Nicholas Carr: Why Social Media Has Made Us So Anti-Social

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Nicholas Carr
When you think of a printed page, it’s kind of almost literally a barrier against distraction. You’re you’re focused on just the words there. So when we move to the internet as a medium for particularly for the dissemination of news, you don’t have this journalistic tradition of trying to be accurate, trying to give context, you have a simple criterion of trying to engage the viewer.

Collin Hansen
There’s a simple reason that fake stories get more attention on social media than real ones. It’s because they’re more surprising by the time the truth gets out. Well, no one seems to really care any longer. And what happens now, when machines create the content, choose who sees it and deliver it, will they determine that real stories get better results than fake ones. Well, if you work in media, as I do, you’ll probably do more nodding along than shaking your head while reading Nicholas Carr’s newest book, super bloom, how technologies of connection tear us apart. Published by Norton Carr is the author of the acclaimed book The Shallows also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and former executive editor of Harvard Business Review. He’s also writer for The Atlantic, New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Super Bloom is not just a book for people who work in media, far from it. In fact, we all live in the media world now. The book’s title comes from how the selfie seekers of Walker Canyon, California created chaos around Poppy’s blooming, and as car opens with this story, you can see why he writes this quote. By turning us all into media personalities, social media has also turned us all into rivals. End Quote, well, we have a lot to cover here, from AI to social media to how fashion influencers became the heirs to Martin Luther that’ll be an interesting conversation. Maybe we’ll even find out where Nicholas Carr sees hope today. Nicholas, thank you for joining me on Gospelbound.

Nicholas Carr
Thank you, Collin. It’s pleasure to be here now.

Collin Hansen
It’s really hard for me to imagine that the shallows came out all the way back in in 2010 helps us to see how incredibly groundbreaking that book was And and is. It’s actually the same year that I started in this job at the gospel coalition. And I think looking back, I’ve had probably four or five different jobs during that tenure, because media changes so quickly now. And I’m just wondering, what are some of the biggest changes since 2010 that led you to write Superbloom?

Nicholas Carr
Well, when I wrote The Shallows, I was I was focused on the intellectual, or in cognitive effects of the internet, and just to set the stage, because things happen so quickly, that was still the time when, when people main, when they went online, they mainly went through laptops and desktops, right? Smartphones were still pretty new. Social media was still kind of considered a kids thing. It had yet to kind of take over. App Stores also very new. So the big thing that’s changed, I think, and that ultimately led me to write this book, is that with the rise of smartphones as the dominant personal computer now, the public’s dominant personal computer and social media as one of if not for most people, the main thing you do with computers. Now, the technology is not only influencing how we gather and interpret and make sense of information. It’s influencing all our social relations, all our relationships, the way we judge other people, the way other people judge us, the way we present ourselves. And so it seemed to me that, you know, I had covered earlier, the kind, the kind of mental, cognitive effects, but I really hadn’t talked about the social effects, and it seemed to me that the time had come because those effects are so broad and so worrisome, and for many people that it made sense for me to kind of delve into this topic.

Collin Hansen
There are also more people, I think, that are talking and researching the subjects now as well. I mean, you’re one of those first voices, I think, out in the wilderness, warning people about what was happening and about what was coming at the time. But you know, when I read this work, I see the work of academics like Byung Chul Han coming through in that and just kind of recognizing more people are becoming wise to some of the some of the dangers in there, and I think including users are recognizing in their own lives some more of the dangers, but not as many as we hope this book will help to warn about. And one of the things Nicholas, you write about is how we’ve been telling ourselves a story of the internet as a democratizing force that will bring humanity together. Yeah, I guess the question now is, looking back, how did we get it so wrong?

