aSocialMedia
Superbloom
How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
Nicholas Carr 2025 . Beaverton Lib 302.231 CARR
- 2004 book: Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage
- 2008 book: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google
- 2010 book: The Shallows
- 2014 book: The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
- 2016 book: Utopia Is Creepy: and Other Provocations
Many references to "our phones" ... prefer email and letters. No dodopaddle, carry an ancient pushbutton phone for emergencies. Still, it is important to know what's shriveling the psyches of half the world; the Carr book sheds some light.
Prologue: Poppies
p1 Walker Canyon 70 miles (I10/I15) southeast of Los Angeles
24yo vlog "influencer" Jaci Marie Smith posted photo among poppies hashtag #superbloom
"On March 1" (2019) hoards of others blocked traffic and trashed the site and nearby Lake Elsinore communities
Well, duh, Crowds Are Stupid
Ch. 1: A More Perfect Liquefaction
p9 John Durham Peters 1958- Harold Innes 1909-1985 Marshall McCluhan 1911-1980 Neil Postman 1931-2003
p15 Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
Ch. 2: Privacy and the Public Interest
p33 Roy Olmstead wiretaps
p36 Titanic 1912 barrage of fake radio signals from clueless amateurs
p41 Federal Communications Commission 1934
p43 fairness doctrine 1949
Ch. 3: The Feed
p47 Committee for National Morale 1940
p54 Claude Shannon A Mathematical Theory of Communication 1948
- "esoteric" sez nonscientist nonengineer Carr
p59 J. C. R. Licklider 1962 foresaw internet and GUI
Arpanet/Internet and GUI
no mention of The Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart in 1968
- Born Portland 1925 OSU EE 1948, UCB MS 1953, PhD 1955, died of Alzheimer's in Atherton 2013 - I wish I had met him
p65 Facebook News Feed many angry, huge success
- p76 industrialization of communication
p77 Caleb Scharf 2021 The Ascent of Information
- "implicit in such calculations is a belief that the only information that counts is information that can be encoded and transmitted by machines"
- conflation of "count" and "countable". Digital information is countable, a smile isn't. Those doing the counting are allocating resources, hopefully fairly, but probably profitably. If you get something for free, you are the product. If you pay for it yourself, you should choose what you pay for.
a lot of "we" statements. What do you mean we, white man? - an essay by Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner which I'd never be aware of without the Internet.
Ch.4: Fast Talking, Fast Thinking
p86 David Henkin The Postal Age 2006 PSU HE6371.H46 2006
- p93 by 2010, teenagers sent eight texts per waking hour, far more often than F2F
p94 texting is faster, cult of concision says John McWhorter
- p99 What we sacrifice are depth and rigor. Reactive rather than reflective
p100 Daniel Kahneman System 1 rather than controlled, deliberative System 2
Ch.5: Antipathies
p102 Ebbe Ebbeson UCSD 1975 Spatial Ecology neighbors more likely friends, but EVEN MORE LIKELY ENEMIES
p105 Michael I. Norton 2007 Less is more: the lure of ambiguity, or why familiarity breeds contempt
- p107 Self-disclosure gets riskier as it gets deeper
p107 John Suler online disinhibition effect oversharing is the new norm
p110 Sherry Turkle Reclaiming Conversation social media "anti-empathy machine"
- p111 empathy is quality, not quantity
p111 Irwin Altman Dalmas A. Taylor Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships PSU HM132.A38
- p112 at any stage, conflicts can arise, fall back to earlier stage, or to acrimony
- p113 revelation may be rewarding, bus psychically costly. "penetration" an act of love, or violation
p114 Altman privacy regulation theory
- p115 removing boundaries sets stage for discord, not harmony
p115 Georg Simmel 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life
p117 Ian Bogost The Age of Social Media is Ending
- notes page 245 says "... Media is Over" rather than "... Media is Ending"
Ch. 6: The Democratization Fallacy
Medium of the Masses - summary of a 2020's snapshot ... but the fat lady ain't sung yet ...
