The Art of Manliness - Familiarity Breeds Contempt (And Other Underappreciated Consequences of Digital Communication)

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:00:10.980 there's been a lot of cultural discussion of the way digital technologies and social media

00:00:15.680 contribute to things like political polarization and adolescent depression but as i'll explore with

00:00:20.640 nicholas carr the author of super bloom our digital tools are also changing our ability

00:00:25.460 to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways today on the show nicholas

00:00:31.080 unpacks why the optimistic idea that more communication is always better hasn't panned out

00:00:35.140 and how the speed and volume of modern communication is overwhelming our human capacity to process

00:00:40.200 information and maintain meaningful relationships we discuss why the messiness of pre-digital

00:00:45.480 communication might have actually been better for us how email has evolved from thoughtful letters to

00:00:50.040 rushed messages and why seeing more of people online often makes us like them less nicholas 1.00

00:00:55.620 also explains why having different versions of ourselves for different contacts was actually

00:00:59.140 healthy and the simple rubric for better managing our relationship with digital communication tools

00:01:03.900 after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is communication

00:01:20.040 all right nicholas carr welcome back to the show thanks it's good to be back with you so we had

00:01:24.820 you on a long time ago to talk about your book the shallows which was about how google was changing

00:01:31.120 our brains this is like 10 years ago 15 years ago you've got a new book out called super bloom where

00:01:36.960 you explore how our digital communication tools whether it's text social media short form video how that's

00:01:45.100 changing the way we communicate socialize even just think of ourselves as a self in the world

00:01:51.400 so the word social media has just become it's just a common word we throw around and i think a lot of

00:01:58.060 people might think oh social media that phrase was an invention of the late 20th early 21st century

00:02:05.860 right we did social media did not exist until mark zuckerberg came up with facebook but you talk about

00:02:11.380 there was a 19th century thinker who coined the term social media his name's charles horton cooley

00:02:17.040 tell us about this guy what was his big idea when it came to communication tools and how we interact

00:02:22.900 with one another well charles horton cooley he was born in the 1860s in michigan he started out as an

00:02:30.620 academic economist but he ended up becoming one of the earliest american sociologists founded the

00:02:37.020 university of michigan's sociology department and the question he set out to answer the question

00:02:42.880 that really interested him is why does society change and in 1897 he wrote this very interesting

00:02:49.980 very obscure at this point article about that subject and he went through you know various possibilities

00:02:56.300 he talked about genetics and stuff like that but ultimately he decided that the biggest force that

00:03:02.860 changes society is changes in communication technology changes in the tools we use to

00:03:09.360 to converse to express ourselves to exchange information and so forth and in that article

00:03:15.880 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

00:03:22.000 first time it's been used and what he meant by it was that communication technologies allow us to form

00:03:30.400 groups that are independent of location so you know in the past before we had the mail system and the

00:03:37.460 telegraph and everything else you know you your social group was whoever happened to be around you

00:03:42.120 in the real world but he saw that as new technologies allow us to interact with people far away we can form

00:03:49.300 all sorts of groups without any spatial or even temporal boundaries and he called these groups social

00:03:56.040 mediums or social media in general and so that you know looking at his work and particularly his

00:04:02.220 stress on the importance of communication technologies he called them communication mechanisms

00:04:07.680 in shaping society was one of the real inspirations for the book and what's interesting his ideas that he

00:04:14.420 had in the the 19th century it seems like later thinkers about media and communication we're talking

00:04:20.640 like marshall mccluhen or neil postman they kind of picked up on these ideas correct absolutely i mean

00:04:28.460 i don't know if they were inspired by cooley but you know 50 70 years before they started looking at

00:04:36.340 this cooley had already come to this conclusion and i mean what characterizes mccluhen's most famous

00:04:41.760 saying of course is the medium is the message and by by that he meant that we focus on the bits of

00:04:49.020 content that come through communication systems media systems but really it's the technology itself

00:04:55.600 that shapes the way we speak who we speak to even how we think and that's very much what cooley was

00:05:03.140 talking about you know at the end of the 19th century that to paraphrase his belief it's that you know

