Familiarity Breeds Contempt (And Other Underappreciated Consequences of Digital Communication)
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There's been a lot of cultural discussion of the way digital technologies and social media contribute to things like political polarization and adolescent depression.

But as I'll explore with Nicholas Carr, the author of Superblue, our digital tools are also changing our ability to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways. Today on the show, Nicholas unpacks why the optimistic idea that more communication is always better hasn't panned out and how the speed and volume of modern communication is overwhelming our human capacity to process information and maintain meaningful relationships. We discuss why the messiness of pre-digital communication might have actually been better for us, how

how email has evolved from thoughtful letters to rushed messages, and why seeing more people online often makes us like them less. Nicholas also explains why having different versions of ourselves for different contexts was actually healthy, and the simple rubric for better managing our relationship with digital communication tools. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash communication. All right, Nicholas Carr, welcome back to the show.

Thanks. It's good to be back with you. So we had you on a long time ago to talk about your book, The Shallows, which was about how Google was changing our brains. This is like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You've got a new book out called Super Bloom, where you explore how our digital communication tools, whether it's text, social media, short form video, how that's changing the way we communicate, socialize, even just think of ourselves as a self in the world.

So the word social media has just become...

It's just a common word we throw around. And I think a lot of people might think, oh, social media, that phrase was an invention of the late 20th, early 21st century, right? Social media did not exist until Mark Zuckerberg came up with Facebook. But you talk about there was a 19th century thinker who coined the term social media. His name's Charles Horton Cooley. Tell us about this guy. What was his big idea when it came to communication tools and how we interact with one another?

Well, Charles Horton Cooley, he was born in the 1860s in Michigan. He started out as an academic economist, but he ended up becoming one of the earliest American sociologists, founded the University of Michigan's sociology department.

And the question he set out to answer, the question that really interested him is, why does society change? And in 1897, he wrote this very interesting, very obscure at this point, article about that subject. And he went through various possibilities. He talked about genetics and stuff like that. But ultimately, he decided that the biggest force that changes society is changes in communication technology, changes in the tools we use to communicate.

converse, to express ourselves, to exchange information and so forth. And in that article, and when I read it, I was kind of amazed. He uses the term social media. And as far as I can tell, it's the first time it's been used. And what he meant by it was that communication technologies allow us to form groups that are independent of location. So, you know, in the past, before we had the

mail system and the telegraph and everything else, you know, your social group was whoever happened to be around you in the real world. But he saw that as new technologies allow us to interact with people far away, we can form all sorts of groups without any spatial or even temporal boundaries. And he called these groups social mediums or social media in general.

And so that, you know, looking at his work and particularly his stress on the importance of communication technologies, he called them communication mechanisms, in shaping society was one of the real inspirations for the book. And what's interesting, his ideas that he had in the 19th century, it seems like later thinkers about media and communication, we're talking like Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman, they kind of picked up on these ideas, correct?

Absolutely. I mean, I don't know if they were inspired by Cooley, but you know,

50, 70 years before they started looking at this, Cooley had already come to this conclusion. And I mean, what characterizes McLuhan's most famous saying, of course, is the medium is the message. And by that, he meant that we focus on the bits of content that come through communication systems, media systems. But really, it's the technology itself that shapes the way we speak, who we speak to, even how we think.

And that's very much what Cooley was talking about, you know, at the end of the 19th century, that to paraphrase his belief, it's that, you know, when mechanisms of communication change, society changes independent of the content that's coming through those mechanisms.

How did he see society changing? So what happened? Did he make any observations about that as we move from, say, an oral communication society where we just talked to the people who are around us around the fire pit or in the town village? How did culture or society change as we introduce letter writing or the telegraph, et cetera? Cooley saw that...

New communication technologies do two things. They change the way influence flows among people. And that just means the patterns of the way information go from one person to another. Certainly when you have electronic or electric communications, everything speeds up and you can cast your voice or hear the voices of other people far away instantaneously. But

But also it changes, and this is what I was talking about before, it changes how people form relationships and form social groups. And these can be people in the distance. They can be people who wrote books a long time ago. And so what he saw, and I think this was very prescient, he used the term social.

That as information speeds up and as we can talk to people far away and they can hear us and there's all these flows of influence and association, that society would come to liquefy.

And what he meant by that was, you know, when you're just talking to people who are around you in the same place at the same time, then you have a lot of social structure. You have a lot of institutions. You have a lot of traditions and they're all, you know, sustained through these tight communities.

The more you break down those kind of barriers, the more chaotic society becomes. And it becomes rather than kind of this concrete thing that changes very, very slowly, society starts to act more like a liquid and it changes much, much quicker.

