Familiarity Breeds Contempt (And Other Underappreciated Consequences of Digital Communication)
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we talk with the author of Superbloom, Nicholas Carron, about how digital tools are changing our ability to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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there's been a lot of cultural discussion of the way digital technologies and social media
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contribute to things like political polarization and adolescent depression but as i'll explore with
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nicholas carr the author of super bloom our digital tools are also changing our ability
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to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways today on the show nicholas
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unpacks why the optimistic idea that more communication is always better hasn't panned out
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and how the speed and volume of modern communication is overwhelming our human capacity to process
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information and maintain meaningful relationships we discuss why the messiness of pre-digital
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communication might have actually been better for us how email has evolved from thoughtful letters to
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rushed messages and why seeing more of people online often makes us like them less nicholas
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also explains why having different versions of ourselves for different contacts was actually
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healthy and the simple rubric for better managing our relationship with digital communication tools
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after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is communication
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all right nicholas carr welcome back to the show thanks it's good to be back with you so we had
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you on a long time ago to talk about your book the shallows which was about how google was changing
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our brains this is like 10 years ago 15 years ago you've got a new book out called super bloom where
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you explore how our digital communication tools whether it's text social media short form video how that's
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changing the way we communicate socialize even just think of ourselves as a self in the world
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so the word social media has just become it's just a common word we throw around and i think a lot of
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people might think oh social media that phrase was an invention of the late 20th early 21st century
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right we did social media did not exist until mark zuckerberg came up with facebook but you talk about
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there was a 19th century thinker who coined the term social media his name's charles horton cooley
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tell us about this guy what was his big idea when it came to communication tools and how we interact
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with one another well charles horton cooley he was born in the 1860s in michigan he started out as an
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academic economist but he ended up becoming one of the earliest american sociologists founded the
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university of michigan's sociology department and the question he set out to answer the question
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that really interested him is why does society change and in 1897 he wrote this very interesting
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very obscure at this point article about that subject and he went through you know various possibilities
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he talked about genetics and stuff like that but ultimately he decided that the biggest force that
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changes society is changes in communication technology changes in the tools we use to
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to converse to express ourselves to exchange information and so forth and in that article
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and when i read it i was kind of amazed he he uses the term social media and as far as i can tell it's the
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first time it's been used and what he meant by it was that communication technologies allow us to form
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groups that are independent of location so you know in the past before we had the mail system and the
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telegraph and everything else you know you your social group was whoever happened to be around you
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in the real world but he saw that as new technologies allow us to interact with people far away we can form
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all sorts of groups without any spatial or even temporal boundaries and he called these groups social
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mediums or social media in general and so that you know looking at his work and particularly his
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stress on the importance of communication technologies he called them communication mechanisms
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in shaping society was one of the real inspirations for the book and what's interesting his ideas that he
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had in the the 19th century it seems like later thinkers about media and communication we're talking
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like marshall mccluhen or neil postman they kind of picked up on these ideas correct absolutely i mean
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i don't know if they were inspired by cooley but you know 50 70 years before they started looking at
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this cooley had already come to this conclusion and i mean what characterizes mccluhen's most famous
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saying of course is the medium is the message and by by that he meant that we focus on the bits of
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content that come through communication systems media systems but really it's the technology itself
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that shapes the way we speak who we speak to even how we think and that's very much what cooley was
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talking about you know at the end of the 19th century that to paraphrase his belief it's that you know
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when mechanisms of communication change society changes independent of the content that's coming
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through those mechanisms how did he see society changing so that what happened did he make any
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observations about that as you know we move from say an oral oral communication society where we just
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talked to the people who are around us around the fire pit or in the town village how did culture
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society change as we introduce letter writing or the telegraph etc cooley saw that new communication
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technologies do two things they change the way influence flows among people and that just means
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the patterns of the way information go from one person to another certainly when you have electronic
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or electric communications everything speeds up and you can cast your voice or hear the voices of other