Nicholas Carr
I think the idea that, I think, I think it dates back to to an idea that was that’s been prominent, probably since the enlightenment, which is that the more we can communicate, the more understanding we’ll have for one another, the more sympathy we’ll have, and the more we’ll all get along. And obviously there’s some truth to that, communication is the way we learn about other people. It’s the way we form relationships. But we went from that belief to the idea that, well, if communication, if some communication is good, then more of it must be better. And so as soon as we started, as soon as we gained the ability to communicate with others at the speed of electricity, back with the Telegraph in the 1840s you saw this. You see this very almost utopian belief that, oh, by communicating more and more quickly, we’re all going to get together. There aren’t going to be any wars anymore. There aren’t going to be any conflicts you see that you know, and even you know, ministers, preachers kind of presented the telegraph and the telephone system as this fulfillment of kind of humanity’s destiny to kind of form a more perfect union on Earth and and what that gets wrong, I think in we haven’t really seen it until the rise of the Internet and social media. But what it gets wrong is that actually communication doesn’t necessarily get better when it speeds up, when it becomes more efficient, just as too much information can overwhelm our capacity, our cognitive capacity, to make sense of things. So too much communication, too many messages, trying to juggle too many relationships simultaneously with other people, overwhelms, I think, the humans, our own human ability to to connect with other people in a deep way, to understand them. So we’ve created by by putting all the stress on making communication and messaging more efficient, we’ve created, I think a fundamental conflict between the technology and all computer technology wants to increase speed of data flow and a volume of data flow and our human psyche, which actually gets very gets overwhelmed by the flow of information, and that ends up drawing out many of the worst qualities in us, rather than the best qualities.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, I deliberately go out of my way, mostly to not become Facebook friends with my immediate proximate neighbors, in part because I want them to see me I’m in a public figure, but I want them to see me as their actual neighbor, as a human being, and not as a collection of my public profile. But also, I don’t really want to judge them based on what they present on social media. I think, I mean, there’s certain things where it seems like life worked better when we had a little bit more discretion about what we knew about each

Nicholas Carr
Absolutely, and if you if you think how, how social media is designed, it’s designed to to encourage and reward people for talking about themselves. Yeah, you know when, when you’re together in a room with other people, and you keep quiet, and you just listen. You don’t disappear. You’re still present. People see you when you’re when you’re on social media, and you go quiet, you disappear. And therefore, we, we, we kind of feel impelled. People feel impelled to constantly post pictures about themselves to let everybody know their opinions about everything, and of course, then you’re rewarded with likes and retweets. So, you know, I think a lot of a lot of us probably remember our parents saying, you know, don’t talk about yourself too much in social situations, which turns out to be very good advice. But online, we’re constantly giving people other information. And what happens, it turns out, is that gives other people opportunities to see something they don’t really like, or that feels strange to them or is dislike them, and that triggers a negative reaction that tends to build this is called. Psychologists call this a dissimilarity cascade. Once you see something about another person that makes them seem dissimilar to you, then as you get more information, you place more emphasis on dissimilarity than similarity. And so the online world is kind of this perfect setting for triggering dissimilarity cascades. Yes. And by by making so much known everybody, making so much known about one another, we actually get more opportunities to dislike other people than to like them.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, and another element you point out in this context, in the book super bloom, is one that I don’t think we quite anticipated the same way, even five or six years ago, you write, far from promoting pluralism, the democratization of media has paradoxically created an information environment conducive to authoritarian movements and cults of personality related to, I think, think about events in China, you realize that does the surveillance state that’s facilitated by these technologies? Does that make authoritarianism harder to pull off because people have so many different ways to communicate, or is it easier to pull off and it looks like it’s nearing toward it’s easier?

Nicholas Carr
You’re right that our initial reaction, and you can think back to the Arab Spring, or right or events like that where people in authoritarian countries use the internet to organize themselves, bypass the official channels, which were, you know, controlled by the government. What we learned? And I mean, there is that aspect to the technology. Any communication technology allows you, allows people to root around existing ones. But what we didn’t realize is that governments and corporations and others who have a vested interest in controlling the flow of information and knowing what everybody’s saying all the time, the Internet gives you a perfect system for that kind of surveillance. So instead of people being able to organize outside the view of government, they soon discovered, sometimes tragically so that actually the government’s pretty good at using the technology to know exactly what you’re doing and saying beyond that, though, I think because, because we kind of are so overwhelmed by information that we’re not encouraged to think in depth about issues, politics or whatever, and so we tend to make snap judgments, and that allows, that opens the way for cults of personality in the book, one thing I talk about is, you know, an authoritarian figure can come off as kind of a meme on on the internet. It’s easy to spread his or her picture, to surround it with slogans, and it takes on this life of its own, and people kind of associate themselves with it. So there’s always going to be a tension between the communication channel as an instrument of greater freedom, but there’s also a countervailing effect that I think we’re seeing, maybe stronger, which is that it’s also very it’s also easy to become a channel of oppression or repression. Yeah,