Yeah, and you can see this if you do sort of a genealogy of communication tools. Like, let's say the introduction of the printing press. Because of the introduction of the printing press, like, you had the Reformation. You had all these changes in what we're thinking about religion, and you had these splinter groups, and then you also had

the rise of nation states and people thinking about freedom and individual rights, that wasn't happening before the printing press, that new form of communication that allows you to speak across space and time.

Right. And one of the implications of that, and McLuhan in particular is pretty good on that, about that, is that suddenly an individual can determine kind of their own knowledge base and their own intellectual activities. Because suddenly you can read and listen to people from all over the place and you can start selecting which ideas are important to you. Right.

And what the argument is, is that this, in addition to all the social changes, this led to the rise of individualism. We started to think of ourselves as kind of self-created because we weren't locked into the traditions and the words of people in our immediate surroundings. We kind of took control of our own intellectual lives and that changed

us as individual persons. We started to think much more about ourselves as individuals, but also became another big, broad force in reshaping society when you move from very tight-knit communities to a huge civilization of individuals who think of themselves as individuals. Yeah. And then, you know,

going on to that theory that he had is as communication speeds up, everything's more fluid. I mean, we, I think we've all seen that if we've been on the internet for the past 25 years, uh,

It just seems like there's just constant change because of the rapidity of digital communication. Right. And there's this weird combination of individualism and also clannishness as people join groups very, very quickly. And again, following Cooley and McLuhan and Neil Postman, if you look at the technology itself...

you see that the technology is there, exists to speed up the flow of information, the flow of conversation. And that has a very interesting effect on human nature because I don't think...

I don't think the human psyche is well suited to exchanging information and expressing oneself in gathering information at the kind of speed and volume that the internet and social media kind of overwhelms us with all the time.

Yeah, and that's the big argument of your book. You talk about how Cooley, you know, he sees this idea of how our communication changes cultures. As it gets faster, things liquefy. And he had an optimistic view of this. Like, well, this is actually a good thing. Yeah. And then you talk about how later social media founders like Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook kind of,

They probably didn't know they were picking up on Cooley, but they picked up on that idea that the more you can communicate, the more you can talk to people, to different people from different backgrounds, from across the world, that is always a net positive. There's no downsides to it. What you're doing in Super Bloom is like, well, okay, yeah, there's some good things that come from this ability to communicate fast in a wide-ranging way, but there are downsides to this. And this is what you explore in the book.

Right. And so if you look, you know, through the history of modern electric communications from the telegraph to the telephone to radio, TV, fax machines and onto the Internet and social media, every new communication technology that makes communication more efficient is greeted as technology.

in utopian terms. So people think, oh, since communication is the way you learn about other people and you gain an understanding of other cultures and you can negotiate or go through diplomacy and stuff, that means that communication is kind of a naturally good thing. And if communication is a naturally good thing, then more communication must be even better.

And you see this again, as I say, over and over again. And I can in the book, I go through many quotes of this utopianism from the moment the telegraph was invented to the Internet came along to Mark Zuckerberg playing up, you know, how sharing on Facebook would bring the world together. And my argument is that that.

gets it wrong. You can see why we believe that. It's all wrapped up in our sense of ourselves as unique creatures because we can communicate in ways that other animals, for instance, can't. And it's also wrapped up in the very popular idea of a marketplace of ideas. The intellectual marketplace operates like a marketplace of goods.

If you can create more supply, then people have more choices and they'll get rid of the bad stuff and they'll choose the good stuff. And so there's all these kind of assumptions we make about more communication being better communication. But what I argue is if you actually look through history, and even if you look at our own recent experience, you see a very different picture. That yes, communication can be very, very good. And in fact, society is built of communication.

But when you speed up communication too much, when you increase the volume of communication too much, it starts to become overwhelming. And you create a conflict, I think, between human nature and our ability to make sense of things and to deal with messages and information in the technology. And I think that's what we're seeing today. But I think you can see that, as I say, throughout recent history. I mean, I'll give you a quick story that I relate in the book.

When telegraph and telephone emerged, people like Nikola Tesla, the great inventors, Marconi, the inventor of radio, and lots of other people, religious figures, said, oh, this is going to create a world of understanding. We're all going to communicate instantaneously so we can work out our problems quickly. And this is the end of war. And Marconi made that proclamation in 1912. And of course, two years later, 1914, World War I broke out.