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people far away instantaneously but also it changes and this is what i was talking about before it
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changes how people form relationships and form social groups and these can be people in the distance they
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can be people who wrote books a long time ago and so he what he saw and i think this was very prescient
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he used the term that as information speeds up and as we can talk to people far away and they can hear us and
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there's all these flows of influence and association that society would come to liquefy and what he meant
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by that was you know what when you're just talking to people who are around you in the same place at the
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same time then you have a lot of social structure you have a lot of institutions you have a lot of
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traditions and they're all you know sustained through these tight communities the more you break down
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those kind of barriers the more chaotic society becomes and it becomes rather than kind of this concrete
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thing that changes very very slowly society starts to act more like a liquid and it changes much much quicker
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yeah and you can see this uh if you do sort of a genealogy of communication tools like let's say the
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the introduction of the printing press because of the introduction of the printing press like you had the
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reformation you had all these changes in what we're thinking about religion and you had these splinter
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groups and then you also had the rise of you know nation states and people thinking about freedom and
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individual rights that wasn't happening before the printing press that that new form of communication
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that allows you to speak across space and time right and one of the implications of that and
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mcclellan in particular is pretty good on that about that is that suddenly an individual
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can determine kind of their own their own knowledge base in their own intellectual activities because
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suddenly suddenly you can read and listen to people from all over the place and you can start
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selecting which ideas are important to you and what the argument is is that this in addition to all the
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social changes this led to the rise of individualism we started to think of ourselves as kind of
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self-created because we we weren't locked into the traditions and the words of people in our
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immediate surroundings we kind of took control of our own intellectual lives and that changed us as
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individual persons we started to think much more about ourselves as individuals but also became another
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big broad force in in reshaping society when you move from very tight-knit communities to a huge
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civilization of individuals who think of themselves as individuals yeah and then you know going on to
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that theory that he had as as communication speeds up everything's more fluid i mean we i think we've
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all seen that if we've been on the internet for the past 25 years it just seems like there's just
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constant change because of the rapidity of digital communication right and there's this weird
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combination of individualism and also clannishness as people you know join groups very very quickly
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and again following cooley and mcclellan and neil postman if you look at the technology itself
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you see that the technology is there exists to speed up the flow of information the flow of
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conversation and that has a very interesting effect on human nature because i don't think i don't think
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the human psyche is well suited to exchanging information and expressing oneself in gathering
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information at the kind of speed and volume that the internet and social media kind of overwhelms us
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with all the time yeah and that's the big argument of your book you talk about how cooley you know he
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sees this idea of how our communication changes cultures if you as it gets faster things liquefy and
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he had an optimistic view of this like well this is actually a good thing yeah and then you talk about
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how later social media founders like mark zuckerberg with facebook kind of they probably didn't know
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they're picking up on cooley but they picked up on that idea that the more you can communicate the
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more you can talk to people to different people from different backgrounds from across the world
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that is always a net positive there's no downsides to it what you're doing in super bloom is like well
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okay yeah there's some good things that come from this ability to communicate fast in a wide-ranging
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way but there are downsides to this and this is what you explore in the book right and and so if you
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look you know through the history of modern electric communications from the telegraph to the telephone
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to radio tv fax machines and on to the internet and social media every new communication technology
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that makes communication more efficient is greeted as in utopian terms so people think oh since
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communication is the way you you learn about other people and you gain an understanding of other
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cultures and you can negotiate or go through diplomacy and stuff that means that communication is kind of a
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naturally good thing and if communication is is a naturally good thing then more communication
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must be even better and you see this again as i say over and over again and i can in in the book i go
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through many quotes of this utopianism from the moment the telegraph was invented to the internet came
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along to mark zuckerberg playing up you know how sharing on on facebook would bring the world together
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and my argument is that that gets it wrong i you can see why we believe that it's all wrapped up
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in our sense of ourselves as unique creatures because we can communicate in ways that other
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animals for instance can't and it's also wrapped up in the very popular idea of a marketplace of ideas
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the intellectual marketplace operates like a marketplace of goods if you can create more supply