- p118 list of four social and political problems
- how do those problems compare to the consequences of Gutenberg's printing press and 1450s Gutenberg Bible? IMHO, that fueled the Protestant Reformation, modern science, and a Metric Crapton of wars.
- You Cannot Do Only One Thing.
- p119 Broadcasting and publishing were largely in the hands of a small group of for-profit companies.
- BULLSHIT. Like most distributions, a few publishing elephants and innumerable mice. Mice grow and merge into elephants, inflate, and die. In 2025, the BIG problem is monopoly-model search engines like Google, but as those edge towards "push" instead of "answer the question asked", they are one new paradigm away from AOL irrelevance.
p121 Francis Cairncross 1997 book "The Death of Distance" PSU HE7631.C34 2001b
p124 Yochai Benkler The Wealth of Networks PSU HM851.B457 2006
- I recall purchasing the print book, but cannot find it on my shelves. I fear that I donated it to the Internet Archive, foolishly assuming it would always be available to me and also shared with others. It is currently being held prisoner by the Copyright Pigs. As I write this, used copies are available for $2.19+$3.98 from Amazon Marketplace, but inches of shelf space are not.
p125 Cass Sunstein 2001 Republic.com PSU HM851.S87 2001
- Republic.com 2.0 2007 PSU HM851.S8728 2007
p129 Walter Lippmann New Republic magazine 1914
- p130 During WW1, Lippman wrote leaflets convincing German soldiers to desert army for good treatment as POWs
ref Walter Lippmann book U.S. Foreign Policy Shield of the Republic online
p131 Walter Lippmann 1922 book Public Opinion online
p133 Walter Lippmann 1925 book The Phantom Public Multco 303.38 L766p 1993
- p133 "average citizen: impossible task unobtainable ideal .. of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen"
- Missing the picture - a citizen is not a complete isolated unit, nor an externally assigned component of complete unit. A citizen is a situationally motivated (and ideally self-assigned volunteer in many temporary collaborations, in parallel, where "temporary" may span a lifetime or a the raise of an eyebrow. Unlike a component in a machine, a citizen can and SHOULD choose her collaborations, and relinquish them for others when better opportunities seem to arise.
- "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines" - Emerson
p134 Herbert Simon's "bounded rationality" ... how about "woven rationality": a fabric of wispy 1 inch fibers twisted into one mile threads on a spool. The "human threads" are a glorious rainbow of unique colors, rather than bland featureless monocolor. Threads woven into fabrics, fabrics shaped into sheets and shirts and sails, all depending on the diverse strengths and crosswise twisty orientation of all those uniquely-positioned fibers.
p134 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
p135 Christopher Achen Larry Bartels Democracy for Realists WCCLS 321.8 ACHEN Cmill Tig Hills-Brook
p135 Zac Gershberg Sean Illing 2012 The Paradox of Democracy
- the most knowledgeable voters are prone to biased decisions
p135 Daniel A. Yudkin The Perception Gap: How False Impressions Are Pulling Americans Apart
- "well-educated" Democrats avoid Republicans, choose less diverse friends, inaccurate views of disagreeing others
p136 Donald R. Kinder Nathan P. Kalmoe Neither Liberal of Conservative
Charles Cooley Susan Blackmore
- p139 Familiarity breeds gullibility
- p139 Social media creed of repetition, the mob, the huckster, the tyrant
- p139 Victor Klemperer, "The Language of the Third Reich" 2006 p39 Multco 430.9043 K648L 2006
p140 Twitter retweet button, programmer Chris Wetherell website now San Francisco, formerly Beaverton Oregon
- p143 Facebook users share/retweet posts denigrating "the other side" twice as often as about the ingroup. Anger and outrage and mocking accumulates.