And if you read the history of World War I, one of the messages that comes out of here is that these new communication technologies, rather than kind of

restraining people from going to war at that time actually hastened the outbreak of the war. And it's because the war was set off by the assassination of Austrian Archduke. And when that happened, instead of going the old-fashioned route where diplomats would travel to different capitals and sit down together and try to hash out

the problems and come to some solution, suddenly all these messages from all the capitals started flowing through telegraph lines and telephone lines and it kind of overwhelmed diplomacy and it soon turned into threats and other things. And what historians say is that the acceleration of communication actually was one of the causes of the war. So exactly the opposite effect when you actually look at what happens from what everyone expected

And yet, unfortunately, we didn't learn from that example because if you go through radio and TV and the internet and stuff, you see that same kind of very optimistic, even utopian belief that more communication will be better for society. And we've all seen that.

play out. Faster communication is the more communication you get online. I think initially thought, oh, this will just bring new understanding, new viewpoints, new vistas. And instead we're just really angry at each other and just, you know, and it's funny that idea of, you know, more communication isn't necessarily better. I think that we've had a marriage counselor on the podcast before talk about, there's this idea in a marriage of a marriage is having problems.

Like you just got to more communication. You got to communicate, communicate, communicate. And he said, he's like, sometimes more communication isn't actually good. Cause you just end up talking about the problems more and more and more instead of,

Just kind of, okay, maybe there's some things we can't change here and we move on. So yeah, let's talk about what we can do and learn from history about maybe the benefits of slowing down our communication, having a little bit more friction. And you talk about in the 20th century when we had this development of different modes of communication. There was radio, there was television, there was telephone, there was newspaper, print. There was actually a lot of variety involved.

in the 20th century and the mediums we can choose. And I think we all picked up on that. Well, with certain mediums, there were certain types of thinking we did with that. But I think we forget that because today our whole information medium is just online. And I think online mediums can kind of encourage a certain type of thinking. Can you walk us through like that variety that we once had with communication and maybe some of the benefits that came with that?

Yeah. So now we've all gotten used to digital media and to the smartphone as information delivery device.

And because computers, which are obviously at the center of this, are general purpose information processors, that means they can do pretty much everything that's ever been done through communication systems and media. So, you know, basically people use their phone as their newspaper. It's their radio. It's their TV. It's their camera and their photo album. It's their post office. It's even their telephone sometimes. And we look back to the pre-digital world. I'll call it analog media.

When we look back, we see it as kind of a mess because you couldn't do everything through one tool and one network. There were all sorts of networks involved and all sorts of devices. You subscribed to a print newspaper that came in the morning. You got some magazines that came weekly or monthly. You had a telephone on the wall, a dial telephone that you'd use to call up people when you needed to talk to people who weren't in your immediate vicinity. You had

You had radio, you had TV, you had record players and records and tapes. So you had all of this diverse set of specialized analog media. And as I say, we look back at that now and see it as a mess and say, oh, thank goodness the internet came along and cleaned that all up so we can do everything through our phone or our computer.

But what I argue is that actually, I think the very messiness of analog media, and particularly the specialization of networks and tools and artifacts, actually had a huge benefit for us.

because it held back the flow of information. You know, it had been possible for, say, in the 1970s, it had been possible for 100 years to transmit information instantaneously, electronically.

But because of various physical constraints and constraints inherent in analog media, you couldn't do that. People had to go out and make choices. They had to say, you know, do I want to turn on the radio now and listen to the program? Do I want to turn on the TV? Do I want to put a record under the turntable? Do I want to pick up a newspaper? Do I want to pick up a book?

And having those specialized media and requiring people to make choices actually imposed a kind of discipline on the way we consumed media. We had to use our discretion. We had to make careful choices. You couldn't do everything all at once and you didn't want to. And I think that had ramifications for.

For how we communicate, for how we think about news, for how we think about entertainment, for how we think about art, there was separation among different forms of media. You know, some things we knew were more important than other things. Some things were truer than other things. So it gave us this discretion in this discipline that I think we've lost when everything comes at us in all forms all the time.

And we've gone from a world of messiness that was still at a human scale and required human decision making to kind of a cleanliness and efficiency that is no longer at human scale and kind of instead of us using the tools, the tools start to use.

Yeah. And that cleanliness or lack of friction with our digital tools, I think that's a source of a lot of the overwhelm or information overload people feel. It's like, man, I've got these feeds I subscribe to, Instagram feeds I got to keep up with, Twitter, email. It's just a glut and you just feel, I can't keep up with this. And I remember before digital tools, before smartphones, I

i don't know i just felt like my brain was a little bit more calm a little bit more chill i didn't feel overwhelmed like i do sometimes today so yeah that friction you know we've been trying to get rid of it because like we see friction particularly in silicon valley is this bad thing we got to get rid of that friction in our communication tools or medium consumption tools i think it just allowed us to i don't think slowly be more contemplative about what we're consuming

Yeah. And at the same time, also, because you couldn't do everything at once and you couldn't juggle dozens of information feeds, you actually were encouraged to pay more attention. Whether you were listening to a song or having a conversation with somebody on the phone or reading a newspaper or whatever, you know, that was what you were doing. You weren't also glancing at notifications on your phone. And so it just, it's a very different mindset or attitude that has basically been destroyed, I think, by digital media.