Collin Hansen
so here’s another something that I picked up in Super bloom that I cannot believe I had missed before your book. And I don’t know if this is original to you, if you picked it up from some other people, I’m not sure. But how do new communication technologies often lead to catastrophe? The way you walk through how these technological breakthroughs and communications precede major conflicts and wars, was shocking to me. As somebody who spent my entire life studying war and conflict, I had never put two and two together before. It

Nicholas Carr
was very it was eye opening to me, and in in many ways, it kind of I was, I was trying to make sense of of this, what seemed to be this conflict between people’s idealism about communication as a tool for building understanding, and the fact that if you look at history, while the telegraph arrives and the telephone and radio and TV, you have this you don’t see this outpouring of understanding. You see lots of wars and lots of conflicts, including horrible ones. And it was in reading about the outbreak of the First World War that that it did kind of crystallize things, because you have people like Marconi, the inventor of radio, saying, proclaiming in 1912 that this would be the end of war. Because how could, how could we have war when we when everybody can communicate so quickly with one another? And then, of course, 1914 comes along, and you have the outbreak of of the First World War. And if you read the history, you find that rather than, rather than providing, rather than deterring us from going to war, at that point, actually, the new communication technologies of the telephone and the telegraph actually seemed to hasten the arrival of the war. And what happened in. Is that the the Arch Bishop, Archduke of Austria, was assassinated in Sarajevo. This there were lots of tensions in Europe at the time anyway, in because all the different capitals and governments could now instantaneously communicate with each other. The new wires of communication were kind of over, overwhelmed with threats, with misunderstanding and and things broke down very, very quickly. And as one British diplomat said at the time, you know, diplomacy is this human art where diplomats travel from capital to capital, they sit down together, they talk things through, and all of that was bypassed by the new communication technologies, and so it kind of undermined diplomacy and did exactly the opposite of what everybody thought. And it does seem to me that there’s a lesson, an important lesson, there. Unfortunately, I don’t think we learned that lesson, certainly for the remainder of of the last century.

Collin Hansen
You also mentioned in there that it made mobilization a lot faster, so these these events could spin out of control. I mean, I’m, I’m working through Christopher Clark’s, the sleepwalkers right now, of course, Barbara Tuckman guns of August. I mean, many other books on how this catastrophe or World War One happened, and I never thought about it from a communications perspective. And I was just teaching a course here at basin dividend school and cultural apologetics. And we teased this out from your book, and we applied it then to World War Two, and we thought about the role that that television had played in the rise of Hitler, of being able to show off not only his speeches, but then also all of the Nazi marches and parades, those spectacles made for TV, along with the radio that garables and others had used so effectively. So same thing that they were using, you know, so effectively was the same thing that Roosevelt had mastered for the fireside chats back in the United States. So just not thought about that before, yeah,

Nicholas Carr
and in fact, you know, the Nazis, one of the first things they did was, was they invented a cheap radio that could only tune into their own stations, and it became ubiquitous in the country, and so they they realized, I think, and they talked about, you know, mass media as a tool for for changing the thinking of the entire country. And in they used it, unfortunately, very effectively.

Collin Hansen
I hope not to get too dystopian here. But what might that historical trend pretend for us today, because where do you situate technology, media, communication technologies, like AI in this in this timeline? Yeah,