- p143 Facebook public policy chief Joel Kaplan curbed some devisive content, rejected other recommendations
p144 Chris Bail Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing Tigard 302.231 BAI essay
p144 Siva Vaidhyanathan Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us And Undermines Democracy Tigard 302.231 VAI
- p146 devisiveness human nature, platforms aren't the cause
p146 The Federalist Papers : No. 10 The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man ... A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points ... divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good
p147 internet founder apologies: Evan Williams Twitter co-founder, Chamath Palihapitya Facebook Sean Parker Facebook Justin Rosenstein Google Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
p147 64% of Americans say social media have a mostly negative effect
- p148 Internet nostalgia, lost paradise ... or human maladaption to speed?
p150 John Dewey The Public and Its Problems PSU 3rdFl JC251.D47 1946
- p151 "Dewey told us what we want to hear. Lippmann told us what we need to hear."
Ch. 7: The Dislocated I
- p155 2020 March 10 WHO declares pandemic, social media increases
p156 Amazon Twitch 1.7 billion hours in May
p157 Patricia Lockwood No One Is Talking About This novel about social media
p157 Nicholas Carr How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds WSJ 2017
p158 Charles Cooley Human Nature and the Social Order the looking glass self
p158 The imaginations which people have of one another atre the solid facts of society.
p160 George Herbert Mead 1913 The Social Self also 1934 Mind, Self, and Society
p160 Erving Goffman 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life PSU HM291.G6 1959
- we frame our behavior to influence the perceptions of others When "between performances", we attend to our inner voice. Essential to a healthy cohesive psyche
p161 Joshua Meyrowitz No sense of place : the impact of electronic media on social behavior PSU HM258 .M49 1985 Offsite
- "Electronic media destroy the specialness of place and time" "What is happening almost anywhere can be happening wherever we are"
p163 passeggiata a leisurely walk or stroll, especially one taken in the evening
p163 disembodiment -> disorientation and dysphoria
p163 Jia Tolentino [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trick_Mirror | Trick Mirror ]] 2019 Bvt Lib 973.93 TOL
p164 danah boyd 2007 None of this is Real: Identity and Participation in Friendster
p164 Michael Wesch YouTube and you: Experiences of self-awareness in the context collapse of the recording webcam
- p165 Young people shifted from Facebook to other platforms with selective access
- p166 Typical internet user has 8 or 9 social media accounts, double the number a decade ago. Continuous preoccupation.
p167 Jean Baudrillard 1996 The Perfect Crime
p167 Dorothy Smith 1990 Texts, Facts, and Femininity Exploring the Relationships of Ruling : PSU HM24.S53923 1990
- seemingly finds it noteworthy that we interact through documents ... or something
p169 Kwame Anthony Appiah The Lies That Bind 2018 WS TIG lib 302.5 APPIAH
- contemporary character was defined by extrinsic markers, not social identity ... or something
- this section makes no sense to me, perhaps because I am a nerd ... or something
- p170 when kids interact online, they don't go out much
- p170-171
age 15 to 24 |
2012 |
2018 |
|
enjoy dangerous things |
50% |
38% |
|
like to take risks sometimes |
46% |
34% |
danger and risk stats swapped??? |
socializing in person with friends |
133 |
67 |
minutes per day |
social activities |
238 |
189 |
minutes per day |
prefer screen to in-person |
1/2 |
2/3 |
|
feel lonely |
23% |
42% |
|
do not enjoy life |
<25% |
~50% |
|
major episode of depression |
8% |
16% |
|
self harm +188% girls, +37% boys |
|||
p173 Jean Twenge 2023 book Generations Bvtn+5 305.2 TWE
- p176 fake Tourettes, mass social media-induced illness "sociogenic transmission of affliction"
Ch. 8: Machines Who Speak
p180 1917, 51yo William Butler Yeats married 25yo Georgie Hyde-Lees, honeymoon near Sussex
p180 Ashdown Forest inspired A. A. Milne's Hundred Acre Wood
- p181 3 years, hundreds of seances, thousands of pages of spirit writing, inspired Yeat's poems
p181 Carr's analogy to Large Language Models
p182 John Durham Peters Speaking into to the Air PSU P90.P388 1999 (unavail?)