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then people have more choices and they'll get rid of the bad stuff and they'll choose the good stuff
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and so there's all these kind of assumptions we make about more communication being better
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communication but what i argue is if you you actually look through history and even if you look at our
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own recent experience you see a very different picture that yes communication can be very very good
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and in fact society is built of communication but when you speed up communication too much when you
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increase the volume of communication too much it starts to become overwhelming and you create a
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conflict i think between human nature and our ability to make sense of things and to deal with messages
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and information in the technology and i think that's what we're seeing today but i think you can see that
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as i say throughout recent history i mean i'll give you a quick story that i relate in the book
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when telegraph and telephone emerged people like nikola tesla the great inventors marconi the inventor
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of radio and lots of other people religious figures said oh this is going to create a world of
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understanding we're all going to communicate instantaneously so we can work out our problems
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quickly and this is the end of war and marconi made that proclamation in 1912 and of course two years
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later 1914 world war one broke out and if you read the history of world war one one of the messages
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that comes out of here is is that these new communication technologies rather than kind of
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restraining people from going to war at that time actually hastened the outbreak of the war and it's
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because the war was was set off by the assassination of austrian archduke and when that happened instead of
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going the old-fashioned route where diplomats would travel to different capitals and sit down together
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and try to hash out the problems and come to some solution suddenly all these messages from all the
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capitals started flowing through telegraph lines and telephone lines and it kind of overwhelmed diplomacy
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and it soon turned into threats and other things in what historians say is that the acceleration of
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communication actually was one of the causes of the war so exactly the opposite effect when you actually
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look at what happens from what everyone expected and yet unfortunately we didn't learn from that
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example because if you go through you know radio and tv and the internet and stuff you see that same
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kind of very optimistic even utopian belief that more communication will be better for society
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and we've all seen that play out faster communication is the more communication you get online
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i think initially thought oh this will just bring new understanding new viewpoints new vistas and instead
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we're just really angry at each other and just right yeah and it's funny that idea of you know more
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communication isn't necessarily better i think we've had a marriage counselor on the podcast before talk
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about there's this idea in a marriage of a marriage is having problems like you just got to more
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communication you got to communicate communicate communicate and he said he's like sometimes more
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communication isn't actually good because you just end up talking about the problems more and more
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and more instead of just kind of okay maybe there's some things we can't change here right and we move
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on so yeah let's talk about what we can do and learn from history about maybe the benefits of slowing
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down our communication having a little bit more friction and you talk about in the 20th century when we
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had this development of different modes of communication there was radio there was television there was
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telephone there was newspaper print there was actually a lot of variety in the 20th century
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in the mediums we can choose and i think we all picked up on that well with certain mediums there were
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certain types of thinking we did with that but i think we forget that because you know today our whole
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information medium is just online and i think online mediums can kind of encourage a certain type of
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thinking can you walk us through like that variety that we once had with communication and maybe some
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of the benefits that came with that yeah so now we've all gotten used to digital media and to the
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smartphone as information's delivery device and because computers which are obviously at the center of
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this are general purpose information processors that means they can do pretty much everything that's ever
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been done through communication systems and media so you know basically people use their phone as their
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newspaper it's the radio it's their tv it's their camera and their photo album it's their post office
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it's even their telephone sometimes and we look back to the pre-digital world i'll call it analog media
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and we when we look back we see it as kind of a mess because you couldn't do everything through one
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tool in one network there were all sorts of networks involved and all sorts of devices so you had
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you know you you subscribe to a print newspaper that came in the morning you got some magazines that came
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weekly or monthly you had a telephone on the wall a dial telephone that you'd use to call up people when
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you needed to talk to people who weren't in your immediate vicinity you had radio you had tv you had record
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players and records and tapes so you had all of this diverse set of specialized analog media and as i
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say we look back that at that now and see it as a mess and say oh thank goodness the internet came along
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and cleaned that all up so we can do everything through our phone or our computer but what i argue
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is that actually i think the very messiness of analog media and particularly the specialization of
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networks and tools and artifacts actually had a huge benefit for us because it held back the flow of
