Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart - Hardcover

by Nicholas Carr (Author)

From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.

A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization. He reveals how messaging apps strip nuance from conversation, how "digital crowding" erodes empathy and triggers aggression, how online political debates narrow our minds and distort our perceptions, and how advances in AI are further blurring the already hazy line between fantasy and reality. Even as Carr shows how tech companies and their tools of connection have failed us, he forces us to confront inconvenient truths about our own nature. The human psyche, it turns out, is profoundly ill-suited to the "superbloom" of information that technology has unleashed.

With rich psychological insights and vivid examples drawn from history and science, Superbloom provides both a panoramic view of how media shapes society and an intimate examination of the fate of the self in a time of radical dislocation. It may be too late to change the system, Carr counsels, but it's not too late to change ourselves.

Back Jacket

Praise for Nicholas Carr

"Nicholas Carr is among the most lucid, thoughtful, and necessary thinkers alive. He's also terrific company."
-- Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated

"Nick Carr is our most informed, intelligent critic of technology."
-- Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired

"Mild-mannered, never polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition."
-- Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times

"Carr's prose is elegant, and he has an exceptional command of the facts."
-- Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music

"One of Carr's great strengths as a critic is the measured calm of his approach to his material--a rare thing in debates about technology. He is neither a bully nor a nanny . . . and he has a gift for stating problems succinctly."
-- Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience

"Nick Carr is the rare thinker who understands that technological progress is both essential and worrying."
-- Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus

"There have been few cautionary voices like Nicholas Carr's urging us to take stock, especially, of the effects of automation on our very humanness."
-- Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books

"Carr has proven to be among the shrewdest and most thoughtful critics of our current technological regime; his primary goal is to exhort us to develop strategies of resistance."
-- Alan Jacobs, author of Breaking Bread with the Dead