Great articulation of the issues. I'm in the middle of a 2-day business trip and I forgot my phone. I've seen all the graphs that show a hockey stick increase in anxiety over the past 10 years for teen girls. Mine has been the exact opposite and it's fascinating. I started anxious but have now settled into a state of calm that I didn't expect. I had to ask the gate agent to print my boarding pass. No problem. It gave me a chance to interact with a nice human being. I didn't have to turn on airplane mode thinking I might be missing out on something. Instead, I just closed my eyes and rested on the flight. Sure, I have to meet friends for lunch when I get to Nashville. So, I got online with my Mac in O'Hare, memorized directions from the Nashville airport to lunch, and I'll see them there. I actually had to memorize something - use my brain. I'm living this post in real-time and it's crazy to feel it.
This articulates something that I have felt. I'm not a heavy social media user - the only platform I use is Facebook, and that is mainly just me wishing people happy birthdays and posting photos of my dogs and pretty sunsets - but I have curtailed even that of late as the election as brought out a great deal of unhinged discourse from both my right-wing and left-wing friends. I feel much calmer and more mentally uncrowded without other peoples' random thoughts being forced upon me; and far more charitable towards others because I now only interact with them in person rather than just seeing an ALL CAPS RANT ABOUT A HOT-BUTTON ISSUE which keeps getting pushed to the top of my feed due to all the "engagement."
I had already stopped following my local community page, as I noticed it was making me feel extremely negative towards everyone in town because of a few noisy crackpots with far too much spare time, who seemed to be the source of 95% of the posts.
Fabulous read and excellent points ! I have notice the SAME issues now with books BUT too ....even watching a long movie...I would rather small bits off YouTube....the brain has been stimulated with the dopamine firing bits...now EXPLAINED ... I get it !!
That part really hit me because I too have noticed the same lack of long term focus. I thought maybe it was an effect of aging (I’m not a spring chicken) but now I don’t think so.
The author is generalizing more widely on social media. Reading long-form essays on Substack is, I suspect, not the source of the state of mind shift going on. A newspaper journalist can write a critique of newspapers, distributed by newspapers. Taking hours and hours to craft a perspective in long-form essay writing differs in its social effects from a swipe, or a quick comment, or a "laughing at you" emoji, or a "too funny" jab of cynicism. It's like a long conversation with a friend over a pint, in the relative richness....
I too try to defend my Substack habit but the comment section still draws us into toxic online discourse unless an author cultivates a really good readership and enforces civility in the comment sections. (Thankfully I’d put our host here in that category.)
The company can’t resist the forces of enshittification though and had to add the Notes feature and an infinite scroll / emotion-triggering feed to the app to make sure we’re more Engaged. I deleted the app. Now I only use Substack email newsletters and the web interface to comment. Sorry guys, you don’t get to draw me back into a Twitter-like cesspit to drive earnings.
Thank you Geoff, and well said. "Enshittification" what a fine word. It reminds me of the concept that we swim against culturally "you can't buy taste". Same here re. the app...there is no need for reading essays on a screen the size of a few postage stamps, in living a rich life.
Digital crowding, that’s a brilliant way of describing what we are all experiencing. We all become overwhelmed by the information and interactions all competing for our attention. Relationships are like a dance, and similar to a dance, has many physical interactions, and eyebrow raised a slight frown, eye contact, a shoulder shrug, all of these are missing, even in video form, because what is missing is the dance, the reciprocal physical cues that we need to form and maintain strong relationships with each other.
The Internet is a dream scape. It is taking on the imagination and the psyche of everybody on it. The Internet is not a relationship at all, but it is a vastly expanded mind. In our own minds, we may have dark thoughts or light thoughts, and we can select which thoughts to focus on. Same with the Internet. Though it’s called social media, it is not a social environment, it is a dreaming space.
I read The Shallows last year for the first time. I underlined that same quote Haidt shared above where Carr says he used to be a scuba diver in a sea of words and now feels like a jet skiier skimming the surface. It sort of blew my mind that Carr articulated all that in 2010, in the dawn of the smartphone era, when people overall spent much less time online than they do today. I remember thinking "oh dear, what would Nicholas Carr say about our lives NOW!?"