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information you know it had been possible for say in the 1970s it had been possible for 100 years
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to transmit information instantaneously electronically but because of various physical constraints and
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constraints inherent in analog media you couldn't do that people had to go out and make choices
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uh they had to say you know do i want to turn on the radio now and listen to the program do i want
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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
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want to pick up a book and having those specialized media and requiring people to make choices actually
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imposed a kind of discipline on the way we consumed media we had to use our discretion we had to make
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careful choices you couldn't do everything all at once and you didn't want to and i think that had
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ramifications for how we communicate for how we think about news for how we think about entertainment
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for how we think about art there was separation among different forms of media you know some things
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we knew were more important than other things uh some things were truer than other things so it gave us
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this discretion in this discipline that i think we've lost when everything comes at us in all forms
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all the time and we've gone from a world of messiness that was still at a human scale and required human
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decision making to kind of a cleanliness and efficiency that is no longer at human scale and kind of
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instead of us using the tools the tools start to use us yeah and that cleanliness or lack of friction
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with our digital tools i think that's a source of a lot of the overwhelm or information overload people
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feel it's like man i've got these feeds i subscribe to instagram feeds i got to keep up with twitter
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email it's just a glut and you just feel i can't keep up with this and i remember you know before
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digital tools before smartphones i don't know i just felt like my brain was a little bit more calm a
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little bit more chill i didn't feel overwhelmed like i do sometimes today so yeah that friction
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you know we've been trying to get rid of it because like we see the friction particularly in silicon
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valley is this bad thing we got to get rid of that friction in our communication tools or medium
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consumption tools i think it just allowed us to i don't know think slowly be more contemplative about
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what we're consuming yeah and at the same time also because you couldn't do everything at once and
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you couldn't juggle dozens of information feeds you you actually were encouraged to pay more
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attention whether you were listening to a song or having a conversation with somebody on the phone
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or reading a newspaper or whatever you know that was what you were doing you weren't also glancing at
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notifications on your phone and so it it just it's a very different mindset or attitude that has
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basically been destroyed i think by digital media and it's sad yeah and i think you're right like it's a we
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have a very surface level attention that we even carry over not just how we consume news but like
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how we interact with others like our emails we just kind of glance over them text messages that you know
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maybe someone's trying to communicate and reach out to you because they're hurting you know that text
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message you're getting could be one of you know 20 that are in your unread message section in your
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smartphone and so you just kind of glance through it and you really can't you can't do that sort of deep
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connection with that person what that person needs because you don't have the ability like your
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attention span can't withstand all the the influx of stuff you're getting yeah and it's kind of a
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consequence of the technology itself in order in order to kind of stay afloat with all this information
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that's coming in you have to be superficial you have to you know make quick decisions and and draw on
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your instinct rather than your reasoning and and respond immediately so it's it changes the depth of
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our engagement with information and with other people i think it changes the way we talk and i think
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it ultimately also changes the way we think there's just if you want to be successful in digital media
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you can't think deeply or slowly about anything we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our
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sponsors and now back to the show well and you use this an example of how our technology changes the
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way we think use this well mcclellan talked about this he says whenever a new form of communication is
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introduced whether that's letter writing or the telegraph or television or radio or email we use that new form of
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communication the same way that we used a previous form of communication so like you use the example
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of email talk about that like i think if people were around when email was first introduced they might
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remember they probably used email differently than they use they use it today absolutely and i certainly
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remember that and mcclellan had a great phrase he said we march backwards into the future and you can see
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this with the email because when email came along and became popular in whenever it was for most people in
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the 1980s or late 1980s 1990s with you know aol mail and yahoo mail and stuff people saw it as kind of a quicker
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electronic version of the mail system so they thought of emails as kind of letters in a different form and i can
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certainly remember this myself when you wrote an email to someone you'd sit down and you'd approach it as if you were
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writing a letter you know you'd write dear so and so and then you'd have some courtesies and and you'd
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write in full sentences and you'd try to express yourself clearly and you'd proofread it and then
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you'd send it off and that prevailed for a little while but then as more and more people got onto email