And it's sad. Yeah. And I think you're right. Like it's, it's a, we have a very surface level attention that we even carry over and on just how we consume news, but like how we interact with others, like our emails, we just kind of glance over them, text messages that, you know, maybe someone's trying to communicate and reach out to you because they're hurting, you know, that text message you're getting could be one of,

you know, 20 that are in your unread message section in your smartphone. And so you just kind of glance through it and you really can't, you can't do that sort of deep connection with that person, with that person needs because you don't have the ability, like your attention span can't withstand all the, the influx of stuff you're getting. Yeah. And it's kind of a consequence of the technology itself in order, in order to kind of stay afloat.

With all this information that's coming in, you have to be superficial. You have to make quick decisions and draw on your instinct rather than your reasoning and respond immediately. So it changes the depth of our engagement with information and with other people. I think it changes the way we talk. And I think it ultimately also changes the way we think. If you want to be successful in digital media, you can't think deeply or slowly about anything.

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Well, and you use this as an example of how our technology changes the way we think. Use this, well, McLuhan talked about this. He says whenever a new form of communication is introduced, whether that's letter writing or the telegraph or television or radio or email, we use that new form of communication the same way that we used a previous form of communication.

So like you use the example of email. Talk about that. Like I think if people were around when email was first introduced, they might remember they probably used email differently than they use. They use it today.

Absolutely. And I certainly remember that. And McLuhan had a great phrase. He said, we march backwards into the future. And you can see this with email because when email came along and became popular in whenever it was for most people in the 1980s or late 1980s, 1990s with, you know, AOL mail and Yahoo mail and stuff, people saw it as kind of a quicker electronic version of the mail system.

So they thought of emails as kind of letters in a different form. And I can certainly remember this myself. When you wrote an email to someone, you'd sit down and you'd approach it as if you were writing a letter. You know, you'd write dear so-and-so, and then you'd have some courtesies, and you'd write in full sentences, and you'd try to express yourself clearly, and you'd proofread it, and then you'd send it off. And that prevailed for a little while.

But then as more and more people got onto email and email began to be used for all sorts of things and displaced letters and stuff, suddenly we couldn't do that anymore because we had to keep up with the inbox. So you just didn't have time to sit down and compose a careful letter. You had to write quickly and often sloppily and kind of get your message across, but get it across in kind of the most efficient way.

way possible. So the technology itself changed the way we speak. And it wasn't only when we were sending emails to work colleagues or for some administrative purpose. It was how we talked to friends and family members. We got

blunter and blunter and more compressed and sloppier. And meanwhile, because the email was so efficient, we stopped writing letters. So the technology shaped the way we correspond with people, changed the very form of it, and made it, I think, much less intimate and much less careful and much less thoughtful. And again, it was because we had no choice. We had to keep up with an email inbox that never stopped growing.

My wife talks about that. She's noticed that. She's always like, remember my emails that I used to write? I wrote these just really long emails to my friends. We had these long correspondences and the emails would look like some letter that was written from the 19th century. Like you said, it had the courtesies and then there was a catch-up of what I've been up to. And then there would be this long exploration of an issue. I mean, they were really well done. And she says, I haven't written those type of

messages in a long time and she's like i feel like i'm missing something because i haven't because the act of writing a letter like that or an email like that it forces you to be self-reflective it forces you to contemplate what you're thinking and think about the other person in a deeper way than you do when you you know just send out these you know short bullet point missives

Right. And you certainly see that if you look back to when letters themselves, the mail became cheap enough that normal everyday citizens could actually write frequent letters. This was in like 1860, 1870. There's histories of that. And it became kind of central, not only to how people communicate, but kind of central to their lives. When

When you sat down to write a letter, you kind of isolated yourself from all the business of the world and all the distractions you had to go through. And it gave you time to kind of compose a narrative about your life. You wanted to tell people what you'd been up to and stuff. So you had to kind of shape it into a story and you had to think about what was important to you. So it was really, in addition to being a communication tool, this kind of long form writing to other people that you're

friendly with or our family members or other, whatever, kind of had a deep effect on our ability to think about life and put everything that was going on in our lives into some kind of context that made sense. And in the early days of email, I think that was also true, but that's all gone now. Yeah. And it's only gotten worse as we shifted our communication from email to text messages or social media updates. It's even more perfunctory.