00:05:09.780 when mechanisms of communication change society changes independent of the content that's coming

00:05:16.500 through those mechanisms how did he see society changing so that what happened did he make any

00:05:22.360 observations about that as you know we move from say an oral oral communication society where we just

00:05:27.040 talked to the people who are around us around the fire pit or in the town village how did culture

00:05:33.240 society change as we introduce letter writing or the telegraph etc cooley saw that new communication

00:05:41.000 technologies do two things they change the way influence flows among people and that just means

00:05:47.960 the patterns of the way information go from one person to another certainly when you have electronic

00:05:53.660 or electric communications everything speeds up and you can cast your voice or hear the voices of other

00:05:58.640 people far away instantaneously but also it changes and this is what i was talking about before it

00:06:04.420 changes how people form relationships and form social groups and these can be people in the distance they

00:06:12.740 can be people who wrote books a long time ago and so he what he saw and i think this was very prescient

00:06:19.120 he used the term that as information speeds up and as we can talk to people far away and they can hear us and

00:06:27.720 there's all these flows of influence and association that society would come to liquefy and what he meant

00:06:35.320 by that was you know what when you're just talking to people who are around you in the same place at the

00:06:40.360 same time then you have a lot of social structure you have a lot of institutions you have a lot of

00:06:46.700 traditions and they're all you know sustained through these tight communities the more you break down

00:06:53.720 those kind of barriers the more chaotic society becomes and it becomes rather than kind of this concrete

00:07:01.840 thing that changes very very slowly society starts to act more like a liquid and it changes much much quicker

00:07:08.260 yeah and you can see this uh if you do sort of a genealogy of communication tools like let's say the

00:07:16.040 the introduction of the printing press because of the introduction of the printing press like you had the

00:07:20.500 reformation you had all these changes in what we're thinking about religion and you had these splinter

00:07:24.680 groups and then you also had the rise of you know nation states and people thinking about freedom and

00:07:30.360 individual rights that wasn't happening before the printing press that that new form of communication

00:07:35.220 that allows you to speak across space and time right and one of the implications of that and

00:07:43.240 mcclellan in particular is pretty good on that about that is that suddenly an individual

00:07:48.320 can determine kind of their own their own knowledge base in their own intellectual activities because

00:07:57.060 suddenly suddenly you can read and listen to people from all over the place and you can start

00:08:02.340 selecting which ideas are important to you and what the argument is is that this in addition to all the

00:08:08.700 social changes this led to the rise of individualism we started to think of ourselves as kind of

00:08:14.480 self-created because we we weren't locked into the traditions and the words of people in our

00:08:21.200 immediate surroundings we kind of took control of our own intellectual lives and that changed us as

00:08:28.260 individual persons we started to think much more about ourselves as individuals but also became another

00:08:34.600 big broad force in in reshaping society when you move from very tight-knit communities to a huge

00:08:42.880 civilization of individuals who think of themselves as individuals yeah and then you know going on to

00:08:48.660 that theory that he had as as communication speeds up everything's more fluid i mean we i think we've

00:08:53.200 all seen that if we've been on the internet for the past 25 years it just seems like there's just

00:08:58.560 constant change because of the rapidity of digital communication right and there's this weird

00:09:04.680 combination of individualism and also clannishness as people you know join groups very very quickly

00:09:12.880 and again following cooley and mcclellan and neil postman if you look at the technology itself

00:09:18.360 you see that the technology is there exists to speed up the flow of information the flow of

00:09:26.120 conversation and that has a very interesting effect on human nature because i don't think i don't think

00:09:34.220 the human psyche is well suited to exchanging information and expressing oneself in gathering

00:09:42.240 information at the kind of speed and volume that the internet and social media kind of overwhelms us

00:09:49.900 with all the time yeah and that's the big argument of your book you talk about how cooley you know he

00:09:54.600 sees this idea of how our communication changes cultures if you as it gets faster things liquefy and

00:10:00.520 he had an optimistic view of this like well this is actually a good thing yeah and then you talk about

00:10:04.700 how later social media founders like mark zuckerberg with facebook kind of they probably didn't know