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and email began to be used for all sorts of things in displaced you know letters and stuff suddenly we
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couldn't do that anymore because we had to keep up with the inbox so you just didn't have time to sit
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down and compose a careful letter you had to write quickly and often sloppily and kind of get your
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message across but get it across in kind of the most efficient way possible so the technology itself
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changed the way we speak and it wasn't only you know when we were sending emails to work colleagues or
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for some administrative purpose it was how we talked to friends and family members we got
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blunter and blunter and more compressed and sloppier and meanwhile because the email was so efficient
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we stopped writing letters so the technology shaped the way we correspond with people change the very form
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of it and made it i think much less intimate and much less careful and much less thoughtful and again
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it was because we had no choice we had to keep up with a email inbox that never stopped growing
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my wife talks about that she's noticed that she's always like remember my emails that i used to write
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i wrote these like just really long emails to my friends we had these like long correspondences and
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the emails would look like some letter that was written from the 19th century like you said had the
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the courtesies and then you know there was like a catch-up of what i've been up to
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and then there would be this long like exploration of an issue and i mean they were really well done
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and she says like i haven't written those type of messages in a long time and she's like i feel like
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i'm missing something because i haven't because the act of writing a letter like that or an email like
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that it forces you to be self-reflective it forces you to contemplate what you're thinking and
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think about the other person in a deeper way than you do when you you know just send out these
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you know short bullet point missives right and you certainly see that if you look back to when
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letters themselves the mail became cheap enough that normal everyday citizens could actually
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write frequent letters this was in like 1860 1870 there's histories of that and it it became kind of
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central not only to how people communicate but kind of central to their lives that when you sat down
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to write a letter you kind of isolated yourself from all the business of the world and all the
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distractions you had to go through and it gave you time to kind of compose a narrative about your life
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you wanted to tell people what you'd been up to and stuff so you had to kind of shape it into a story
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and you had to think about what was important to you so it was really in addition to being a
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communication tool this kind of long form writing to other people that you're friendly with or our
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family members or other whatever kind of had a deep effect on our ability to think about life and put
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everything that was going on in our lives into some kind of context that made sense and in the early
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days of email i think that was also true but that's all that's all gone now yeah and it's only gotten
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worse as we shifted our communication from email to text messages or social media updates it's even
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more perfunctory oh yeah and i what amazes me and i i have a chapter in super bloom that's about this
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because i don't think it's been talked about enough is is what's happened to personal correspondence
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you know now everybody's texting going through messaging apps and stuff and their group texts and
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whatever so so even email now is going the way of the written letter emails too slow emails too slow
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you know it used to be it used to be the fast thing emails too slow and what you see is just
00:27:30.280
nobody cares it's full of typos it's sloppy there's no punctuation you know the the application itself is
00:27:37.860
messing things up with auto complete algorithms and stuff and people don't proofread it or anything so
00:27:43.840
it's you can understand why this happened because it's so fast and so efficient and yet it really
00:27:49.280
tells us something about how we think about self-expression today and how we think about
00:27:53.900
other people that we can't be bothered to proofread a note because we have to be so fast and it it's a
00:27:59.260
very apparent symbol of kind of the degradation of communication and self-expression and even a kind
00:28:08.080
of lack of treating other people with courtesy when you can't even be bothered to when you can just dash off
00:28:15.680
these sloppy strange notes full of you know emojis and auto complete sentences and stuff and no punctuation
00:28:24.700
and yet we do it without even thinking about it now yeah it's undignified there's no dignity involved in it
00:28:30.700
yeah and you talk about this this new form of communication we have with text messages that involves
00:28:35.060
it's not just we're not just using text but we're also incorporating emojis as you said because
00:28:40.200
the emojis are a shortcut for emotional expression so in a letter we would have had to write about well
00:28:46.140
i'm feeling very sad and despondent instead you just put the the crying emoji or you can use like a
00:28:51.660
gif of some person looking sad and so because you just someone can just glance at it you're like okay i
00:28:57.680
get it this person he's sad and you call this new form of quick communication text speak and i've seen
00:29:03.660
other media theorists talk about it as digital orality it's got this mixture of text it's not
00:29:09.620
completely oral but we use text and other symbols as if we were speaking to someone in person because
00:29:17.860
like when we speak with people in person we do get perfunctory like you can shorten things you can use
00:29:22.480
slang and you can do that because you're in the presence of that person physically and so you're able
00:29:27.780
to pick up on you know body language cues and things like that that you can't do online but
00:29:34.780
because we're online we try to replicate that same sort of communication with our digital tools and
00:29:40.440
it just something something gets lost in that translation yeah i mean and it's important to
00:29:45.380
emphasize that it's not all bad being able to have a written communication system that is informal and
00:29:52.140
casual and kind of replicates the way you talk to friends if you were out for an evening or something
00:29:56.860
that's a good thing and in fact i tell the story of how text speak was invented it was kind of invented
00:30:01.760
through teenagers instant messaging at you know in the late 1990s sitting at the family pc with a bunch
00:30:08.700
of instant message im windows open and having all these conversations and when you're having that