Oh, yeah. And what amazes me, and I have a chapter in Superboom that's about this because I don't think it's been talked about enough, is...

is what's happened to personal correspondence. You know, now everybody's texting, going through messaging apps and stuff and their group texts and whatever. So even email now is going the way of the written letter. Email's too slow. Email's too slow. You know, it used to be the fast thing. Email's too slow. And what you see is just...

Nobody cares. It's full of typos. It's sloppy. There's no punctuation. You know, the application itself is messing things up with auto-complete algorithms and stuff, and people don't proofread it or anything. So it's

You can understand why this happened because it's so fast and so efficient. And yet it really tells us something about how we think about self-expression today and how we think about other people, that we can't be bothered to proofread a note because we have to be so fast. And it's a very apparent symbol of kind of the degradation of communication and self-expression and even a kind of lack of treating other people with courtesy when you can't even be bothered to

When you can just dash off these sloppy, strange notes full of emojis and autocomplete sentences and stuff and no punctuation. And yet we do it without even thinking about it now. Yeah, it's undignified. There's no dignity involved in it. Yeah, and you talk about this new form of communication we have with text messages that involves...

It's not just, we're not just using text, but we're also incorporating emojis, as you said, because the emojis are a shortcut for emotional expression. So in a letter, we would have had to write about, well, I'm feeling very sad and despondent. Instead, you just put the crying emoji or you can use like a GIF.

Right.

speaking to someone in person. Because when we speak with people in person, we do get perfunctory. You can shorten things, you can use slang, and you can do that because you're in the presence of that person physically. And so you're able to pick up on body language cues and things like that that you can't do online.

But because we're online, we try to replicate that same sort of communication with our digital tools. And it just something something gets lost in that translation. Yeah, I mean, and it's important to emphasize that it's not all bad. Being able to have a written communication system that is informal and casual and kind of replicates the way you talk to friends if you were out for an evening or something. That's a good thing. And in fact, I tell the story of how TechSpeak was invented. It was kind of invented online.

teenagers instant messaging in the late 1990s, sitting at the family PC with a bunch of instant IM windows open and having all these conversations. And when you're having that many conversations, you kind of have to compress language. So they very quickly learned how to shorten words and use initialisms and typed emoji and stuff. In some ways, this is kind of ingenious and it really worked.

The problem is that that kind of casual sort of oral communication has not only displaced a lot of person-to-person conversation, it's moved into all forms of communication. So it's displaced...

kind of the slower, more considered, more contemplative forms of correspondence. So if TechSpeak was just kind of digital orality and gave us the ability to chat, you know, casually with friends online, I think it would be fine. But under the pressure of having to keep up with so much information, we now use TechSpeak

It's kind of our basic language. And that to me is the problem. Yeah, text speak tends to be more reflexive and less reflective, right? Like you're kind of using that system one thinking that I guess Kahneman talked about, which is like fast, right? It's emotional. And that's why, you know, sometimes text messages or group chats can kind of go off the rails because people are just

reflexively reacting to things and they're not taking the time to use that sort of system to thinking of I need to think about this and let me contemplate a little bit about this. Let me reflect to make sure that I'm putting something out there that is measured. TechSpeak

does not encourage that. And the problem with like tech speak or digital orality, that sort of reflexive communication, I don't think it's much of a problem when you're face to face and sort of in real time with somebody because you have the thing, you might have this disagreement in a spat and then you can kind of patch things up and then you move on. And like, it's just that thing that happened, the interaction that happened is just in the past. Like you can't go back to it really, except in your brain. Um,

With digital orality or like this text speak, you have a permanent record of that ephemeral spat. And every time you open up your text messages, let's say you had a spat with a friend and you patched it up, but then you're going through your text messages again. You see it, that interaction you had, like, oh man, yeah, I don't like this guy. I'm going to dredge that up again. So text speak takes something that was once ephemeral, like oral speech, and basically makes a permanent record of it.

Right. Yeah. And that definitely makes it harder to kind of get over things because it's always there in front of you. And also, you know, another difference between quote unquote digital orality and actually having a conversation with a person is that when you're having a conversation with a person, a lot of information is communicated, not with words, but with gestures, with words.

you know, the look in people's eyes with how they're standing with their smiles and everything. And, you know, we underestimate the importance of all those gestures, all those physical signals. And you strip those out when you converse online, even if the language you're using might be similar to what you'd use if you were sitting around a table. And it's hard to add back with emojis or gifs or whatever. You can do maybe a little bit, but not, it's not the same thing.

