Review: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own, personalized feed.
As their feed becomes more personalized, it gets more and more isolated from a common, shared cultural context.
According to Wilbur Schramm's theories of communication, human to human messages must occur over a shared cultural context, and social media shrinks that shared cultural context.
LLMs as a platform could shrink this shared cultural context even more, unless we become more deliberate about fighting back against this "shared experience" shrinking:
https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/social-media-is-the-f...
And yeah, now imagine everyone watching their own personalized media. Under the surface it's so empty.
And in actual numbers, about 20% of Americans at least have an account with a sports betting platform.
https://www.sbu.edu/news/news-items/2024/02/05/st.-bonaventu...
One great thing that I like to find is interest or curation lists. Like themed books, favorite music albums, software one uses,… Better than any recommendation engine.
There are the usual culprits that people talk about and others which people don't seem to think about much. Looking forward to reading the book mentioned in the article to see someone else's in depth thoughts.
- reading a newspaper/books
- binge watching Netflix
- refreshing HN every 2 minutes
I’m not sure that’s a specific aspect of social media.
Same for Hacker News and older bulletin board style forums: it's largely the same experience for everyone (at least at any given moment). When you load the frontpage, it's roughly the same stories at the top for everyone (sans whatever you've manually hidden, of course.)
Social media isn't completely different, but it sure is weirder, especially with algorithmic feeds. I don't use social media anymore, but sometimes when I would talk with friends it would become apparent that the posts that were surfacing for them were completely different than the ones surfacing for me, which gave us very different ideas of what the general feeling on some issues was. I think this probably amplifies the living shit out of false pluralities.
But even without that, look at the popularity of book discussions, book clubs, and things like that. Multiple people, reading the same book, at the same pace, and discussing it. That's the opposite of isolating, and is impossible to achieve with "personalized feeds." There's no common point to discuss.
And, as yet another example, have you ever read a book that someone else has marked up and taken notes in? Passing a book around a few friends, each with a different color pen to make notes, is certainly not isolating.
I think that's it.
You are not connecting with "people", but you are connecting deeply with the highly concentrated (and presumably original and high quality) thoughts of one person.
Quality beats quantity for most types of relationships. We don't need lots of close friends, although that's great. But we really benefit from even one, two or three very close friends.
Social media increasingly isolating, full of dreck, and often shallow. But the last one, shallow, is not the problem the other two are. It is also healthy to maintain wider looser social circles.
Maybe it’s just one of those things that becomes more pleasant as you grow older and enjoy a more laid back pace, but I appreciate having those friends you can just chill with without really having to ‘do’ something or needing to fill the space with conversation. You’ve become close enough (not necessarily romantically) that you can just enjoy the presence.
Of course it contains posts that may be shared widely and thus unifying, or posts from your close friends and relatives and thus also unifying in a way. This is not a given though, and the context of your newsfeed is effectively unique.
This is one of the reasons community feeds exist, which are the same for the members of a community and thus somehow unifying, around a topic of interest.
I notice this with streaming platforms like Netflix as well, there is no longer a channel that we all watch (not even in the same household), so a lot of water boiler talk about TV shows have disappeared. The only conversations I have about TV shows are now on reddit.
I see this as a feature. I was so bored in high school, kids talking about football games ad nauseam. There was no easy cohort to chat about things I cared more about. Why should we force one shared experience on everyone? After all, that is why i'm on HN and not CNN.
Is this everyone? No. But "forcing one shared experience on everyone" is a straw man that wasn't being argued: the argument is about the other extreme, where every user has their own feed, and worlds splinter so hard that they are inherently irreconcilable with anyone else's.
photography, brooklyn, coffee, health-tech, health-ai, fin-tech, finance, quant, bears, cats, calico cats, ucberkeley stats alums, genai in marketing, generative-ai created music, east coast gangster rap
There is no one community for all these. There are not even individual communities for each of these, some are too specific.
Yes, there are random slack instances (e.g., for ucberkely dept alumni) and random boards (quants and poets for finance) but social media provides a giant funnel for everything and hashtags let me focus on long-tail items of interest. I've carefully curated my account follows and hashtag follows over years.
But also, looking at this as a kind of fractal level of curation, even within your east coast gangster rap community, there are still going to be a variety of people who think a number of different things about the world at large; and, unless you have an algorithmic feed inside of that community, you will see those varied models of the world blossom.
What happens when you fully go down the algorithmic feed rabbit hole is that, if someone in east coast gangster rap disagrees with you on some other unrelated axis--or they are simply boring to you--they will get increasingly filtered away by the algorithm, leaving you alone in your misleadingly-cacophonous bubble.
I'm on a locals hiking mail list. We share things like when the kokanee are running. That doesn't get blasted to 20,000 people with zero interest but who will go because they saw it in the equivalent of the local 'what to do this weekend' section of the newspaper. Society has arranged itself so that there is very little to do without spending money. And so those few things of beauty, free, and semi easy to get to get 'devoured' by a very hungry populace.