00:30:13.700
many conversations you kind of have to compress language so so they very quickly learned how to shorten
00:30:18.640
words and use initialisms and typed emoji and stuff in some ways this is kind of ingenious and it really
00:30:26.760
worked the problem is that that kind of casual sort of oral communication has not only displaced a lot of
00:30:36.460
person-to-person conversation it's moved into all forms of communication so it's displaced kind of the
00:30:43.880
slower more considered more contemplative forms of correspondence so if text speak was just kind of digital
00:30:51.220
orality and gave us the ability to chat you know casually with friends online i think would be fine
00:30:58.020
but under the pressure of having to keep up with so much information we now use text speak it's kind of
00:31:04.840
our basic language and that to me is the problem yeah text speak tends to be more reflexive and less
00:31:11.100
reflective right like you're kind of using that system one thinking that i guess kahneman talked about
00:31:15.700
which is like fast all right it's emotional and that's why you know sometimes text messages or group
00:31:20.520
chats can kind of go off the rails because people are just reflexively reacting to things and they're
00:31:25.820
not taking the time to use that sort of system to thinking of i need to think about this and let me
00:31:31.860
contemplate a little bit about this let me reflect to make sure that i'm putting something out there
00:31:36.380
that is measured tech speak does not encourage that any and the problem with like tech speak or digital
00:31:42.840
orality that sort of reflexive communication i don't think it's much of a problem when you're face
00:31:47.600
to face and sort of in real time with somebody because you have the thing you might have this
00:31:52.500
disagreement in a spat and then you can kind of patch things up and then you move on and like it's just
00:31:57.440
that thing that happened the interaction that happened is just in the past like you can't go back
00:32:02.640
to it really except in your brain with digital orality or like this tech speak you have a permanent
00:32:08.420
record of that ephemeral spat and every time you open up your text messages let's say you you had a
00:32:14.120
spat with a friend and you patched it up but then you're going through your text messages again you
00:32:19.740
like you see it that interaction you had like oh man yeah i don't like this guy i'm gonna dredge that up
00:32:24.280
again so tech speak takes something that was once ephemeral like oral speech and basically makes a permanent
00:32:30.020
record of it right yeah and that definitely makes it harder to kind of get over things um because it's
00:32:39.800
always there in front of you and also you know another difference between quote-unquote digital
00:32:45.300
orality and actually having a conversation with a person is that when you're having a conversation
00:32:49.380
with a person a lot of information is communicated not with words but with gestures with you know the look
00:32:57.980
in people's eyes with how they're standing with their smiles and everything and you know we
00:33:04.080
underestimate the importance of all those gestures all those physical signals and you strip those out
00:33:09.600
when you converse online even if the language you're using might be similar to what you'd use if you were
00:33:15.260
sitting around a table and it's hard to add back with emojis or gifs or whatever you can do maybe a
00:33:22.680
little bit but not it's not the same thing another thing you talk about is that social media or
00:33:27.440
tech speak or this quick communication that we have not only does it encourage us to be reflexive
00:33:33.300
and just kind of have the surface level attention to the communication we're having with others it
00:33:39.440
also allows us to be ever present in the lives of others and others to be ever present in ours
00:33:45.600
and it's also nudged us to reveal more and more about ourselves like you're supposed to be transparent
00:33:52.160
and vulnerable as sort of the ethos what's been the effect of that constant exposure to each other
00:33:57.680
via our phones or computers yeah so social media rewards people for talking about themselves a lot
00:34:05.640
that's how you get likes that's how you get retweets and reposts and stuff and unlike in the physical
00:34:11.920
world where if you're quiet but in a social setting you're still there you're still present online if
00:34:18.120
you go quiet you disappear so that's another reason we we we we're kind of encouraged to constantly
00:34:24.280
post things express ourselves put up pictures and stuff and in fact there are studies that show that
00:34:29.820
if you compare people conversing online versus people conversing in person online people will tend to
00:34:36.560
divulge four times as much information about themselves in a given period of time so you see that
00:34:42.060
very very much now here we get back to another paradox like you know similar to more communication
00:34:48.800
means less understanding we want to think that the more we learn about other people and the more we
00:34:55.320
divulge about ourselves the more we'll like each other we'll understand each other we'll have empathy
00:35:00.240
and stuff unfortunately if you look at the actual research something very very different happens that
00:35:06.280
yeah there are certainly times when learning more about somebody makes you like them more
00:35:11.360
but it's equally likely if not slightly more likely that learning more about someone will make you like
00:35:18.060
them less and there's this phenomenon in social psychology pretty well documented called dissimilarity
00:35:25.000
cascades which shows that the more facts you learn or the more pictures you see or whatever of other
00:35:31.360
people over time you begin to place more emphasis on their dissimilarities with you than on their
00:35:38.500
similarities and what we know from a raft of psychological research is that we tend to like
00:35:44.420
people who are similar to us in some ways and we tend to dislike people who are dissimilar and so
00:35:50.080
online where people are constantly you know posting selfies or posting pictures of their vacations or
00:35:56.580
talking about what they just did or giving you their political opinions or whatever there's all these
00:36:02.240
opportunities to begin to be alienated by those people and so i think what we see is again kind of
00:36:09.240
the opposite effect that we thought we'd see which is that you know talking more with everybody and
00:36:15.800
showing off and giving more information about ourselves would lead to more understanding and more
00:36:20.160
friendship and more liking it actually often has the opposite effect and i think if you look closely at that
00:36:27.780
that psychological research i think it explains a lot of the enmity and combativeness and insults and
00:36:36.940
everything else that we see online we've created a communication system that doesn't bring us closer
00:36:43.640
together but often kind of emphasizes how we're different it makes us think of each other as not only
00:36:50.440
different but but in some cases as enemies or people to be disliked so familiarity breeds contempt
00:36:56.120
unfortunately um you know there are times when familiarity breeds friendship and love and
00:37:02.700
everything but i do think that old saying which is quite a sad saying has been basically proven true
00:37:08.800
through social media and through digital communication and i'm sure people have experienced this maybe
00:37:14.060
they've got a co-worker at their office that at work they just kind of present their work self and
00:37:19.460
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
00:37:24.040
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
00:37:29.940
social media profile and then you start seeing oh my gosh this guy this is his political beliefs and
00:37:35.200
like oh man he likes that movie that's a terrible movie and then when you go to the office the next
00:37:39.060
day you think man i don't like this guy and so your whole interaction with him before it was completely
00:37:43.880
positive but now that you know more about him and how he's different from you it just makes things worse
00:37:48.900
yeah there's this other concept also quite sad in the research called environmental spoiling and
00:37:56.860
there's research that shows that the closer you live to another person the more likely you are to