So I was very excited and also a bit nervous to read Superbloom. I'm almost done with it and it is fantastic. I love the way Carr is able to situate our current moment in historical context (The Shallows does an amazing job of this as well, particularly the bit about how the invention of the clock 1000+ years ago altered the way humans conceived of everything). There's a chapter toward the beginning of Superbloom when he talks about how, 100+ years ago, everyone thought the telegraph, by enabling more efficient communication for the masses, would put an end to human conflict -- but in fact actually contributed to the outbreak of WWI. It turns out efficiency is not always good for diplomacy, just as it's not always best for interpersonal relationships in general. Human beings need time to process a conflict, contemplate a proper course of action, and craft a thoughtful response. When efficiency is prioritized above all else, this cannot happen.
One other quote from Superbloom that I've been noodling on uneasily is this one:
“The technology industry is a worthy target but also an easy one. In placing blame for the internet’s failings on social media companies, we let the net itself off the hook while also absolving ourselves of complicity. Commercial interests constitute one force that determines how a new medium shapes society. But there are two others at least equally important: technology and human nature.”
Since human nature is unlikely to change anytime soon, what are we to do about this? Where do we go from here? On an individual level, it's clear to me that being constantly online is very bad for me and I've cut back significantly on that over the last year (got a flip phone, deleted most of my social media accounts, etc.). But I am just one person, and it seems society overall is moving faster and faster toward more heavy reliance on tech, not less. What can be done?
I think there might also be something to the idea that something about social media--anonymity, of just a feeling of anonymity, or maybe just the lack of physical cues and feedback--makes people meaner and less empathetic, the way being behind the wheel of a car sometimes does.
JH - have you written anything on the impact of 'memes'? The effects of the oversimplification and reductive nature of communication seems to be a consequence of the social media ecosystem; which then has further impacts, etc.
Jon, disembodied communication has been a subject of discussion in our house for a few years now. We talk about real communication, which is in-person and includes all our senses, including smell and the visual cues, such as blushing and subtle glances of approval or disapproval. We talk about the descending means of effective communication, beginning with in-person, and then remove effective elements as we go to video chatting to phone calls to letters to emails and to that tailor made means of misunderstanding: texting.
Reading Nicholas Carr's piece, especially his comments on broadcasting vs. conversing, the disappearing online if not broadcasting and the animosity encouraged by over-sharing, reminded me of some concepts in your book, The Righteous Mind. I'm thinking of Can I and Must I thinking, as well as how poor we are at noticing flaws in our own thinking vs. how easily we see the flaws and hypocrisy in the thinking and actions of others. We evolved to need and benefit from the course corrections we get from our friends and peers. We need to have embodied relationships to keep ourselves on the rails. We can tell from a glance, a sigh, scents, a feeling of impatience or enthusiasm if we're on the wrong or right track. The "hiving" you describe is, in my opinion, our sixth sense and we evolved to live as hiving creatures. That's our super power. Reading The Righteous Mind, I would turn to my wife and say, "These are yet more reasons why we need each other."
Incredible reflection on the unintended consequences of hypercommunication.
I found the concept of dissimilarity cascades fascinating. We assume knowing more about others fosters connection, yet it often amplifies division. Once we spot a difference, we unconsciously filter everything else through it, reinforcing dissimilarity instead of commonality. No wonder online interactions so often divide rather than unite.
I’ve never adopted Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter/X, and I’ve often sensed a certain suspicion toward this choice—almost as if opting out of social media is seen as a refusal to be open or present in the world. In an age of overexposure, preserving privacy rather than constantly broadcasting can feel unnatural—or even unsettling—to some.
Something I find interesting is the concept of a social media well being tax credit. Simply a tax credit to social media platforms based on their more positive influence on user's self reported well being, paid for by a matching tax on those with more negative impacts
Minimum ages are a good solution for young teens, while the basic dynamic of the platforms themselves seems much more challenging to change. They have a very strong incentive to maximize addiction, and any one company that changed the goals of their algorithm to include general well being would simply lose market share without a tax credit system to change the incentives
I think self reported well being has a lot of backing in social science. It has the additional benefit of being a simple metric to measure that greatly reduces the scope for picking and choosing other things like "misinformation", which seems to usually turn into a way of reinforcing official information and misinformation
Great articulation of the issues. I'm in the middle of a 2-day business trip and I forgot my phone. I've seen all the graphs that show a hockey stick increase in anxiety over the past 10 years for teen girls. Mine has been the exact opposite and it's fascinating. I started anxious but have now settled into a state of calm that I didn't expect. I had to ask the gate agent to print my boarding pass. No problem. It gave me a chance to interact with a nice human being. I didn't have to turn on airplane mode thinking I might be missing out on something. Instead, I just closed my eyes and rested on the flight. Sure, I have to meet friends for lunch when I get to Nashville. So, I got online with my Mac in O'Hare, memorized directions from the Nashville airport to lunch, and I'll see them there. I actually had to memorize something - use my brain. I'm living this post in real-time and it's crazy to feel it.