Another thing you talk about is that social media or tech speak or this quick communication that we have, not only does it encourage us to be reflexive and just kind of have the surface level attention to the communication that we're having with others, it also allows us to be ever present in the lives of others and others to be ever present in ours. And it's also nudged us to reveal more and more about ourselves. Like you're supposed to be transparent and vulnerable as sort of the ethos of

What's been the effect of that constant exposure to each other via our phones or computers? Yeah, so social media rewards people for talking about themselves a lot.

that's how you get likes. That's how you get retweets and reposts and stuff. And unlike in the physical world, where if you're quiet, but in a social setting, you're still there, you're still present. Online, if you go quiet, you disappear. So that's another reason we're kind of encouraged to constantly post things, express ourselves, put up pictures and stuff. And in fact, there are studies that show that

If you compare people conversing online versus people conversing in person, online people will tend to divulge four times as much information about themselves in a given period of time. So you see that very, very much. Now,

Here we get back to another paradox, like, you know, similar to more communication means less understanding. We want to think that the more we learn about other people and the more we divulge about ourselves, the more we'll like each other. We'll understand each other. We'll have empathy and stuff. Unfortunately, if you look at the actual research, something very, very different happens that, yeah, there are certainly times when learning more about somebody makes you like them more than

But it's equally likely, if not slightly more likely, that learning more about someone will make you like them less. And there's this phenomenon in social psychology, pretty well documented, called dissimilarity cascades, which shows that the more facts you learn or the more pictures you see or whatever of other people, over time, you begin to place more emphasis on their dissimilarities with you than on their similarities.

And what we know from a raft of psychological research is that we tend to like people who are similar to us in some ways, and we tend to dislike people who are dissimilar. And so online, where people are constantly, you know, posting selfies or posting pictures of their vacations or talking about what they just did or giving you their political opinions or whatever, there's all these opportunities to begin to be alienated by those people.

And so I think what we see is, again, kind of the opposite effect that we thought we'd see, which is that, you know, talking more with everybody and showing off and giving more information about ourselves would lead to more understanding and more friendship and more liking. It actually often has the opposite effect. And I think if you look closely at that psychological research,

I think it explains a lot of the enmity and combativeness and insults and everything else that we see online. We've created a communication system that doesn't bring us closer together, but often kind of emphasizes how we're different. It makes us think of each other as not only different, but in some cases as enemies or people to be disliked. So familiarity breeds contempt.

Unfortunately, there are times when familiarity breeds friendship and love and everything. But I do think that old saying, which is quite a sad saying, has been basically proven true through social media and through digital communication. And I'm sure people have experienced this. Maybe they've got a coworker at their office that says,

At work, they just kind of present their work self and they see the work self of the other person. It's very collegial and like, I get along with this guy. He does a good job at his work and he's pleasant to be around. And then you might go home and let me look up this guy's social media profile and

And then you start seeing, oh my gosh, this guy, this is his political beliefs. And like, oh man, he likes that movie. That's a terrible movie. And then when you go to the office the next day, you think, man, I don't like this guy. And so your whole interaction with him before it was completely positive, but now that you know more about him and how he's different from you, it just makes things worse. Yeah. There's this other concept of,

Also quite sad in the research called environmental spoiling. And there's research that shows that the closer you live to another person, the more likely you are to be friends, which is sort of obvious. But the research also shows that the closer you live to someone, the more likely you are to be enemies. And in fact, that may be, again, slightly more common. And the reason is, is because you're exposed to

to their habits, to their beliefs and everything. And so there's lots of opportunities for that other person to do something that irritates you, you know, leaving their garbage cans out after garbage day or letting their dog go to the bathroom on your lawn or whatever. And once that happens, once you see something that's irritating, that tends to build on itself. It's very hard to forget that. And it leads to this kind of animosity.

And so online, we're exposed to people doing all, you know, sharing their thoughts, sharing pictures of themselves, talking through videos and stuff. There's all sorts of opportunities to see things that are not only dissimilar to you, but that are actually irritating to you. And so it's...

Just as the digital world is a very good setting for dissimilarity cascades, it's also a very good setting for this phenomenon of environmental spoiling. Okay, so our digital tools, the digital world encourages this vulnerability, this transparency. And of course, the platforms like that because it gives them more data to sell ads. So I guess the takeaway there is maybe don't share as much about yourself online. Leave a small digital blueprint.

give people less of a reason to not like you potentially. Right. And again, there's trade-offs there because as I said, when you're not sharing, when you're not speaking up, you kind of disappear. And so you feel kind of out of the social loop. But I do think that that is the kind of lesson to be learned here. And when I was growing up, and I think for a lot of people, and even today, I'm sure your mom would tell you, don't talk about yourself so much. Right.