Nicholas Carr
well, it’s, there’s a lot, there’s a lot about AI that at this point, we have no idea how it’s going to play out, but it’s certainly one thing we can see looking at it from a media perspective, is if you look at social media companies, one thing that’s always been crucial to them is getting huge amounts of content for cheap, because unlike radio stations and TV stations and newspapers and magazines, they’re Broadcasting billions of pieces of information every minute, literally around the world. And so up till now, they’ve basically relied on the users themselves. We’re all happy to post things, to post pictures, to make comments, and that’s the kind of free content that they circulate on their on their media. What, what AI allows, for the first time is that the media company itself, through its machines, which used to just transmit information, can actually create the information, create the content, and create it at a scale unlike we’ve ever seen before, because there’s kind of no limits. And so already, I think we’re seeing kind of AI generated stuff beginning to flood the Internet, whether it’s songs on Spotify or images, photographs, words, summaries and Google results and everything. And the next step is going to be, you know, connecting the content creating AI to social media algorithms, so you’ll be able to so the companies will be able to use the AI to create the content that appeals to individuals, and do it instantaneously. Now, as I say, there’s there’s question marks here about Will we just simply accept that content and say it’s good enough? And if so, it raises, you know, the the it gives these companies, particularly if they’re linked to governments or run by governments, as this case in some some countries, it gives them a new tool to. Uh, formulate their message and broadcast it to individuals all the time. Um, and what we’re seeing, you know, I think whatever your political views are, what we’re seeing in the US, with the with the people who own big information platform, social media platforms, which are media unlike, more powerful than any we’ve seen before, really, you know, they are getting more and more confident that they can use this, not just to make lots of money, but they can use it to to wield power, even of a political sort. And so I think, you know, there’s, there’s recently been talk of, you know, an oligarchy emerging. And again, you know, I don’t want to rush ahead and predict the future, but certainly there are signs of this, this kind of merging of media systems and political power that, to me is Maureen,

Collin Hansen
Well, realistically, it, it doesn’t, it didn’t start now. It had been happening. And with some of the things that that we publish, they had been deliberately throttled down by Facebook, or they’d been de indexed by Google, at the risk of stealing your thunder from your famous article in The Atlantic, AI is making Google stupid, that’s for sure. I mean, it just overwhelms Google’s ability to be able to track this information, and makes Google far less effective than it had been previously in there. And that has downstream effects from media organizations like ours that are trying to create and curate information. So it may that some of the power dynamics may change, but if they do change, it’s probably just because those same oligarchs are just putting their finger to a cultural wind that they might think is blowing a different direction, but it’s not terribly different from what they had been doing before, in different ways, which had been, which had been concerning. But let’s, let’s take a step back talking here with Nicholas Carr talking about Super bloom, how technology’s connection tear us apart. Let’s go back to that question I teased with the airs of Luther draw the connection between today’s online fashion influencers and the great reformer himself, yeah,

Nicholas Carr
well, if you look at, if you look at Luther, what Luther was able to do, he, you know, he came along not long after Gutenberg invented the printing press. So the for the first time, an individual who had access to a press could do what used to be very, very hard and expensive to do, which is hire a bunch of scribes to write out a book or a pamphlet or a broadside or whatever. And so he was able, you know, to to print off many, many copies of his theses and distribute them broadly as as an individual. So at the at the risk of being somewhat heretical, if you look at what online influencers do today, they’re also making use of a new technology, the internet and social media, to kind of bypass established, media forces and reach a public directly. Now they, you know, they might be interested more in, you know, fashion accessories than in articles of faith. But nevertheless, you know, in both cases, we see how a new communication technology changes the kind of dynamics of influence and of power, and can do it in a way that people don’t, don’t foresee, and so it happens very suddenly, and can have, as a result, can have very broad social effects

Collin Hansen
well. And part of what you’re you’re pulling from here, is people like postman. Postman amusing ourselves death specifically talks about the shift from print to visual media and how it changes religion. So Luther is a very popular figure because of the printing press in ways we hadn’t seen before. But then this new technology comes and makes Martin Luther sermons basically implausible to be delivered today, because everything is kind of trimmed to the psychology or catered to the psychology that TV allows, that medium dictates the message there. Now this is also related. You write this in Super bloom. Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires. It’s successful because it gives us what we want. Now, I mean by having gone through journalism school and thing like things like that, of course, a lot of journalism is operated under the same premise. You’re not really too successful in media if you don’t give people what they want. At the same time, though, we were certainly trained and practiced that. So giving. We also wanted to give people what they thought that they needed to know and also learn. Help us understand what’s lost in that shift from the newspaper to the news feed. Well, there’s