00:38:01.260
be friends which is sort of obvious but the research also shows that the closer you live to someone the
00:38:07.320
more likely you are to be enemies and in fact that may be again slightly more common and the reason is
00:38:13.720
is because you're exposed to their habits to their beliefs and everything and so there's lots of
00:38:19.580
opportunities for that other person to do something that irritates you you know leaving their garbage
00:38:24.360
cans out after garbage day or letting their dog go to the bathroom on your lawn or whatever and once
00:38:29.520
that happens once you see something that's irritating that tends to build on itself it's very hard to
00:38:35.180
forget that and it leads to this kind of animosity and so online where we're exposed to people
00:38:42.620
doing all you know sharing their thoughts sharing pictures of themselves talking through videos and
00:38:48.220
stuff there's all sorts of opportunities to see things that are not only dissimilar to you but that
00:38:53.880
are actually irritating to you and so it's it's just as it's a the digital world is a very good
00:39:00.140
setting for dissimilarity cascades it's also a very good setting for this phenomenon of environmental
00:39:05.480
spoiling okay so our digital tools the digital world encourages this is this vulnerability this
00:39:10.660
transparency and of course the platforms like that because it gives them more data to sell ads so i
00:39:16.280
guess the takeaway there is maybe don't share as much about yourself online leave a small digital
00:39:22.500
blueprint give people less of a reason to to not like you potentially right and again you know there's
00:39:30.160
trade-offs there because as i said when you're not sharing when you're not speaking up you kind of
00:39:35.180
disappear and so you feel kind of out of the social loop but i do think that that is the kind of lesson
00:39:41.420
to be learned here and it's you know when i was growing up and i think for a lot of people and
00:39:45.500
even today i'm sure you know your mom would tell you you know don't talk about yourself so much
00:39:50.040
that turns out to be pretty good advice we we forget it as soon as we look at our phone or sit in front
00:39:56.160
of our computer but maybe we should uh go back to to that as a kind of rule of thumb yeah i remember the
00:40:01.820
old rule of thumb don't talk about politics or religion like you know maybe ways yeah certainly
00:40:07.300
not what happens right that's not what happens online well here's something i could use your
00:40:11.860
help on i've been trying to put my finger on this for a long time so we've been talking about you know
00:40:15.060
tech speak where it's it's sort of oral like speaking via digital tools what is what is the
00:40:21.300
introduction of online video particularly like short form video i feel like the introduction of this
00:40:27.160
stuff has just exacerbated some of the problems we've talked about and it also exacerbates kind
00:40:31.860
of my contempt for people online because i mean as soon as i see like the short form video some head
00:40:36.380
talking to me i'm like i don't like this and i can't figure out why uh have you been able to think
00:40:42.520
about this or am i just being a crank no i think there's something to that and i think it comes back to
00:40:49.620
in some ways comes back to like seeing too much gives you opportunities to find elements that are
00:40:56.520
irritating but i think it's also because when people you know videotape them or videotape is no
00:41:04.620
longer the right word but video video i'll say videotape themselves uh and post it online they're
00:41:09.760
performing they're not acting naturally they know that they're on camera they know that this is going
00:41:14.900
to become media content and i think we have a tendency to become performers and to think of
00:41:21.620
ourselves as kind of media content when we're on video i mean i think it's also true often when
00:41:27.940
we're writing but certainly when we're on video and so there's an irony that people talk all the time
00:41:33.780
about oh you know authenticity and relatability of people on youtube or tiktok or whatever and it
00:41:41.180
turns out that often it's exactly the opposite that we convince ourselves that oh this person is
00:41:46.920
talking about themselves so they must be authentic you know i can relate to what they're saying
00:41:50.700
but actually you know the medium itself encourages a kind of inauthenticity because you are performing
00:41:57.740
you're not talking to someone who's there you're by necessity performing and when you see that
00:42:02.860
somebody is performing you immediately kind of doubt their sincerity you kind of feel like you're being
00:42:09.480
treated as an audience and so i think there is this kind of strange social dynamic that happens when we
00:42:16.040
see someone you know talking through a video that that's very different from what would happen if
00:42:22.060
that person was talking to us in person one of the things i love watching i think it's interesting to
00:42:27.500
observe i love watching clips from say the 1950s or 1960s of when regular people get interviewed by
00:42:35.720
newscasters sort of the man on the street thing and it's interesting to watch how self-conscious the
00:42:42.440
people were they didn't like the people then didn't know how to act in front of a camera and you can
00:42:47.360
tell that they're trying to be kind of professional and so they were very professional prim and proper
00:42:51.580
now since we've had cameras in our lives just it's ubiquitous i think we've all developed like oh here's
00:42:58.000
how i'm supposed to act when there's a camera on me and it's it's just it's interesting it's it goes
00:43:02.420
back to the idea that our tools change how we think or how we talk right i think we know that we're
00:43:10.080
going to be in competition with enormous amounts of other content and so we tend to exaggerate what
00:43:16.980
we say and exaggerate our gestures and kind of in a way become more clownish because we know that
00:43:22.500
that's the only way we'll we'll be able to grab attention with all this competition going on around
00:43:27.780
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
00:43:35.020
role in it but it also again leads to kind of these kind of i don't know we almost become caricatures of
00:43:43.000
ourselves yeah become cartoons yeah yeah something else you talk about in the book is that throughout
00:43:49.080
human history we had different concepts or different ideas of ourselves and what i mean by
00:43:55.080
that is we had a different sense of ourself depending on the context right there was the work
00:43:58.840
self and there was the family self and there was church self so you behaved and thought in a certain
00:44:03.340
way when you're at work compared with your family then you're at church and the internet has pretty
00:44:09.120
much eliminated those barriers like it's all there your work self your church self your family self
00:44:14.180
it's all there what have been the consequences of that you think yeah so and this is something that
00:44:20.280
to go back to charles horton cooley where we started he talks about this that you have different
00:44:24.560
selves for different audiences and many many writers sociologists and other writers throughout the
00:44:30.920
the 20th century you know talked about this and if you look at it from one way you can think oh
00:44:37.160
that's an indication that we lack integrity that we're constantly changing how we present ourselves
00:44:43.080
depending if we're with our family or with friends or with our work colleagues and stuff but i take a
00:44:48.380
different view i i think i think they're all expressions of ourselves but actually you can look at it as
00:44:55.360
this is our effort to accommodate ourselves to other people and other settings so it's not a loss of
00:45:01.340
integrity when we go through this it's kind of a expansion of the orbit the social orbit that we're in
00:45:09.860
and this was very much tied in the past to the fact that we socialized in our bodies and what that meant is
00:45:17.700
you could when you went to school say you were in a particular place at a particular time and you were
00:45:24.460
interacting with people in a particular way and then you'd leave and you might go home and there'd be
00:45:30.560
a gap between those two events and you'd go home and you'd be with your parents and you'd talk in a
00:45:37.860