This is what hundreds of teens experience every summer at the summer camp my wife and I run in Maine. It’s revelatory for them.
This articulates something that I have felt. I'm not a heavy social media user - the only platform I use is Facebook, and that is mainly just me wishing people happy birthdays and posting photos of my dogs and pretty sunsets - but I have curtailed even that of late as the election as brought out a great deal of unhinged discourse from both my right-wing and left-wing friends. I feel much calmer and more mentally uncrowded without other peoples' random thoughts being forced upon me; and far more charitable towards others because I now only interact with them in person rather than just seeing an ALL CAPS RANT ABOUT A HOT-BUTTON ISSUE which keeps getting pushed to the top of my feed due to all the "engagement."
I had already stopped following my local community page, as I noticed it was making me feel extremely negative towards everyone in town because of a few noisy crackpots with far too much spare time, who seemed to be the source of 95% of the posts.
Fabulous read and excellent points ! I have notice the SAME issues now with books BUT too ....even watching a long movie...I would rather small bits off YouTube....the brain has been stimulated with the dopamine firing bits...now EXPLAINED ... I get it !!
That part really hit me because I too have noticed the same lack of long term focus. I thought maybe it was an effect of aging (I’m not a spring chicken) but now I don’t think so.
Thank you Jon for inviting Nicholas to write this thought provoking article.
I really enjoyed it and it presents a really strong argument why some of our brains have gone to mush.
More of the same please and I'll definitely buy the book , thanks.
The author is generalizing more widely on social media. Reading long-form essays on Substack is, I suspect, not the source of the state of mind shift going on. A newspaper journalist can write a critique of newspapers, distributed by newspapers. Taking hours and hours to craft a perspective in long-form essay writing differs in its social effects from a swipe, or a quick comment, or a "laughing at you" emoji, or a "too funny" jab of cynicism. It's like a long conversation with a friend over a pint, in the relative richness....
I too try to defend my Substack habit but the comment section still draws us into toxic online discourse unless an author cultivates a really good readership and enforces civility in the comment sections. (Thankfully I’d put our host here in that category.)
The company can’t resist the forces of enshittification though and had to add the Notes feature and an infinite scroll / emotion-triggering feed to the app to make sure we’re more Engaged. I deleted the app. Now I only use Substack email newsletters and the web interface to comment. Sorry guys, you don’t get to draw me back into a Twitter-like cesspit to drive earnings.
Same here! Just email newsletters, the news, and anything thoughtfully sought after. Also… 🤌🏿 ‘Enshittification’ ✨ is GOLD.
Word of the year for 2023! It really does describe something new and specific.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Thank you Geoff, and well said. "Enshittification" what a fine word. It reminds me of the concept that we swim against culturally "you can't buy taste". Same here re. the app...there is no need for reading essays on a screen the size of a few postage stamps, in living a rich life.
Digital crowding, that’s a brilliant way of describing what we are all experiencing. We all become overwhelmed by the information and interactions all competing for our attention. Relationships are like a dance, and similar to a dance, has many physical interactions, and eyebrow raised a slight frown, eye contact, a shoulder shrug, all of these are missing, even in video form, because what is missing is the dance, the reciprocal physical cues that we need to form and maintain strong relationships with each other.
The Internet is a dream scape. It is taking on the imagination and the psyche of everybody on it. The Internet is not a relationship at all, but it is a vastly expanded mind. In our own minds, we may have dark thoughts or light thoughts, and we can select which thoughts to focus on. Same with the Internet. Though it’s called social media, it is not a social environment, it is a dreaming space.
sigma sigma boy yay i can use this for my project :D
slay gurly
sigma sigma boy yay I can use this for my project nice info dude
I read The Shallows last year for the first time. I underlined that same quote Haidt shared above where Carr says he used to be a scuba diver in a sea of words and now feels like a jet skiier skimming the surface. It sort of blew my mind that Carr articulated all that in 2010, in the dawn of the smartphone era, when people overall spent much less time online than they do today. I remember thinking "oh dear, what would Nicholas Carr say about our lives NOW!?"