p183 2022 OpenAI ChatGPT Sam Altman risk of extinction
p183 Yann LeCun 2023 "AI Doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion, complete with prophecies of imminent fire and brimstone caused by an omnipotent entity that doesn't actually exist" twitter April 1 2023
- p184 grandiosity, hubris, and self-aggrandizement
p185 Stephen Wolfram Feb14 2023 What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?
p185 Ted Chiang 2023 Feb 9 ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
- p186 Chatbot "hallucinations" - like a compression algorithm followed by interpolation
- p187 "ChatGPT Renoirish painting of an anteater riding a motorcycle through Disney World"
- come ON, people ... where is that image?
p187 Vauhini Vara Ghosts
p188 My Fair Bot: AI doppleganger, assistant, familiar
p192 Spike Jonze Her "You seem like a person but you're just a voice in a computer" "You'll get used to it"
p198 Bobby Chesney Danielle Citron 2019 Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security
p199 Yuri Mirolyubov Book of Veles forgery
p201 Microsoft Tay 2016 corrupted replaced with Zo originally based on Microsoft Xiaoice 2014
p202 for sixhttps://www.amazon.com/Social-Photo-Photography-Media/dp/1788730917 months 50 contractors mistrained GPT-4 a thousand more retrained and armored it against mischief
The Atlantic magazine September 2023 Inside the Revolution by Ross Andersen (paywall)
- p202 OpenAI "socio-technical" filtered input data to remove offensive images and text
p203 Amazon Gemini Chatbot mistrained, generated images of women in 1800s Senate, Asians Blacks and women as 1943 Nazi soldiers
p204 Musk's X (renamed Twitter) large language model !xAI
- Musk reshaped Twitter to his biases
Ch. 9: World without World
p206 Mark Andreessen 1993 Mosaic 1995 Netscape Loudcloud -> Opsware
p207 2011 WSJ Software is eating the world 2023 blog AI will save the world
p207 The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen - Interviewed by a Retard Niccolo Soldo May 31, 2021
- p208 MA: tiny "Reality Privileged" elite, masses better off with virtual reality
p208 chiliastic fervor, transcendental consumerism
p209 Mark Zuckerberg Meta Horizon Worlds
- p210 Gaze is a register of attention
p211 superbloom Flowergeddon
p212 James R. Flynn 2012 Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century
- PSU BF431.F565 2012 / Central 153.9309 F6485a 2012
- p212 IQ scores rose as people learned to work puzzles mentally
p213 William Blake Blake Archive Songs of Innocence and of Experience
p214 Nathan Jurgenson 2019 The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media
p215 Jean Baudrillard 1976 Symbolic Exchange and Death
p216 Shoshana Zuboff 2019 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism CMill Tig +5 306.3 ZUB
- hijacked, kidnapped, manipulated ... no says Carr, we are complicit and having fun
p217 we explore environment "from nuts to knowledge" Jaak Panksepp
p218 TV -> social media active participation
p219 Jane McGonigal 2011 Reality is Broken Cmill 306.487 MCGONIGAL
p220 Antón Barba-Kay 2023 A Web of Our Own Making
p221 John Dewey 1927 The Public and Its Problems
Ch. 10: Dr. Johnson's Rock
p222 1952 Oct 19 Frank Walsh shoots television NYT
p223 appeared on game show Strike It Rich and won a TV.
- p224 European law provide citizens with more control, but behavior remains the same.
p225 Brett Frischmann Susan Benesch 2023 Friction-In-Design Regulation
- p227 Enforced Friction. Free speech concerns? How about offshoring concerns?
p229 George Berkeley 1710 Treatise concerning the Principles of Knowledge
p229 described as ingenious sophistry by James Boswell to Samuel Johnson, who kicked (stomped?) a stone to "refute it thus".
p230 Rodney Brooks when a robot explores the world like a child, "the need for symbolic representations soon fades entirely"
- cite 9, which references a seemingly nonexistent IEEE Spectrum article