone who thinks it's new should go back and read the first part of The Anatomy of Melancholy; there, a fictionalized Democritus, accused of insanity, turns the accusation back on the world at large, citing a surprisingly large and still relevant list of issues: information overload, self-serving politicians, charlatans, rubes, general bullshit. The phenomenon of meteoria goes back that far and further. I'm actually curious whether Carr cites Burton!
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
It's not connection but the software and motivations of the companies behind it along with the structure of our society that is the problem. I make music for fun. Half of my online interaction is people looking to make a buck. Connecting in a music space wasn't like that 20 years ago. The conversations I had online 20 years ago are now still happening just in private discords. Connecting in public spaces driven by algo's based purely to serve profit motives and people whose motives aren't connection but clout/politics/selling something doesn't define some universal tech/connection rule. I'm on a locals hiking mail list. We share things like when the kokanee are running. That doesn't get blasted to 20,000 people with zero interest but who will go because they saw it in the equivalent of the local 'what to do this weekend' section of the newspaper. Society has arranged itself so that there is very little to do without spending money. And so those few things of beauty, free, and semi easy to get to get 'devoured' by a very hungry populace. But on the hiking/biking app I have no fear sharing trails because the 'social media' people on the app are only going to trails they can get to within 2 minutes of the highway. People that are going on a 2 hour mountain hike that requires an hour of fire road driving self select out. Plus if we don't get enough people going the trails get overgrown so I need exposure. I am only sharing because I want something out of it (enough traffic to keep the trail accessible) and I don't share my favorite trails outside of the mail list. Social media companies have made sure their experience is purely transactional at this point, not 'connective', but things like selective highly connecting discords/email lists exist and very much connect people in healthy ways.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  It's like we're re-learning something humans have intuitively understood since humans have existed: a cohesive community needs to be human-scaled and has standards it enforces. Online "communities" often fail at both. They allow any rando to show up (or even encourage them to do so via algorithms), and there are no barriers to entry or consequences for leaving.
hedayet 2y ago
Like home-cooked meals, real-life connections are hard to build and nurture. On the other hand, web connections are cheap and fast. It takes less than a minute to go from opening an Instagram account to "connecting" (following) with someone and see their semi-nude photos
quercusa 2y ago
Once again, Douglas Adams was ahead of his time: Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
GMoromisato 2y ago
Do we need to have a single, common cultural experience? Mass media, and the resulting mass culture, are a recent phenomenon, and certainly one that has been heavily criticized. My sense is that we're in the middle of a phase-transition, and the unhappiness and dislocation that people feel is because the old world (shared cultural context) is dying, but the new world hasn't yet been born. Our generation will have the hardest time because we have a foot in both worlds.
- lantry 2y ago
  What existed before mass-media was a shared experience with unmediated interactions. With mass media, the interactions are mediated but there is still a shared experience. With social media, there is neither unmediated interaction nor shared experience. So I think you are correct that we are transitioning to a new "phase", but I disagree with the implication that things will be better once the transition is over. They could be worse!
  - GMoromisato 2y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "a shared experience with unmediated interactions." Without mass media, how did people share an experience? Do you mean sharing with your friends/family/church? If so, isn't that option still available post-transition? Or is your point that social media destroys personal interactions, so the next generation is left with nothing (kind of like porn destroying healthy sex lives)? If so, then I agree the future might be worse. But it's also possible that social interactions are changing, and it is only because they are different for us that we think of it as "worse". Moreover, society hasn't yet had a chance to adapt to the new technology, so we don't know exactly what social interactions will be like in the future. It could be that kids tomorrow will learn to adapt to social media just as our generation learned to adapt to TV.
    - computerthings 2y ago
      How did people adapt to TV, and how was it prior to that adaption?
brokebit 2y ago
The author, Nicholas Carr, is doing a free Zoom event with Christine Rosen from the American Enterprise Institute on Feb 10th. They are giving out free copies of the book to those that attend. - https://www.familyactionnetwork.net/events/superbloom-how-technologies-of-connection-tear-us-apart/ https://www.familyactionnetwork.net/events/superbloom-how-te...