Nicholas Carr
a couple of things. One is on the supply side, on the actual side of the journalists who are creating stuff, and one is on the side of the readers, the demand side. And so, for all the flaws that we saw in mass media, in publishing and that these were imperfect institutions, there was a shared even if, even if the journalists themselves had very different views on things, there was a shared belief in the importance of accuracy of information, the importance of giving people context so that they could understand something new in a in a broader set of facts, rather than just react to it impulsively. And so there was this attempt to at least do deep reporting, thoughtful reporting, and get it out in a form, a newspaper or a magazine or a book that actually encouraged deep reading, deep engagement. You know, when you, when you, when you think of a printed page, it’s kind of almost literally a barrier against distraction. You’re you’re focused on just the words there. So when we move to the when we move to the internet as a medium for, particularly for the dissemination of news, and I think it’s pretty clear now that most people get most of their news online through social media, you don’t have behind the workings of the algorithm. You don’t have this journal journalistic tradition of trying to be accurate, trying to give context. You have a simple criterion of trying to engage the viewer, knowing or the reader, knowing that the user on social media is bombarded by all sorts of information. So to engage them, you just have to grab them with something emotional, something extreme, something that gets their hackles, unexpected. Unexpected. Surprise is surprise is the key. You want to surprise is the key. You want to surprise them, because that grabs their attention and then give them another surprise. So both the kind of editorial mechanism, which is now embedded in algorithms that are sensing you know what’s going to grab people’s eyeballs, and the medium itself, because the screen is not a shield against distraction. It’s kind of a conduit of distraction that means that we aren’t getting a kind of healthy information diet, and we don’t have the capacity to even judge this stuff clearly, because we have to make snap judgments in order to get to the next surprise.

Collin Hansen
Oh, I mean, part of what I try to teach prospective pastors is to understand how dramatically this shapes people’s perceptions of institutions. If your institution is about trying to pass on from one generation to another a message that is that you regard to be unchanged and a set of values, even spiritual laws, moral laws that are unchanged over time. The very architecture of digital media works against that because of what we come to expect, in terms of novelty, right? We have to be entertained. Was, of course, what postman was talking about. But what we also have to be now, be be surprised, be shocked and enraged. Well, those values just do not translate with institutional religion. And I think it’s one reason why I’ve I often teach in my courses that we’ve seen such a such a remarkable de churching in the last 25 years, which, not coincidentally, is 25 years since a majority of Americans have had the internet in their homes. Another problem that I’ve seen, that I would love for you to comment on here is that the social medium determines the reception of a given argument, and once an essay has been framed by interlocutors. It’s like a like a veil comes over the argument. All critical thought has gone out the window. And I’m just wondering for you, as an essayist, journalist, editor, what kind of recourse do you have when you have that kind of framing in that environment? Well,

Nicholas Carr
I’ve certainly seen it with my own work, as I’m sure all writers do that, that if you know it, whether somebody agrees with you or disagrees with you, as soon as if they have lots of followers on, say x, formally Twitter, they you have the power as. You said to frame how people see the article, just by putting in one catchy sentence or something either dismissing it or saying, This is the greatest thing ever. And one thing we know is that if you look at how people retweet things or repost things, very few of them actually make the effort to go to the article and read it, they’re just kind of retweeting the gloss, or they’re retweeting the person who’s doing the gloss. So it’s, it’s very, you know, it’s in, in one ways, it it’s always been frustrating. It’s frustrating for any writer who puts something, it’s out into the world, whether it’s, you know, online or in a magazine, and knows that something that a lot of people are just going to glance at and may misinterpret it, they might hear something. So this has always been a frustration. It’s always been but it’s certainly the scale of the ability to not only offer a misinterpretation, but then to spread that misinterpretation, you know, far and wide is, is it has never been so powerful. I you know you were talking about the the difficulty of transmitting kind of wisdom, religious tenants, kind of age old, yeah, messages, things that are not new, things that are not novel, exactly. And one of the you’ve probably, you probably are familiar with the work of Harold Innis, the Canadian historian and media theorist. And he drew this very he died in 1952 I think so, way before everything we’re talking about. But he drew a very interesting distinction between what he called time biased media and space biased media in time biased media. You know, think of Moses’s engraved stones. Time biased media communicates information through the ages, but usually it’s not very good at communicating information across wide distances, because it’s it’s it’s it, it’s on some material that has longevity, but it’s often hard to carry around, whereas time biased, I mean space bias. Media is lightweight, sometimes no weight at all, as with digital data. So it’s very good at spreading, at communicating information across vast distances, but you sacrifice the ability to transmit that information over time. And his observation was that in the modern world, increasingly, we are coming to emphasize space bias media and de emphasize time biased media, which means everything that’s new gets out there and gets seen and then gets tossed away very quickly. But if you’re trying to have continuity through time and give people a sense of of of what has stood the test of time that becomes much, much harder to communicate.