different way and you'd act in a different way and so in this defined our social lives they very much
00:45:44.280
took place in different places at different times and there were gaps between them when you actually
00:45:49.420
weren't socializing so you could you know get in touch with your own thoughts you could follow your
00:45:55.000
own train of thought you could think about what just happened and kind of synthesize it into your
00:46:00.040
experience those kind of spatial and temporal boundaries of our social lives have disappeared
00:46:06.560
online you know everybody's there all the time you can use snapchat to manage your audience so it's not
00:46:13.780
like you're talking to everybody all at once but because we have all these social media platforms
00:46:18.900
and group texts and other texts and emails going there's no longer the ability to distinguish among
00:46:27.040
different social experiences and social social events and it all becomes a jumble which becomes very
00:46:32.680
disorienting and also you know breeds a lot of anxiety i think but even more so we've lost those gaps
00:46:39.660
between social events where there weren't people around that we knew and we're talking to and
00:46:44.740
shaping ourself to fit them those are all gone because if you have your phone you can socialize
00:46:49.460
all the time even when you're alone and that's what people do there's a writer from i think the 1980s
00:46:55.500
or something called joshua myrowitz who talked about the isolation of different social events
00:47:01.240
and the gaps between them as providing this kind of psychological shock absorber that meant we weren't
00:47:08.440
overwhelmed by the need to socialize all the time with lots of different people and adapt ourselves
00:47:13.840
to all these different people but we we could do it kind of in a segregated deliberate way and i think
00:47:20.900
we've lost our shock absorber and that's one of the reasons that i think people often behave in kind
00:47:27.140
of strange antagonistic ways when they're online because they've lost the ability to kind of think about
00:47:34.940
who they're with at the moment think about what the other people are thinking shape their own
00:47:39.800
behavior to that we simply can't do that anymore because everybody's out there all the time yeah
00:47:45.500
it's made it harder to order ourselves or create a self and because we're not ordered kind of act
00:47:49.980
disorderly there's no self basically right you know mark zuckerberg once said when he was talking
00:47:55.300
about facebook that you know on facebook you can't have multiple selves you have to have just one
00:48:00.980
self because everybody's seeing you at at the same time and you know he thought that was a great thing
00:48:04.860
that that gave us all integrity but i think it's it's exactly the opposite because you know shaping
00:48:10.960
yourself to different social situations doesn't mean you lack integrity it it means you have a
00:48:16.000
consciousness of different people in different social situations and you adapt to them and that
00:48:20.340
actually turns out to be a good thing so we talked about a lot of the ill consequences of
00:48:25.140
too much communication so what do we do about that today all of our work lives and social lives are
00:48:29.720
done via digital devices it seems and so opting out of that would basically mean you have to opt
00:48:35.600
out of large swaths of life so what can we do to sort of mitigate the contamination of the super bloom
00:48:42.160
effect of online communication well it's difficult as all of us who have tried know because society
00:48:48.940
really has reshaped itself at this point to the internet it's hard to do anything without pulling out
00:48:55.260
your phone or being online in one way or another so backing away you know not cutting yourself off
00:49:01.480
but even backing away a bit is going to entail sacrifices you know people will resent you if you
00:49:07.720
respond to their messages less quickly or if your comment on their instagram post less quickly or
00:49:15.040
whatever so i want to start by stressing the fact that you know you can't do this without sacrifices
00:49:20.000
but i do think the sacrifices in the long run are probably worth it because they'll ultimately make
00:49:26.060
your life richer and more fulfilling so you know if i was going to give advice or a way to think about
00:49:32.280
this i'd go back to something old and simple which is that you should always use the right tool for the
00:49:39.240
job you know my father used to tell me that when i was trying to do something haphazardly and you know
00:49:45.320
using a screwdriver when i should have used a wrench or whatever you know always use the right tool for
00:49:51.140
the job because because our computers and our phones and digital media can do everything for us
00:49:58.080
or or can be a tool for doing pretty much everything particularly in our social lives and it's a very
00:50:03.340
efficient tool we've kind of come to the belief that oh it's it's kind of the swiss army knife or the
00:50:08.580
leather man tool for that that we can use for everything in in terms of gathering information sharing our
00:50:14.520
thoughts communicating with others building relationship groups and i think it's actually
00:50:19.840
really really bad a really bad tool for a lot of that i think it's a bad tool for conversing
00:50:25.320
with other people particular people who are close to us i think it's a bad tool for gathering information
00:50:32.740
and gathering news and certainly a bad tool for thinking deeply about things so if we can step back
00:50:38.820
and say you know what is this tool actually good for and certainly it's good for a lot of things
00:50:44.740
uh you know i'm a big fan of computers though i'm not a big fan of digital media
00:50:49.940
but also appreciate that you know it's not a great tool for socializing it's actually better and more
00:50:58.460
fulfilling for yourself and for the other person to sit down and write somebody a letter something we almost
00:51:03.000
never think about doing anymore then jotting down you know a sloppy text and sending it off that that
00:51:08.600
is going to be basically meaningless to that other person or it's better to sit down and have a
00:51:13.900
conversation without also glancing at your phone all the time it's going to be more fulfilling
00:51:18.040
you know it may even make sense to subscribe to a print newspaper or some print magazine so you can
00:51:23.440
get them and you can sit down with them and actually go through them quietly and carefully without
00:51:29.040
being bombarded by other things on the screen so if we step back and kind of realize that you know
00:51:34.840
our phones and digital media are good for some things but they're really bad for other things
00:51:38.980
and we just use them for other things because it's quick and efficient and easy then i think we
00:51:44.620
we might be able as individuals at least i'm not sure about as a society as individuals at least
00:51:49.780
make better decisions about how we live our day-to-day lives and and kind of realize that you know
00:51:57.580
we need to set the phone or the computer aside for lots of things we do particularly of a social
00:52:03.000
nature well nick this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book
00:52:07.380
and your work well i have a website nicholascar.com and the book is called super bloom how technologies
00:52:15.680
of connection tear us apart and i also have a new sub stack called new cartographies.com where i
00:52:23.860
fairly frequently post short essays short articles so any and all of those places if you want to learn
00:52:30.420
more good places to go yeah i subscribe to new cartographies i really enjoy it so i encourage people
00:52:34.720
to do that well nick carr thanks for time it's been a pleasure thanks brett it was a great pleasure
00:52:39.340
to be back on the show my guest here is nicholas carr he's the author of the book super bloom it's
00:52:45.280
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about his work at his
00:52:49.160
website nicholas carr.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash communication we find links
00:52:56.620
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:53:08.040
artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter it's
00:53:12.020
called dying breed you can sign up at dyingbreed.net it's a great way to support the show as always
00:53:17.720
thank you for the continued support until next time it's brett mckay remind time listening on podcast