southernplaces7 2y ago
I call partial nonsense. Faddish tech bashing and harping on de jure boogeymen like "misinformation", which overeaches beyond valid criticisms to apply social connection technologies as a cause for the harm between people that has perhaps always been the case in many contexts. Cherry picking can make any argument seem valid and especially if you rule out other considerations in favor of a specific narrative agenda. We still always have the option today of connecting with real people in the real world, as much as or more so than we have at any time in our history, while also being able to use social media and other related technologies to connect with distant family or friends in ways that are completely unique to a modern context. This duality is a fundamental good, because it allows for new options from more contexts than ever before. Yes, there are difficulties with social media and some people misuse these technologies in ways that emotionally harm them, but people who misdirect their efforts to socialize with others and balance their emotional lives have always existed, albeit with fewer options than today for staying in touch. One can choose who to reach out to, and the presence of social media doesn't make it any less important or more difficult to simply choose people who are capable of caring. Those who don't care for contact are no more the case no than they were before digital connectivity was a thing in human society. As for social media and misinformation? Give me a break. Legacy media has a vast, long, torrid and dirty history of spreading propaganda on an industrial scale, with few avenues for finding out differently, and they hate losing control of that, so now we get contrived fears about misinformation from the same industry that promoted yellow journalism and absurdly grotesque beliefs upon the public for many, many decades. Politicians and other social actors have taken up this same banner of fear mongering for their own pet reasons and interests, and at least some segments of the wider public have swallowed these fears without giving them proper analytical context. Shameful. At least now, the very fact that nearly anyone can post nearly anything allows for those who have better information, closer sources and more reasoned insights to spread their points with no controlling middlemen, even if they need to swim among tides of charlatans and conspiracy nuts. That however is a price to be paid for the democratization of access to instantly posting anything for worldwide access.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  [flagged]
groby_b 2y ago
I'm just going to say that it's Nicholas "Filter Bubbles Make Us Stupid, We Should Talk To Opposing Viewpoints All Day" Carr. If you believe social media is tearing us apart, a significant chunk of responsibility lies on his shoulders. (We knew shared cultural context matters, but by Jove, "Filter Bubbles" was a term that could be milked for book deals, so milk he did)
- jjulius 2y ago
  Hello, untruths! >The term filter bubble was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser circa 2010. In Pariser's influential book under the same name, The Filter Bubble (2011), it was predicted that individualized personalization by algorithmic filtering would lead to intellectual isolation and social fragmentation.[1] Ctrl+F for "carr" on the "filter bubble" wiki reveals two instances of "carrots". Similarly, Ctrl+F for "bubble" on Carr's Wiki returns 0 results. The book Carr is most famous for was based on an article that he wrote two years prior to Pariser coining the term, and was published the same year the term was coined. His following two books also don't seem to be riding on some kind of "filter bubble" coattail (I mean, unless you've found a way to connect his next book, a 2014 release about automation, to filter bubbles!). It was Pariser who published "The Filter Bubble" a year later. Essentially, what you've done is written this piece off entirely based on a false assumption, and suggested that others do the same. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
throw7 2y ago
Kind of surprised McLuhan (medium is the message) wasn't referenced in the story. It's helpful to think of these technological innovations as being the message and what that means when you interact with them. The piece says Carr believes reality can’t compete with "the internet’s steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards". I disagree. I do think one remedy is reality. I remember turning the corner into St Peter's Basilica and facing the Pietà. Now, I'm not one for being moved by statues, but tears immediately started streaming down my face. I'll never forget this moment. It's seared into my brain. I'm not saying you have to go to Rome. I'm not saying go travel the world. I'm saying it might be as simple as not pulling out your cell phone (i.e. "the medium") during the concert you're going to tonight.
- disqard 2y ago
  Thank you for mentioning McLuhan, and for sharing that personal anecdote. The process of engaging with the Real World, is a constant choice. With the busy lives we lead, it is much easier to operate in "default mode", as David Foster Wallace put it (in his "what is water?" commencement speech at Kenyon College).

