aSocialMedia

aSocialMedia

Superbloom

How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

Nicholas Carr 2025 . Beaverton Lib 302.231 CARR

• Nicholas 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

• 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

  • Flowergeddon

• Well, duh, Crowds Are Stupid

• Many references to "our phones"

• p7 Charles Horton Cooley 1864-1929

• p9 John Durham Peters 1958- Harold Innes 1909-1985 Marshall McCluhan 1911-1980 Neil Postman 1931-2003

• p15 Mark Zuckerberg Facebook

• p24 George Carlin's Filthy Words

• p33 Roy Olmstead wiretaps

• p36 Titanic 1912 barrage of fake radio signals from clueless amateurs

• p37 Radio Act of 1912

• p40 Radio Act of 1927 Federal Radio Commission

• p41 Federal Communications Commission 1934

• p43 National Association of Broadcasters

• p43 fairness doctrine 1949

• 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.

• p86 David Henkin The Postal Age 2006

• p88 Theodor Adorno

  ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[ ]] [[