That turns out to be pretty good advice. We forget it as soon as we look at our phone or sit in front of our computer, but maybe we should go back to that as a kind of rule of thumb. Yeah, I remember the old rule of thumb. Don't talk about politics or religion. Which is certainly not what happens online. Right, it's not what happens online. Well, here's something I could use your help on. I've been trying to put my finger on this for a long time. So we've been talking about tech speak. It's sort of

Oral like speaking via digital tools. What is the introduction of online video, particularly like short form video? I feel like the introduction of this stuff has just exacerbated some of the problems we've talked about. And it also exacerbates kind of my contempt for people online. Because I mean, as soon as I see like the short form video, some head talking to me, I'm like, I don't like this. And I can't figure out why. Have you been able to think about this? Or am I just being a crank? Yeah.

No, I think there's something to that. And I think it comes back to, in some ways, comes back to seeing too much gives you opportunities to find elements that are irritating. But I think it's also because when people, you know, videotape them or videotape is no longer the right word, but I'll say videotape themselves and post it online online.

They're performing. They're not acting naturally. They know that they're on camera. They know that this is going to become media content. And I think we have a tendency to become performers and to think of ourselves as kind of media content when we're...

on video. I mean, I think it's also true often when we're writing, but certainly when we're on video. And so there's an irony that people talk all the time about, oh, you know, authenticity and relatability of people on YouTube or TikTok or whatever. And it turns out that often it's exactly the opposite, that we convince ourselves that, oh, this person is talking about themselves, so they must be authentic. And, oh, I can relate to what they're saying. But actually, you

You know, the medium itself encourages a kind of inauthenticity because you are performing. You're not talking to someone who's there. You're by necessity performing. And when you see that somebody is performing, you immediately kind of doubt their sincerity. You kind of feel like you're being treated as an audience. And so I think there is this kind of strange thing.

social dynamic that happens when we see someone, you know, talking through a video that that's very different from what would happen if that person was talking to us in person. One of the things I love watching, I think it's interesting to observe. I love watching clips from say the 1950s or 1960s of when regular people get interviewed by newscasters, sort of the man on the street thing. And it's interesting to watch how

self-conscious that people were they didn't like the people then didn't know how to act in front of a camera and you can tell that they're trying to be kind of professional and so they were very professional prim and proper now since we've had cameras in our lives just it's ubiquitous I think we've all developed like oh here's how I'm supposed to act when there's a camera on me and it's it's just it's interesting it goes back to the idea that our tools change how we think or how we talk

Right. I think we know that we're going to be in competition with enormous amounts of other content. And so we tend to exaggerate what we say and exaggerate our gestures and kind of, in a way, become more clownish because we know that that's the only way we'll be able to grab attention with all this competition going on around us. So we're very...

in one way, very savvy in a way that people didn't used to be about media and our own role in it. But it also, again, leads to kind of these kind of, I don't know, we almost become caricatures of ourselves. Yeah, become cartoons.

Yeah, yeah.

And the internet has pretty much eliminated those barriers. Like it's all there. Your work self, your church self, your family self, it's all there. What have been the consequences of that, you think? Yeah. So, and this is something that to go back to Charles Horton Cooley, where we started, he talks about this, that you have different selves for different audiences in many, many ways.

writers, sociologists and other writers throughout the 20th century talked about this. And if you look at it from one way, you can think, oh, that's an indication that we lack integrity, that we're constantly changing how we present ourselves, depending if we're with our family or with friends or with our work colleagues and stuff. But I take a different view. I think

I think they're all expressions of ourselves, but actually you can look at it as this is our effort to accommodate ourselves to other people and other settings. So it's not a loss of integrity when we go through this. It's kind of a expansion of the orbit, the social orbit that we're in. And this was very much tied in the past to the fact that we socialized in our bodies, right?

And what that meant is you could, when you went to school, say you were in a particular place at a particular time and you were interacting with people in a particular way. And then you'd leave and you might go home and there'd be a gap between those two places.

events and you'd go home and you'd be with your parents and you'd talk in a different way and you'd act in a different way. And so, and this defined our social lives. They very much took place in different places at different times. And there were gaps between them when you actually weren't socializing. So you could, you know, get in touch with your own thoughts. You could follow your own train of thought. You could think about what just happened and kind of synthesize it into your experience and

those kind of spatial and temporal boundaries of our social lives have disappeared online. You know, everybody's there all the time. You can use Snapchat to manage your audience. So it's not like you're talking to everybody all at once. But because we have all these

social media platforms and group texts and other texts and emails going, there's no longer the ability to distinguish among different social experiences and social events. And it all becomes a jumble, which becomes very disorienting and also breeds a lot of anxiety, I think. But even more so, we've lost those gaps between social events.

where there weren't people around that we knew and were talking to and shaping ourself to fit them. Those are all gone because if you have your phone, you can socialize all the time, even when you're alone and that's what people do. There's a writer from, I think, the 1980s or something called Joshua Meyerowitz who talked about the isolation of different social events and the gaps between them as providing this kind of psychological shock absorber.