99 points by pseudolus 2y ago

A point not made about that #superbloom: When many people feel anxiety and insecurity about the future, then web-scale social media catalyzes a nasty, desperate scramble - to be at least a relevant-sized fish, in a planet-sized pond.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
There isn't much beauty left in lots of people's day to day lives that isn't gate kept behind a dollar requirement. I can't blame people for wanting beauty in their lives.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  I'm a regular volunteer in natural areas, in SE Michigan. Unless it's right next to a big university campus, and their friends are there, it's amazing and sad how few people show any interest in adding some free, open-to-the-public natural beauty to their lives. From the article's description (of #superbloom), I'd say that nobody actually wanted beauty in their lives. But everybody wanted to visit a trending-now location ASAP.
  - steve_adams_86 2y ago
    I do this as well where I live. We have some beautiful spots right in the city. When I go and help do ecological restoration, very few people are around. Some paths go by these areas, but no one stops. They're going somewhere. I don't blame them; my days are packed too. My local subreddit is FULL of people wondering where these places are. They hate living in the city because it's ugly or they miss rural life. Some even ask how to help. No new volunteers show up, though. No uptick in people visiting these areas. We've got this one beautiful ravine that needs so much work done, and we can't really get funding or a go-ahead at all until it's clear we'll have the resources. This means volunteers who have stuck around for a few jobs and expressed an intent to return. We've got around 10 people, but would need more like 20. I'm not sure it's possible. We put up signs, put out social media, get people in the group to reach into their network. No luck. If people won't visit the beautiful places, what are the chances they'll help restore the parts that need our help? It's rough. Oh well, just have to keep at it. It makes a real difference.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      > My local subreddit is FULL of people wondering [...] Some even ask how to help. No new volunteers show up, though. Oh, yes. I'm in a local volunteer group here. We have just under 1,800 "members" on Meetup - supposedly interested in regularly doing Good Deeds with us. But there are less than 18 members who ever show up and do things. Evidently the other ~1,782 had Good Intentions...that mysteriously vanished when they clicked "Join". Or only care about polishing their online images. Or something. A great many things were different back in the early '90's. One of which was that branding yourself as a volunteer do-gooder required you to actually show up and do some work. Somehow, our group had far more actual workers back then.
      - steve_adams_86 2y ago
        Oh, nice. You’ve been at it for a while now. I’d love to have some of the insights you have. Though, I guess they don’t help you grow the group much if you’re only 18. Yet, I have no idea how we’d get to 18. The most successful group around here has about that many volunteers (I’m one of them), but they’re focused on a huge range of land trusts outside of the city. Given the city is small, it still seems insane that so few people want to contribute. My kids have no interest. Friends have no interest. But it’s literally the only way things get better… For example. A creek nearby smells awful and is full of drug paraphernalia and garbage. The city has expressed with clarity that they aren’t touching it. The only solution is people like you and I taking a Saturday to clean it. Yet we’re not actually allowed to unless the city approves it (more specifically the Parks branch), which requires meeting their criteria such as number of people involved, short enough time frames, available expertise, etc. Sometimes I think I might just go guerilla and pull a bunch of crap out on my own, take it to the dump on my own, whatever. Okay, I got that out of my system. If you have any advice on making groups like this more effective, I’m all ears. Bringing coffee and muffins to the work events certainly helps.
        sriacha 2y ago
        Really seems like the best route is to go guerilla, no?
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    You sure it's not the equivalent of the local 'what to do this weekend' section of the newspaper? I know people from the bay area would see my posts get all excited then sad when they learned where I live now and too far away, and none of them were trending or made to look cool by boring old me.
  - asdff 2y ago
    It really depends on the natural area in question. Not everyone is really motivated to build up the skills required to do things like navigate via map and compass to actually tackle natural terrain safely. People die every year in the Angeles National Forest and its almost always because they didn't prepare for the conditions and didn't let anyone know that they were hiking that weekend and therefore where to aid search and rescue when the missing persons report is filed. However I think smaller urban/suburban trails have probably never been more popular. You know the sort of 1-3 mile loop in the hills or woods trails with a convenient parking lot. Those are filled with trail runners, dog walkers, people pushing strollers, etc.