00:10:10.780 they're picking up on cooley but they picked up on that idea that the more you can communicate the

00:10:15.240 more you can talk to people to different people from different backgrounds from across the world

00:10:20.020 that is always a net positive there's no downsides to it what you're doing in super bloom is like well

00:10:25.880 okay yeah there's some good things that come from this ability to communicate fast in a wide-ranging

00:10:32.460 way but there are downsides to this and this is what you explore in the book right and and so if you

00:10:41.080 look you know through the history of modern electric communications from the telegraph to the telephone

00:10:47.320 to radio tv fax machines and on to the internet and social media every new communication technology

00:10:55.580 that makes communication more efficient is greeted as in utopian terms so people think oh since

00:11:03.400 communication is the way you you learn about other people and you gain an understanding of other

00:11:08.220 cultures and you can negotiate or go through diplomacy and stuff that means that communication is kind of a

00:11:15.280 naturally good thing and if communication is is a naturally good thing then more communication

00:11:21.700 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

00:11:28.080 through many quotes of this utopianism from the moment the telegraph was invented to the internet came

00:11:33.800 along to mark zuckerberg playing up you know how sharing on on facebook would bring the world together

00:11:39.220 and my argument is that that gets it wrong i you can see why we believe that it's all wrapped up

00:11:47.560 in our sense of ourselves as unique creatures because we can communicate in ways that other

00:11:54.300 animals for instance can't and it's also wrapped up in the very popular idea of a marketplace of ideas

00:12:01.060 the intellectual marketplace operates like a marketplace of goods if you can create more supply

00:12:07.000 then people have more choices and they'll get rid of the bad stuff and they'll choose the good stuff

00:12:11.640 and so there's all these kind of assumptions we make about more communication being better

00:12:17.440 communication but what i argue is if you you actually look through history and even if you look at our

00:12:23.600 own recent experience you see a very different picture that yes communication can be very very good

00:12:30.880 and in fact society is built of communication but when you speed up communication too much when you

00:12:37.780 increase the volume of communication too much it starts to become overwhelming and you create a

00:12:43.240 conflict i think between human nature and our ability to make sense of things and to deal with messages

00:12:50.000 and information in the technology and i think that's what we're seeing today but i think you can see that

00:12:56.300 as i say throughout recent history i mean i'll give you a quick story that i relate in the book

00:13:02.160 when telegraph and telephone emerged people like nikola tesla the great inventors marconi the inventor

00:13:10.420 of radio and lots of other people religious figures said oh this is going to create a world of

00:13:17.060 understanding we're all going to communicate instantaneously so we can work out our problems

00:13:21.260 quickly and this is the end of war and marconi made that proclamation in 1912 and of course two years

00:13:28.700 later 1914 world war one broke out and if you read the history of world war one one of the messages

00:13:36.220 that comes out of here is is that these new communication technologies rather than kind of

00:13:42.820 restraining people from going to war at that time actually hastened the outbreak of the war and it's

00:13:49.560 because the war was was set off by the assassination of austrian archduke and when that happened instead of

00:13:56.300 going the old-fashioned route where diplomats would travel to different capitals and sit down together

00:14:01.400 and try to hash out the problems and come to some solution suddenly all these messages from all the

00:14:07.460 capitals started flowing through telegraph lines and telephone lines and it kind of overwhelmed diplomacy

00:14:13.880 and it soon turned into threats and other things in what historians say is that the acceleration of

00:14:20.200 communication actually was one of the causes of the war so exactly the opposite effect when you actually

00:14:27.560 look at what happens from what everyone expected and yet unfortunately we didn't learn from that

00:14:33.300 example because if you go through you know radio and tv and the internet and stuff you see that same

00:14:38.680 kind of very optimistic even utopian belief that more communication will be better for society

00:14:45.100 and we've all seen that play out faster communication is the more communication you get online

00:14:50.940 i think initially thought oh this will just bring new understanding new viewpoints new vistas and instead

00:14:56.800 we're just really angry at each other and just right yeah and it's funny that idea of you know more

00:15:01.540 communication isn't necessarily better i think we've had a marriage counselor on the podcast before talk