But on the hiking/biking app I have no fear sharing trails because the 'social media' people on the app are only going to trails they can get to within 2 minutes of the highway. People that are going on a 2 hour mountain hike that requires an hour of fire road driving self select out. Plus if we don't get enough people going the trails get overgrown so I need exposure. I am only sharing because I want something out of it (enough traffic to keep the trail accessible) and I don't share my favorite trails outside of the mail list. Social media companies have made sure their experience is purely transactional at this point, not 'connective', but things like selective highly connecting discords/email lists exist and very much connect people in healthy ways.
Online "communities" often fail at both. They allow any rando to show up (or even encourage them to do so via algorithms), and there are no barriers to entry or consequences for leaving.
As a species, we need a wider exploration of how to structure online spaces in a way that builds and sustains social capital instead of usurping it. That's difficult to do with out resorting to censorship and ideological totalitarianism. And it's probably not compatible with the ad-funded addiction-driven business model of most modern platforms.
One historical example of note here is Wikipedia. It was a complete failure as a for-profit product, but it skyrocketed in significance when it opened up and adopted the relatively new social interaction model of the wiki.
I'm not sure what the solution is beyond niche little forums (tribes) that somehow tip toe the line of having the website be supported at all and also not growing too big to be of much interest for advertising and other forms of propaganda. And even then, how do you discover these little tribes? All the discovery mechanisms for internet content today are centralized or gated away from the upstart individual. Search engines, social media, even advertising in the meatspace takes serious capital. People don't have their own sites with webrings linking to other sites anymore. They have social media profiles and even then most people just lurk after highschool and college vs use it to share actual content or ideas. Search engines favor directing you to mass media and social media results for queries rather than small sites and forums.
I feel like what is left of these niche interest and niche forums are doomed to die out in a few generations, since its so hard to actually come up into this world and find these refuges on the web unless you knew about them from years ago when the internet was smaller and signal to noise ratios were much higher. Kids today aren't even interested in using the web, let alone a desktop OS. At least there are still computer science college programs but who knows how long that will be the case everywhere in the chatGPT/cut everything era we find ourselves in.
The piece says Carr believes reality can’t compete with "the internet’s steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral rewards".
I disagree. I do think one remedy is reality. I remember turning the corner into St Peter's Basilica and facing the Pietà. Now, I'm not one for being moved by statues, but tears immediately started streaming down my face. I'll never forget this moment. It's seared into my brain.
I'm not saying you have to go to Rome. I'm not saying go travel the world. I'm saying it might be as simple as not pulling out your cell phone (i.e. "the medium") during the concert you're going to tonight.
The process of engaging with the Real World, is a constant choice. With the busy lives we lead, it is much easier to operate in "default mode", as David Foster Wallace put it (in his "what is water?" commencement speech at Kenyon College).
It takes less than a minute to go from opening an Instagram account to "connecting" (following) with someone and see their semi-nude photos
My sense is that we're in the middle of a phase-transition, and the unhappiness and dislocation that people feel is because the old world (shared cultural context) is dying, but the new world hasn't yet been born.
Our generation will have the hardest time because we have a foot in both worlds.
So I think you are correct that we are transitioning to a new "phase", but I disagree with the implication that things will be better once the transition is over. They could be worse!
Without mass media, how did people share an experience? Do you mean sharing with your friends/family/church? If so, isn't that option still available post-transition?
Or is your point that social media destroys personal interactions, so the next generation is left with nothing (kind of like porn destroying healthy sex lives)? If so, then I agree the future might be worse.
But it's also possible that social interactions are changing, and it is only because they are different for us that we think of it as "worse". Moreover, society hasn't yet had a chance to adapt to the new technology, so we don't know exactly what social interactions will be like in the future. It could be that kids tomorrow will learn to adapt to social media just as our generation learned to adapt to TV.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/common-worlds-com...
1. We value a shared culture because that's what we're used to. There's no guarantee that future generations will agree.
2. Shared cultural values also have downsides, and depending on your perspective, the downsides might outweigh the benefits.
I'm not sure I fully agree with the conclusion, though, that we can't change the tech and can only change ourselves. I think there's a lot of room to explore variations on tech that are healthier for us and for society. Adding friction as mentioned in the article is one example, but I think there's more we can come up with if we treat our attentional and societal health as a primary goal.
This probably does, to some extent, involve changing ourselves too. Frictionlessness and seamlessness are comfortable, and rejecting those will probably always involve some conscious effort. But we don't have to do it all alone, as individuals! Those of us with the skills to do so can try to build healthier tools so that people have alternatives when they go looking.
Unless it's right next to a big university campus, and their friends are there, it's amazing and sad how few people show any interest in adding some free, open-to-the-public natural beauty to their lives.
From the article's description (of #superbloom), I'd say that nobody actually wanted beauty in their lives. But everybody wanted to visit a trending-now location ASAP.
When I go and help do ecological restoration, very few people are around. Some paths go by these areas, but no one stops. They're going somewhere. I don't blame them; my days are packed too.
My local subreddit is FULL of people wondering where these places are. They hate living in the city because it's ugly or they miss rural life. Some even ask how to help. No new volunteers show up, though. No uptick in people visiting these areas.