ryukafalz 2y ago

Good article. I think I need to add this book to my reading list now. I'm not sure I fully agree with the conclusion, though, that we can't change the tech and can only change ourselves. I think there's a lot of room to explore variations on tech that are healthier for us and for society. Adding friction as mentioned in the article is one example, but I think there's more we can come up with if we treat our attentional and societal health as a primary goal. This probably does, to some extent, involve changing ourselves too. Frictionlessness and seamlessness are comfortable, and rejecting those will probably always involve some conscious effort. But we don't have to do it all alone, as individuals! Those of us with the skills to do so can try to build healthier tools so that people have alternatives when they go looking.

argomo 2y ago

Reminds me of an old Bruce Sterling quote: "politics pulls us together, technology tears us apart". That always struck me as being directly opposite of our intuitions as technologists. As a species, we need a wider exploration of how to structure online spaces in a way that builds and sustains social capital instead of usurping it. That's difficult to do with out resorting to censorship and ideological totalitarianism. And it's probably not compatible with the ad-funded addiction-driven business model of most modern platforms. One historical example of note here is Wikipedia. It was a complete failure as a for-profit product, but it skyrocketed in significance when it opened up and adopted the relatively new social interaction model of the wiki.

asdff 2y ago
By far the biggest issue with the internet is the power it represents. And there is no avoiding that when it is by definition a way into the hearts and minds for every person connected to it on earth. It will always be ripe for advertising, for propaganda, for misinformation, because the incentives are just too damned great to not let it be. It was one thing when it was 25 years ago and internet users represented a small fraction of the worlds population compared to today. A fraction that might have gone unnoticed from a certain degree of mass advertising and propagandizing that always seeks to put itself where it can get in front of the most eyeballs, but that is no longer the case so long as so many people use the internet. I'm not sure what the solution is beyond niche little forums (tribes) that somehow tip toe the line of having the website be supported at all and also not growing too big to be of much interest for advertising and other forms of propaganda. And even then, how do you discover these little tribes? All the discovery mechanisms for internet content today are centralized or gated away from the upstart individual. Search engines, social media, even advertising in the meatspace takes serious capital. People don't have their own sites with webrings linking to other sites anymore. They have social media profiles and even then most people just lurk after highschool and college vs use it to share actual content or ideas. Search engines favor directing you to mass media and social media results for queries rather than small sites and forums. I feel like what is left of these niche interest and niche forums are doomed to die out in a few generations, since its so hard to actually come up into this world and find these refuges on the web unless you knew about them from years ago when the internet was smaller and signal to noise ratios were much higher. Kids today aren't even interested in using the web, let alone a desktop OS. At least there are still computer science college programs but who knows how long that will be the case everywhere in the chatGPT/cut everything era we find ourselves in.

burningion 2y ago

I think of "social" media as a fundamentally isolating experience. On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own, personalized feed. As their feed becomes more personalized, it gets more and more isolated from a common, shared cultural context. According to Wilbur Schramm's theories of communication, human to human messages must occur over a shared cultural context, and social media shrinks that shared cultural context. LLMs as a platform could shrink this shared cultural context even more, unless we become more deliberate about fighting back against this "shared experience" shrinking: https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/social-media-is-the-final-film/ https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/social-media-is-the-f...

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
It's a bummer that there's a whole generation that doesn't know how much fun it was for everyone to watch and discuss the same episode of the same show at the same time week to week. And yeah, now imagine everyone watching their own personalized media. Under the surface it's so empty.
- goromo 2y ago
  [dead]
- pesus 2y ago
  Are there even any more shared cultural moments/experiences like that anymore? The closest thing I can think of is maybe large sporting events, but even then, they seem much less impactful than before.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    I’d say movies.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    Sports are also totally about betting in the 21st century, at least in the US

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

was that "medium is the message" (or massage) ? by Marshall McLuhan, as noted here: https://zandercutt.com/2018/07/16/the-cosmetic-class/ https://zandercutt.com/2018/07/16/the-cosmetic-class/

devindotcom 2y ago

I look forward to reading this. But anyone who thinks it's new should go back and read the first part of The Anatomy of Melancholy; there, a fictionalized Democritus, accused of insanity, turns the accusation back on the world at large, citing a surprisingly large and still relevant list of issues: information overload, self-serving politicians, charlatans, rubes, general bullshit. The phenomenon of meteoria goes back that far and further. I'm actually curious whether Carr cites Burton!