That meant we weren't overwhelmed by the need to socialize all the time with lots of different people and adapt ourselves to all these different people. But we could do it kind of in a segregated, deliberate way. And I think we've lost our shock absorber. And that's one of the reasons that I think people often behave in kind of strange ways.

antagonistic ways when they're online because they've lost the ability to kind of think about who they're with at the moment, think about what the other people are thinking, shape their own behavior to that. We simply can't do that anymore because everybody's out there all the time. Yeah, it's made it harder to order ourselves or create a self. And because we're not ordered, kind of act disorderly. There's no self, basically.

Right. You know, Mark Zuckerberg once said when he was talking about Facebook that, you know, on Facebook, you can't have multiple selves. You have to have just one self because everybody's seeing you at the same time. And, you know, he thought that was a great thing that gave us all integrity. But I think it's exactly the opposite because, you

you know, shaping yourself to different social situations doesn't mean you lack integrity. It means you have a consciousness of different people in different social situations and you adapt to them. And that actually turns out to be a good thing. So we've talked about a lot of the ill consequences of too much communication. So what do we do about that today? All of our work lives and social lives are done via digital devices, it seems. And so opting out of that would basically mean you have to opt out of large swaths of life. So

What can we do to sort of mitigate the contamination of the super bloom effect of online communication?

Well, it's difficult, as all of us who have tried know, because society really has reshaped itself at this point to the internet. It's hard to do anything without pulling out your phone or being online in one way or another. So backing away, you know, not cutting yourself off, but even backing away a bit is going to entail sacrifices. You know, people will resent you if you respond to their messages less quickly or if you're

comment on their Instagram posts less quickly or whatever. So I want to start by stressing the fact that, you know, you can't do this without sacrifices. But I do think the sacrifices in the long run are probably worth it because they'll ultimately make your life richer and more fulfilling. So, you know, if I was going to give advice or a way to think about this, I'd go back to something old and simple, which is that you should always use the right tool for the job.

You know, my father used to tell me that when I was trying to do something haphazardly and, you know, using a screwdriver when I should have used a wrench or whatever, you know, always use the right tool for the job because that's,

Because our computers and our phones and digital media can do everything for us or can be a tool for doing pretty much everything, particularly in our social lives, and it's a very efficient tool, we've kind of come to the belief that, oh, it's kind of the Swiss army knife or the leather man tool that we can use for everything in terms of gathering information, sharing our thoughts, communicating with others, building relationship groups.

And I think it's actually really, really bad, a really bad tool for a lot of that. I think it's a bad tool for conversing.

other people, particularly people who are close to us. I think it's a bad tool for gathering information and gathering news and certainly a bad tool for thinking deeply about things. So if we can step back and say, you know, what is this tool actually good for? And certainly it's good for a lot of things. You know, I'm a big fan of computers, though I'm not a big fan of digital media. I

But also appreciate that, you know, it's not a great tool for socializing. It's actually better and more fulfilling for yourself and for the other person to sit down and write somebody a letter, something we almost never think about doing anymore, than jotting down, you know, a sloppy text and sending it off. That is going to be basically meaningless to that other person. Or it's better to sit down and have a conversation without also glancing at your phone all the time. It's going to be more fulfilling. Yeah.

It may even make sense to subscribe to a print newspaper or some print magazine so you can get them and you can sit down with them and actually go through them quietly and carefully without being bombarded by other things on the screen. So if we step back and kind of realize that our phones and digital media are good for some things, but they're really bad for other things, and we just use them for other things because...

it's quick and efficient and easy, then I think we might be able as individuals, at least, I'm not sure about as a society, as individuals, at least, make better decisions about how we live our day-to-day lives and kind of realize that we need to set the phone or the computer aside for lots of things we do, particularly of a social nature. Well, Nick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Well, I have a website, nicholascarr.com. And the book is called Super Bloom, How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. And I also have a new sub stack called newcartographies.com, where I fairly frequently post short essays, short articles. So any and all of those places, if you want to learn more, good places to go. Yeah, I subscribe to New Cartographies. I really enjoy it. So I encourage people to do that. Well, Nick Carr, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks, Brett. It was a great pleasure to be back on the show. My guest today is Nicholas Carr. He's the author of the book, Super Bloom. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, nicholascarr.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash communication. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It's called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It's a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind time listening on podcasts, but put what you've heard into action.