We've got this one beautiful ravine that needs so much work done, and we can't really get funding or a go-ahead at all until it's clear we'll have the resources. This means volunteers who have stuck around for a few jobs and expressed an intent to return. We've got around 10 people, but would need more like 20. I'm not sure it's possible. We put up signs, put out social media, get people in the group to reach into their network. No luck.
If people won't visit the beautiful places, what are the chances they'll help restore the parts that need our help? It's rough. Oh well, just have to keep at it. It makes a real difference.
Oh, yes. I'm in a local volunteer group here. We have just under 1,800 "members" on Meetup - supposedly interested in regularly doing Good Deeds with us.
But there are less than 18 members who ever show up and do things. Evidently the other ~1,782 had Good Intentions...that mysteriously vanished when they clicked "Join". Or only care about polishing their online images. Or something.
A great many things were different back in the early '90's. One of which was that branding yourself as a volunteer do-gooder required you to actually show up and do some work. Somehow, our group had far more actual workers back then.
The most successful group around here has about that many volunteers (I’m one of them), but they’re focused on a huge range of land trusts outside of the city. Given the city is small, it still seems insane that so few people want to contribute. My kids have no interest. Friends have no interest. But it’s literally the only way things get better…
For example. A creek nearby smells awful and is full of drug paraphernalia and garbage. The city has expressed with clarity that they aren’t touching it.
The only solution is people like you and I taking a Saturday to clean it. Yet we’re not actually allowed to unless the city approves it (more specifically the Parks branch), which requires meeting their criteria such as number of people involved, short enough time frames, available expertise, etc.
Sometimes I think I might just go guerilla and pull a bunch of crap out on my own, take it to the dump on my own, whatever.
Okay, I got that out of my system. If you have any advice on making groups like this more effective, I’m all ears.
Bringing coffee and muffins to the work events certainly helps.
I know people from the bay area would see my posts get all excited then sad when they learned where I live now and too far away, and none of them were trending or made to look cool by boring old me.
However I think smaller urban/suburban trails have probably never been more popular. You know the sort of 1-3 mile loop in the hills or woods trails with a convenient parking lot. Those are filled with trail runners, dog walkers, people pushing strollers, etc.
But anyone who thinks it's new should go back and read the first part of The Anatomy of Melancholy; there, a fictionalized Democritus, accused of insanity, turns the accusation back on the world at large, citing a surprisingly large and still relevant list of issues: information overload, self-serving politicians, charlatans, rubes, general bullshit. The phenomenon of meteoria goes back that far and further. I'm actually curious whether Carr cites Burton!
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
If you believe social media is tearing us apart, a significant chunk of responsibility lies on his shoulders. (We knew shared cultural context matters, but by Jove, "Filter Bubbles" was a term that could be milked for book deals, so milk he did)
>The term filter bubble was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser circa 2010. In Pariser's influential book under the same name, The Filter Bubble (2011), it was predicted that individualized personalization by algorithmic filtering would lead to intellectual isolation and social fragmentation.[1]
Ctrl+F for "carr" on the "filter bubble" wiki reveals two instances of "carrots". Similarly, Ctrl+F for "bubble" on Carr's Wiki returns 0 results. The book Carr is most famous for was based on an article that he wrote two years prior to Pariser coining the term, and was published the same year the term was coined. His following two books also don't seem to be riding on some kind of "filter bubble" coattail (I mean, unless you've found a way to connect his next book, a 2014 release about automation, to filter bubbles!). It was Pariser who published "The Filter Bubble" a year later.
Essentially, what you've done is written this piece off entirely based on a false assumption, and suggested that others do the same.
by Marshall McLuhan, as noted here:
We still always have the option today of connecting with real people in the real world, as much as or more so than we have at any time in our history, while also being able to use social media and other related technologies to connect with distant family or friends in ways that are completely unique to a modern context.
This duality is a fundamental good, because it allows for new options from more contexts than ever before.
Yes, there are difficulties with social media and some people misuse these technologies in ways that emotionally harm them, but people who misdirect their efforts to socialize with others and balance their emotional lives have always existed, albeit with fewer options than today for staying in touch.
One can choose who to reach out to, and the presence of social media doesn't make it any less important or more difficult to simply choose people who are capable of caring. Those who don't care for contact are no more the case no than they were before digital connectivity was a thing in human society.
As for social media and misinformation? Give me a break. Legacy media has a vast, long, torrid and dirty history of spreading propaganda on an industrial scale, with few avenues for finding out differently, and they hate losing control of that, so now we get contrived fears about misinformation from the same industry that promoted yellow journalism and absurdly grotesque beliefs upon the public for many, many decades.
Politicians and other social actors have taken up this same banner of fear mongering for their own pet reasons and interests, and at least some segments of the wider public have swallowed these fears without giving them proper analytical context. Shameful.
At least now, the very fact that nearly anyone can post nearly anything allows for those who have better information, closer sources and more reasoned insights to spread their points with no controlling middlemen, even if they need to swim among tides of charlatans and conspiracy nuts. That however is a price to be paid for the democratization of access to instantly posting anything for worldwide access.