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

It's not connection but the software and motivations of the companies behind it along with the structure of our society that is the problem. I make music for fun. Half of my online interaction is people looking to make a buck. Connecting in a music space wasn't like that 20 years ago. The conversations I had online 20 years ago are now still happening just in private discords. Connecting in public spaces driven by algo's based purely to serve profit motives and people whose motives aren't connection but clout/politics/selling something doesn't define some universal tech/connection rule. I'm on a locals hiking mail list. We share things like when the kokanee are running. That doesn't get blasted to 20,000 people with zero interest but who will go because they saw it in the equivalent of the local 'what to do this weekend' section of the newspaper. Society has arranged itself so that there is very little to do without spending money. And so those few things of beauty, free, and semi easy to get to get 'devoured' by a very hungry populace. But on the hiking/biking app I have no fear sharing trails because the 'social media' people on the app are only going to trails they can get to within 2 minutes of the highway. People that are going on a 2 hour mountain hike that requires an hour of fire road driving self select out. Plus if we don't get enough people going the trails get overgrown so I need exposure. I am only sharing because I want something out of it (enough traffic to keep the trail accessible) and I don't share my favorite trails outside of the mail list. Social media companies have made sure their experience is purely transactional at this point, not 'connective', but things like selective highly connecting discords/email lists exist and very much connect people in healthy ways.

the_snooze 2y ago
It's like we're re-learning something humans have intuitively understood since humans have existed: a cohesive community needs to be human-scaled and has standards it enforces. Online "communities" often fail at both. They allow any rando to show up (or even encourage them to do so via algorithms), and there are no barriers to entry or consequences for leaving.

hedayet 2y ago

Like home-cooked meals, real-life connections are hard to build and nurture. On the other hand, web connections are cheap and fast. It takes less than a minute to go from opening an Instagram account to "connecting" (following) with someone and see their semi-nude photos

quercusa 2y ago

Once again, Douglas Adams was ahead of his time: Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

GMoromisato 2y ago

Do we need to have a single, common cultural experience? Mass media, and the resulting mass culture, are a recent phenomenon, and certainly one that has been heavily criticized. My sense is that we're in the middle of a phase-transition, and the unhappiness and dislocation that people feel is because the old world (shared cultural context) is dying, but the new world hasn't yet been born. Our generation will have the hardest time because we have a foot in both worlds.

lantry 2y ago
What existed before mass-media was a shared experience with unmediated interactions. With mass media, the interactions are mediated but there is still a shared experience. With social media, there is neither unmediated interaction nor shared experience. So I think you are correct that we are transitioning to a new "phase", but I disagree with the implication that things will be better once the transition is over. They could be worse!
- GMoromisato 2y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "a shared experience with unmediated interactions." Without mass media, how did people share an experience? Do you mean sharing with your friends/family/church? If so, isn't that option still available post-transition? Or is your point that social media destroys personal interactions, so the next generation is left with nothing (kind of like porn destroying healthy sex lives)? If so, then I agree the future might be worse. But it's also possible that social interactions are changing, and it is only because they are different for us that we think of it as "worse". Moreover, society hasn't yet had a chance to adapt to the new technology, so we don't know exactly what social interactions will be like in the future. It could be that kids tomorrow will learn to adapt to social media just as our generation learned to adapt to TV.
  - computerthings 2y ago
    How did people adapt to TV, and how was it prior to that adaption?

brokebit 2y ago

The author, Nicholas Carr, is doing a free Zoom event with Christine Rosen from the American Enterprise Institute on Feb 10th. They are giving out free copies of the book to those that attend. - https://www.familyactionnetwork.net/events/superbloom-how-technologies-of-connection-tear-us-apart/ https://www.familyactionnetwork.net/events/superbloom-how-te...

