Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

by Nicholas Carr Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

How much progress is too much progress? Bestselling author Nicholas Carr explores the history of technological advances and questions where we need to draw the line between innovation and societal dislocation. Groundbreaking and thought-provoking, Superbloom is great for readers of Ruha Benjamin and Sherry Turkle.

From the author of The Shallows, a bracing exploration of how social media has warped our sense of self and society.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Literary Hub - Oliver Scialdone

"This book is so timely. I say this as an extremely online person who has a deep love for the culture and history of the internet: maybe some of this was a bad idea."

Economist

"The 'superbloom' of flowers produced a superbloom of people, trampling the poppies, causing gridlock and creating a public-safety hazard. For Nicholas Carr, a thoughtful critic of technology and its consequences, all this is a metaphor for today’s media-saturated world."

Scientific American - Brianne Kane

"This book might finally convince you to stay off social media—or at least get the apps off your phone...Carr promises to bring readers along into the murky waters of our ever expanding technological landscape."

The New York Times - Jen Szalai

"Carr, for his part, extols a 'more material and less virtual existence.' I think they’re both right, even if trying to change one’s own behavior feels small next to the structural forces delineated in their books. But for now, yes—it’s going to take willful acts of sensory deprivation for us to come to our senses."

The Gospel Coalition - Nicholas J. Weyrens

"At times alarming, Superbloom is a profound reminder of what’s at stake if we consume only ultraprocessed communication at the expense of real, embodied community."

Sam Keanen Scholar

"[An] eye-opening new book...We have, Carr concludes, 'been telling ourselves lies about communication—and about ourselves.' It’s time we stop."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Philip Ball

"The case Carr makes is compelling...It is an inspiring rallying call, and Superbloom shows us what is at stake—but with market forces, peer pressure, and our own instincts ranged against us, this might be easier said than done."

Booklist (starred review) - John Keogh

"Carr considers what we know about human communication and psychology and argues that modern social media is ideally suited to increase intolerance, anxiety, and factionalism. Turns out, more communication isn’t automatically better…As always, Carr’s perspective is urgent and bracing, a necessary challenge to idealistic visions of a democratic internet. "

American Scholar - Sam Keane

"[An] eye-opening new book... We have, Carr concludes, ‘been telling ourselves lies about communication—and about ourselves.’ It’s time we stop."

Kirkus Reviews

2024-11-09
A call to change our relationship with communication technologies.

If a little of something is good, then more must be better, and a lot more must be much better. According to journalist and author Carr, this assumption is longstanding, straightforward, and terribly wrong—at least when applied to communications technology. The theme of his book is that social media has taken over our society with such speed that we have not been able to absorb its ramifications or develop mechanisms to effectively control it. Carr has already addressed some of these ideas in a previous book,The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, but here he delves more deeply. He brings together the opinions of commentators who had once applauded the rise of social media but now see it as personally dangerous and socially disastrous, and he cites a convincing body of research as well. Many young people in particular seem to have lost the capacity and willingness to engage with life beyond the screen, even as they exhibit unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety, and pessimism. Some of this is due to the addictive nature of the technology itself, but more of it comes from a failure to confront our own fears and weaknesses. Reality is difficult; the screen offers an easy escape. “That’s the trick for us humans, to sense the real world appropriately and often enough,” Carr writes. “It’s a trick we’ll need to relearn if we hope to escape imprisonment in the hyperreal.”

Carr persuasively sounds the alarm about the destructive nature of social media and the corporations that control it.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160048833
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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