00:15:06.040 about there's this idea in a marriage of a marriage is having problems like you just got to more

00:15:11.020 communication you got to communicate communicate communicate and he said he's like sometimes more

00:15:15.000 communication isn't actually good because you just end up talking about the problems more and more

00:15:18.800 and more instead of just kind of okay maybe there's some things we can't change here right and we move

00:15:23.520 on so yeah let's talk about what we can do and learn from history about maybe the benefits of slowing

00:15:30.160 down our communication having a little bit more friction and you talk about in the 20th century when we

00:15:35.320 had this development of different modes of communication there was radio there was television there was

00:15:42.020 telephone there was newspaper print there was actually a lot of variety in the 20th century

00:15:48.600 in the mediums we can choose and i think we all picked up on that well with certain mediums there were

00:15:54.900 certain types of thinking we did with that but i think we forget that because you know today our whole

00:16:01.900 information medium is just online and i think online mediums can kind of encourage a certain type of

00:16:07.960 thinking can you walk us through like that variety that we once had with communication and maybe some

00:16:14.100 of the benefits that came with that yeah so now we've all gotten used to digital media and to the

00:16:20.140 smartphone as information's delivery device and because computers which are obviously at the center of

00:16:26.480 this are general purpose information processors that means they can do pretty much everything that's ever

00:16:32.700 been done through communication systems and media so you know basically people use their phone as their

00:16:39.120 newspaper it's the radio it's their tv it's their camera and their photo album it's their post office

00:16:44.960 it's even their telephone sometimes and we look back to the pre-digital world i'll call it analog media

00:16:51.880 and we when we look back we see it as kind of a mess because you couldn't do everything through one

00:16:57.760 tool in one network there were all sorts of networks involved and all sorts of devices so you had

00:17:04.020 you know you you subscribe to a print newspaper that came in the morning you got some magazines that came

00:17:09.880 weekly or monthly you had a telephone on the wall a dial telephone that you'd use to call up people when

00:17:17.040 you needed to talk to people who weren't in your immediate vicinity you had radio you had tv you had record

00:17:23.060 players and records and tapes so you had all of this diverse set of specialized analog media and as i

00:17:31.740 say we look back that at that now and see it as a mess and say oh thank goodness the internet came along

00:17:36.120 and cleaned that all up so we can do everything through our phone or our computer but what i argue

00:17:41.240 is that actually i think the very messiness of analog media and particularly the specialization of

00:17:49.200 networks and tools and artifacts actually had a huge benefit for us because it held back the flow of

00:17:57.940 information you know it had been possible for say in the 1970s it had been possible for 100 years

00:18:04.060 to transmit information instantaneously electronically but because of various physical constraints and

00:18:12.260 constraints inherent in analog media you couldn't do that people had to go out and make choices

00:18:17.480 uh they had to say you know do i want to turn on the radio now and listen to the program do i want

00:18:22.080 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

00:18:27.360 want to pick up a book and having those specialized media and requiring people to make choices actually

00:18:34.460 imposed a kind of discipline on the way we consumed media we had to use our discretion we had to make

00:18:42.120 careful choices you couldn't do everything all at once and you didn't want to and i think that had

00:18:47.200 ramifications for how we communicate for how we think about news for how we think about entertainment

00:18:56.240 for how we think about art there was separation among different forms of media you know some things

00:19:02.960 we knew were more important than other things uh some things were truer than other things so it gave us

00:19:09.060 this discretion in this discipline that i think we've lost when everything comes at us in all forms

00:19:15.940 all the time and we've gone from a world of messiness that was still at a human scale and required human

00:19:23.460 decision making to kind of a cleanliness and efficiency that is no longer at human scale and kind of

00:19:30.520 instead of us using the tools the tools start to use us yeah and that cleanliness or lack of friction

00:19:37.520 with our digital tools i think that's a source of a lot of the overwhelm or information overload people

00:19:43.080 feel it's like man i've got these feeds i subscribe to instagram feeds i got to keep up with twitter

00:19:48.700 email it's just a glut and you just feel i can't keep up with this and i remember you know before