Collin Hansen
Well, I’m going to jump to another quote that you have here, because I think underscore something that is really important for people who are watching and listening here, we at the gospel Coalition have a book coming out very soon called scrolling ourselves to death. It’s a 40th anniversary tribute to postman. My chapter is on, is on preaching, and where I end up landing is by saying that we will be better off by restricting the audience of our messages and focusing on the tangible, physical in front of you at that moment, people as well as, of course, the sacraments, to baptism and to the Lord’s Supper. So I say, I mean, look, my profession is digital media, but that’s exactly why I’m telling you that I think as a church, you need to be doing the opposite of that. Don’t try to compete with what I’m doing. Focus on what you do, and basically focus on the things that were kind of you can’t transport a congregation easily across the space. It’s time bound that sense. But I think this is goes along with what you commend in this book you write this the computer is so quick to sense and fulfill our desires that it never allows us the opportunity to examine our desires, to ask ourselves whether what we choose or what is chosen for us is worthy of the choosing, maybe salvation, if that’s not too strong a word lies in personal, willful acts of ex communication, the taking up of positions, first as individuals and then perhaps together, not outside of society, but at society’s margin, not beyond the reach of the informational flow, but beyond the reach of its liquefying force. I mean, thank you. That’s what I want to send. Want to send to churches. That’s what I want churches to do. I mean, where do you see hope? Do you think maybe even churches could be those kinds of places? I

Nicholas Carr
I think so, certainly, because there is the tradition of of of kind. Coming together as a group of people in a particular space and at a particular time. And I think what we’re what we’ve lost as a society, is our appreciation of the importance of that and and to me, I guess if I was going to encapsulate what I see as the big problem, it’s that we’ve been given this powerful technology, medium technology of the internet and in all the flowerings of social media stuff, and because we can communicate basically what seems to be anything very, very quickly and very efficiently through it, we’ve decided, Oh, this must be the best tool for all communication jobs. And so you see people withdrawing often from, you know, gatherings, personal gatherings, personal conversations, into this mediated world. And it seems to me that if we start, instead of saying, oh, because it’s efficient and it’s always there, it’s the best tool for the job. If we actually step back and say, Look, computers, smartphones, they are quite good for many things, but they’re not the best tool for all the jobs that are available to or that require communication. And if we were just more thoughtful and see that, you know, getting together with people, is actually a way to communicate that can’t be replicated online, that you know, instead of shooting people back and forth texts all the time, actually give them a phone call. Even you know, there are ways to communicate that have been kind of tossed aside in our rush for this efficient, fast kind of communication. And I think if we, if we actually think about what’s good for communities and what’s good for ourselves individually, you’ll find that this really is the wrong tool for a lot of the social jobs that we’ve yoked it into, into being part of

Collin Hansen
that’s a good summary, and that’s a good place to to end it. I mean, this has been such a rich source of reflection for me. Made me appreciate the the group from my church who every Monday night, congregate together in my house, in my living room, opening up the Bible and talking about it, not to mention Sunday Sunday worship. But also, think you’d be encouraged to know, even just in our public school, in our neighborhood, we’ve seen a sea change happening, not sending computers home, eliminating technologies in the classroom, even eliminating homework, at least nothing that’s not on paper. Things like that that I think are, I mean, your book is a word in season, I think, thank you, and one that I’m hopeful that people will will heed and understand the reflection that comes from somebody who’s been immersed for so long thinking about these things. So the book is super bloom, how technology is a connection tear us apart. The author and my guest here on gospel bound this week is Nicholas. Carr. Nicholas, thank you for joining me.

Nicholas Carr
Thank you, Collin, it was a pleasure.