southernplaces7 2y ago

I call partial nonsense. Faddish tech bashing and harping on de jure boogeymen like "misinformation", which overeaches beyond valid criticisms to apply social connection technologies as a cause for the harm between people that has perhaps always been the case in many contexts. Cherry picking can make any argument seem valid and especially if you rule out other considerations in favor of a specific narrative agenda. We still always have the option today of connecting with real people in the real world, as much as or more so than we have at any time in our history, while also being able to use social media and other related technologies to connect with distant family or friends in ways that are completely unique to a modern context. This duality is a fundamental good, because it allows for new options from more contexts than ever before. Yes, there are difficulties with social media and some people misuse these technologies in ways that emotionally harm them, but people who misdirect their efforts to socialize with others and balance their emotional lives have always existed, albeit with fewer options than today for staying in touch. One can choose who to reach out to, and the presence of social media doesn't make it any less important or more difficult to simply choose people who are capable of caring. Those who don't care for contact are no more the case no than they were before digital connectivity was a thing in human society. As for social media and misinformation? Give me a break. Legacy media has a vast, long, torrid and dirty history of spreading propaganda on an industrial scale, with few avenues for finding out differently, and they hate losing control of that, so now we get contrived fears about misinformation from the same industry that promoted yellow journalism and absurdly grotesque beliefs upon the public for many, many decades. Politicians and other social actors have taken up this same banner of fear mongering for their own pet reasons and interests, and at least some segments of the wider public have swallowed these fears without giving them proper analytical context. Shameful. At least now, the very fact that nearly anyone can post nearly anything allows for those who have better information, closer sources and more reasoned insights to spread their points with no controlling middlemen, even if they need to swim among tides of charlatans and conspiracy nuts. That however is a price to be paid for the democratization of access to instantly posting anything for worldwide access.

southernplaces7 2y ago
[flagged]

groby_b 2y ago

I'm just going to say that it's Nicholas "Filter Bubbles Make Us Stupid, We Should Talk To Opposing Viewpoints All Day" Carr. If you believe social media is tearing us apart, a significant chunk of responsibility lies on his shoulders. (We knew shared cultural context matters, but by Jove, "Filter Bubbles" was a term that could be milked for book deals, so milk he did)

jjulius 2y ago
Hello, untruths! >The term filter bubble was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser circa 2010. In Pariser's influential book under the same name, The Filter Bubble (2011), it was predicted that individualized personalization by algorithmic filtering would lead to intellectual isolation and social fragmentation.[1] Ctrl+F for "carr" on the "filter bubble" wiki reveals two instances of "carrots". Similarly, Ctrl+F for "bubble" on Carr's Wiki returns 0 results. The book Carr is most famous for was based on an article that he wrote two years prior to Pariser coining the term, and was published the same year the term was coined. His following two books also don't seem to be riding on some kind of "filter bubble" coattail (I mean, unless you've found a way to connect his next book, a 2014 release about automation, to filter bubbles!). It was Pariser who published "The Filter Bubble" a year later. Essentially, what you've done is written this piece off entirely based on a false assumption, and suggested that others do the same. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

throw7 2y ago

Kind of surprised McLuhan (medium is the message) wasn't referenced in the story. It's helpful to think of these technological innovations as being the message and what that means when you interact with them. The piece says Carr believes reality can’t compete with "the internet’s steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards". I disagree. I do think one remedy is reality. I remember turning the corner into St Peter's Basilica and facing the Pietà. Now, I'm not one for being moved by statues, but tears immediately started streaming down my face. I'll never forget this moment. It's seared into my brain. I'm not saying you have to go to Rome. I'm not saying go travel the world. I'm saying it might be as simple as not pulling out your cell phone (i.e. "the medium") during the concert you're going to tonight.

disqard 2y ago
Thank you for mentioning McLuhan, and for sharing that personal anecdote. The process of engaging with the Real World, is a constant choice. With the busy lives we lead, it is much easier to operate in "default mode", as David Foster Wallace put it (in his "what is water?" commencement speech at Kenyon College).