June 18, 2025

In his 2010 book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” Nicholas Carr argued that our immersion in digital media is rewiring the way we think, turning us into distracted skimmers who are losing the capacity for deep concentration.

Yet social media was in its infancy back then. His lament in those days was aimed at a panoply of online distractions such as email that needed to be written, blogs that cried out to be read, streaming videos, downloadable music — in other words, anything but the task at hand. He mentions Facebook, but only in passing. Over the years, I’ve sometimes wondered what he would make of the explosion not just of Facebook but of Instagram, TikTok and their ilk now that they’ve taken over so much of our lives.

Well, my question has been answered. Earlier this year Carr published what is essentially a follow-up to “The Shallows.” Titled “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart,” the book surveys the mediascape of algorithmically driven tech platforms and finds that it is not just driving us to distraction but is creating a less happy, more polarized and more dangerous world.

Mark Zuckerberg, who stands at the pinnacle of this dystopian revolution, started out as a tech optimist, writing early on that social media would “lead to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others.” But Carr, echoing Siva Vaidhyanathan in “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy” (2018), counters that Zuckerberg was being dangerously naïve.

“Human beings are not computers,” Carr writes. “The communities they form are not electronic networks. Society does not scale. What was missing from Zuckerberg’s manifesto was any sense of people as individuals, with their own backgrounds and beliefs, personalities and motivations, quirks and biases.”

In fact, humans are not genetically coded to interact peaceably with large numbers of unseen strangers talking with (or past) each other. Among other things, social media has contributed to genocide in Myanmar, the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, and suicide ideation among teenage girls.

Carr takes an exceedingly long view, calling Martin Luther “the world’s first media star” and claiming that the wireless telegraph hastened the outbreak of World War I, despite predictions by its creator, Nikola Tesla, “that he would be ‘remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.’” We also hear about Charles Horton Cooley, who coined the phrase social media in 1897 and who was a relentless — and relentlessly wrong — evangelist for the idea that progress in communications technology would bring us together.

By the way, the title “Superbloom” comes from a hashtag of the same name that went viral on Instagram in 2019. A strikingly vivid outbreak of poppies in Southern California’s Walker Canyon drew selfie-snapping influencers. That led to vandalism, followed by a social-media backlash; photos were tagged with hashtags such as #horribleperson and #flowerdestroyer. “As it played out in the poppy field and through millions of social media feeds,” Carr writes, “the affair in Walker Canyon offered a portrait in miniature of our frenzied, farcical, information-saturated time.”

In Carr’s view, the switch on internet culture flipped from bad to much, much worse the day that Facebook debuted its news feed in 2006. Before that, the then-nascent service simply showed you posts from people and organizations you had chosen to follow in reverse-chronological order. The feed took that choice out of your hands. Mysterious algorithms monitored what kinds of content you engaged with and showed you more and more of it. As it turned out, users were drawn to engage with posts that made them angry and upset. Smartphones worsened the problem, as Facebook and its progeny were never more than a click away. And we couldn’t put it down. As Carr explains: “Whether we realize it or not, social media churns out information that’s been highly processed to stimulate not just engagement but dependency.”

Carr places all of this in context, perhaps more than we need. Thus we take an excursion into the mind of Marshall McLuhan (as we also did in “The Shallows”) as to why email and texting have led to sloppy writing. We learn that Carr believes dreams of a democratic media espoused by thinkers like Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and Yochai Benkler are wrong. We get a blow-by-blow on the 100-year-old conflict between Walter Lippmann’s vision of a society governed by an elite class of experts and John Dewey’s espousal of grassroots democracy.

These are all important topics, but they are treated at such length that a reader may start to wonder precisely what “Superbloom” is about. Moreover, as Jennifer Szalai wrote in The New York Times, “There’s an unmistakable skepticism of progress in this book, at least when it comes to modern communication technology.”

The internet has proved to be the ultimate distraction machine not just because of its ubiquity but also because it is infinite. The solution isn’t to turn back the technological clock but to find ways to set boundaries. There are actually some hopeful signs. The platform formerly known as Twitter has collapsed into uselessness under Elon Musk’s ownership, and one of the more promising alternatives, Bluesky, takes a different approach. There are no algorithms unless you choose one or design your own, and since it’s organized as a public benefit corporation, it is unlikely to sell out to the forces of extreme commercialism. The audience for Facebook is aging. Increasingly, people are curating their news consumption by subscribing to a few quality news sources and newsletters.

Virginia Heffernan, who wrote perceptively about online culture in her 2016 book “Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art,” explained that “digital literacy … involves chiefly the refusal to read.” We need new skills to eliminate the onrushing torrents of information, very little of which is informing us about the world around us or enhancing our lives.

Carr has done an admirable job of diagnosing the challenge, and he closes by warning us that the rise of artificial intelligence means it’s only going to get worse. He’s less clear on the solution; perhaps there isn’t one. But surely each of us can resolve to do better in our own lives, and to encourage our family and friends to do the same. Such individual actions, multiplied by millions, could lead to the better world that Charles Horton Cooley envisioned more than a century ago.

But if you’ll excuse me, there’s this video of a turtle on a skateboard chasing a cat, and I need to watch it right now.

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Dan Kennedy is a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and the author of the blog Media Nation. He is the co-author, with Ellen Clegg, of…
Dan Kennedy

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