How Our Devices Are Driving Us Apart
The year 2008 might have felt dispiriting or uplifting, based on what you paid attention to. It was the year, after all, of the Great Recession, a slide that started in the US and then spread to other countries, many of which might have been trying like novice gymnasts, to tread tightropes between growth and ecology or growth and equity. On a more hopeful note, Barack Obama had been elected President, and his “Yes we can” beamed across global screens infected us with a pixelated Power-of-Positive-Thinking.
It was a mere two decades since two doctoral students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had turned their research project into a search engine that insidiously crept into our minds. Like a smiley caterpillar that crunched through our memory stores – why remember anything when you could Google it? – we were slowly but surely becoming bonded to our machines.
Beyond Losing Our Smarts
Except that the enslavement did not feel harsh or harrowing, but cotton candy pleasant. Like the puffy pinkness twirled on sticks and handed out at fairs and parks, the taste felt flavorless and too sugary. In that year, when Nicholas Carr published his essay – “Is Google Making Us Stupid” – in The Atlantic, many of us nodded along, but with the blithe bleats of lambs who are not yet aware of their impending slaughter.
Leaping to 2025, it’s no longer just about our plunge into the shallows. More than the steep fall in our collective (and individual) intelligence, we are faced with cliff-height divides. The internet, is no doubt, “making us stupid.” More perilously, social media, AI and other leading-edge technologies are “tearing us apart.”
The Cost of Measuring Intangibles
All this was kicked off, as Carr writes in his latest book, Superbloom, by a misplaced belief in the boons of hyper-communication. It’s not an accident that the very companies that are supposedly boosting our friendliness chops, are run by young men who view people as data points, and who believe that we can measure the worth of what was hitherto deemed intangible: our relationships. Can you put a number on how much better your best friend is than your second-best?
The title of the work is drawn from a seemingly inconsequential event in the Walker Canyon, Temescal Mountain, south of Los Angeles. In early 2019, more poppies than usual emerged into view. These large swathes of orange grabbed eyeballs on social media. The phenomenon was accorded a term: superbloom, or rather, #superbloom.
Content Creators Remake Reality
Soon, the Instagrammars, YouTubers and TikTokers swooped in. Dressed in poppy colors, they posed with flowers tucked into mouths, hairs and hands. The hashtag #superbloom went viral, blooming faster than the poppies ever could. As more and more influencers were tugged into what had been a quiet, non-drama, “[cars] clogged roads and highways” and a nearby town felt so besieged, they had to declare an “emergency.”
On the internet, like in IRL, roses don’t stay rosy for all time. Soon the love emojis turned to hate. The influencers were called out for being poppy spoilers, anti-nature and selfish. “There was the excitement of communal discovery and the noxiousness of mob action.”
New Mediums Spin New Ruboffs
As Carr observes, we now live in a #superbloom of messages and communication. We are all technologically tethered, sending information consciously and unconsciously (like our location and even our moods). But the OG excitement has vanished. There’s cheer but also jadedness, hope scarred by cynicism. Maybe there are and always have been two sides: “Poppies are lush, vibrant and entrancing. They’re also garish, invasive and narcotic.”
The very design of social media companies don’t take the two-sidedness of human communication into account. Words can mediate, foster peace et al, but they can also fuel differences and spark wars. Each new medium shifts how power is distributed. As Carr puts it, “[e]very communication medium is political, a conduit of power as much as thought.” While social thinkers like Harold Innis (who emphasized “bias” and “monopolies of knowledge”), Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) and Neil Postman (“Amusing ourselves to Death”), have always been attuned to how media alter our cultural environs, the current ubiquity of technology and speeds of transmission are unprecedented.
Janus Faces of Social Media
In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had 900 Mn users on Facebook, posting three billion messages a day. Facebook was to go public in a few months. Zuckerberg proclaimed, in what seemed like a soaring mission: “People sharing more creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.” In 2017, Zuckerberg was as optimistic and relentless about spreading his sauce across the globe, connecting the whole world.
In 2025, you would be hard put to think of Facebook in such elevated terms. It’s been blamed for bullying, heightening divisions, spreading fake news, spying on users. Social media may not be the sole cause for heightening divisions or rising stress levels. Maybe it’s just us human beings, with our gamut of messy emotions. Communicate too much, and you risk conflict. Communicate too little, and you withdraw into a perilous aloofness. How does Carr suggest we occupy that Goldilocks middle? Disappointingly he doesn’t offer social or systemic solutions. Maybe he can’t? Till then, he suggests that each of us moderate our usage of technology to retain healthy analog selves.
Abiding with #Reality
The irony is that that those who read Superbloom might already be regulating their online interactions. The tricky part is to impart this to those who don’t or can’t. Yet, for all of us, there is not just reality anymore, but also #reality or #hyperreality. As Jean Baudrillard observed, we interact with a “smooth and functional surface” and there is a void below. The poet Annelyse Gelman sums it up best:
“Looking at screens made me think in screens
Looking at pixels made me think in pixels.”
References
Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, W.W. Norton & Company, 2025