So I was very excited and also a bit nervous to read Superbloom. I'm almost done with it and it is fantastic. I love the way Carr is able to situate our current moment in historical context (The Shallows does an amazing job of this as well, particularly the bit about how the invention of the clock 1000+ years ago altered the way humans conceived of everything). There's a chapter toward the beginning of Superbloom when he talks about how, 100+ years ago, everyone thought the telegraph, by enabling more efficient communication for the masses, would put an end to human conflict -- but in fact actually contributed to the outbreak of WWI. It turns out efficiency is not always good for diplomacy, just as it's not always best for interpersonal relationships in general. Human beings need time to process a conflict, contemplate a proper course of action, and craft a thoughtful response. When efficiency is prioritized above all else, this cannot happen.
One other quote from Superbloom that I've been noodling on uneasily is this one:
“The technology industry is a worthy target but also an easy one. In placing blame for the internet’s failings on social media companies, we let the net itself off the hook while also absolving ourselves of complicity. Commercial interests constitute one force that determines how a new medium shapes society. But there are two others at least equally important: technology and human nature.”
Since human nature is unlikely to change anytime soon, what are we to do about this? Where do we go from here? On an individual level, it's clear to me that being constantly online is very bad for me and I've cut back significantly on that over the last year (got a flip phone, deleted most of my social media accounts, etc.). But I am just one person, and it seems society overall is moving faster and faster toward more heavy reliance on tech, not less. What can be done?
More real face time. More listening. More talking. More socializing.
I think there might also be something to the idea that something about social media--anonymity, of just a feeling of anonymity, or maybe just the lack of physical cues and feedback--makes people meaner and less empathetic, the way being behind the wheel of a car sometimes does.
JH - have you written anything on the impact of 'memes'? The effects of the oversimplification and reductive nature of communication seems to be a consequence of the social media ecosystem; which then has further impacts, etc.
Jon, disembodied communication has been a subject of discussion in our house for a few years now. We talk about real communication, which is in-person and includes all our senses, including smell and the visual cues, such as blushing and subtle glances of approval or disapproval. We talk about the descending means of effective communication, beginning with in-person, and then remove effective elements as we go to video chatting to phone calls to letters to emails and to that tailor made means of misunderstanding: texting.
Reading Nicholas Carr's piece, especially his comments on broadcasting vs. conversing, the disappearing online if not broadcasting and the animosity encouraged by over-sharing, reminded me of some concepts in your book, The Righteous Mind. I'm thinking of Can I and Must I thinking, as well as how poor we are at noticing flaws in our own thinking vs. how easily we see the flaws and hypocrisy in the thinking and actions of others. We evolved to need and benefit from the course corrections we get from our friends and peers. We need to have embodied relationships to keep ourselves on the rails. We can tell from a glance, a sigh, scents, a feeling of impatience or enthusiasm if we're on the wrong or right track. The "hiving" you describe is, in my opinion, our sixth sense and we evolved to live as hiving creatures. That's our super power. Reading The Righteous Mind, I would turn to my wife and say, "These are yet more reasons why we need each other."
Incredible reflection on the unintended consequences of hypercommunication.
I found the concept of dissimilarity cascades fascinating. We assume knowing more about others fosters connection, yet it often amplifies division. Once we spot a difference, we unconsciously filter everything else through it, reinforcing dissimilarity instead of commonality. No wonder online interactions so often divide rather than unite.
I’ve never adopted Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter/X, and I’ve often sensed a certain suspicion toward this choice—almost as if opting out of social media is seen as a refusal to be open or present in the world. In an age of overexposure, preserving privacy rather than constantly broadcasting can feel unnatural—or even unsettling—to some.
Thank you.
Something I find interesting is the concept of a social media well being tax credit. Simply a tax credit to social media platforms based on their more positive influence on user's self reported well being, paid for by a matching tax on those with more negative impacts
Minimum ages are a good solution for young teens, while the basic dynamic of the platforms themselves seems much more challenging to change. They have a very strong incentive to maximize addiction, and any one company that changed the goals of their algorithm to include general well being would simply lose market share without a tax credit system to change the incentives
I think self reported well being has a lot of backing in social science. It has the additional benefit of being a simple metric to measure that greatly reduces the scope for picking and choosing other things like "misinformation", which seems to usually turn into a way of reinforcing official information and misinformation