00:19:55.980 digital tools before smartphones i don't know i just felt like my brain was a little bit more calm a

00:20:02.160 little bit more chill i didn't feel overwhelmed like i do sometimes today so yeah that friction

00:20:08.600 you know we've been trying to get rid of it because like we see the friction particularly in silicon

00:20:12.240 valley is this bad thing we got to get rid of that friction in our communication tools or medium

00:20:17.800 consumption tools i think it just allowed us to i don't know think slowly be more contemplative about

00:20:23.400 what we're consuming yeah and at the same time also because you couldn't do everything at once and

00:20:29.320 you couldn't juggle dozens of information feeds you you actually were encouraged to pay more

00:20:34.760 attention whether you were listening to a song or having a conversation with somebody on the phone

00:20:38.840 or reading a newspaper or whatever you know that was what you were doing you weren't also glancing at

00:20:44.800 notifications on your phone and so it it just it's a very different mindset or attitude that has

00:20:51.960 basically been destroyed i think by digital media and it's sad yeah and i think you're right like it's a we

00:20:57.660 have a very surface level attention that we even carry over not just how we consume news but like

00:21:02.560 how we interact with others like our emails we just kind of glance over them text messages that you know

00:21:08.500 maybe someone's trying to communicate and reach out to you because they're hurting you know that text

00:21:12.540 message you're getting could be one of you know 20 that are in your unread message section in your

00:21:18.680 smartphone and so you just kind of glance through it and you really can't you can't do that sort of deep

00:21:24.560 connection with that person what that person needs because you don't have the ability like your

00:21:28.220 attention span can't withstand all the the influx of stuff you're getting yeah and it's kind of a

00:21:34.440 consequence of the technology itself in order in order to kind of stay afloat with all this information

00:21:42.460 that's coming in you have to be superficial you have to you know make quick decisions and and draw on

00:21:48.660 your instinct rather than your reasoning and and respond immediately so it's it changes the depth of

00:21:55.380 our engagement with information and with other people i think it changes the way we talk and i think

00:22:00.740 it ultimately also changes the way we think there's just if you want to be successful in digital media

00:22:07.040 you can't think deeply or slowly about anything we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our

00:22:12.520 sponsors and now back to the show well and you use this an example of how our technology changes the

00:22:21.840 way we think use this well mcclellan talked about this he says whenever a new form of communication is

00:22:27.300 introduced whether that's letter writing or the telegraph or television or radio or email we use that new form of

00:22:36.580 communication the same way that we used a previous form of communication so like you use the example

00:22:42.980 of email talk about that like i think if people were around when email was first introduced they might

00:22:47.760 remember they probably used email differently than they use they use it today absolutely and i certainly

00:22:54.880 remember that and mcclellan had a great phrase he said we march backwards into the future and you can see

00:23:01.140 this with the email because when email came along and became popular in whenever it was for most people in

00:23:06.500 the 1980s or late 1980s 1990s with you know aol mail and yahoo mail and stuff people saw it as kind of a quicker

00:23:16.800 electronic version of the mail system so they thought of emails as kind of letters in a different form and i can

00:23:25.360 certainly remember this myself when you wrote an email to someone you'd sit down and you'd approach it as if you were

00:23:31.360 writing a letter you know you'd write dear so and so and then you'd have some courtesies and and you'd

00:23:37.520 write in full sentences and you'd try to express yourself clearly and you'd proofread it and then

00:23:42.320 you'd send it off and that prevailed for a little while but then as more and more people got onto email

00:23:49.360 and email began to be used for all sorts of things in displaced you know letters and stuff suddenly we

00:23:57.160 couldn't do that anymore because we had to keep up with the inbox so you just didn't have time to sit

00:24:02.140 down and compose a careful letter you had to write quickly and often sloppily and kind of get your

00:24:08.840 message across but get it across in kind of the most efficient way possible so the technology itself

00:24:14.980 changed the way we speak and it wasn't only you know when we were sending emails to work colleagues or

00:24:22.280 for some administrative purpose it was how we talked to friends and family members we got

00:24:27.860 blunter and blunter and more compressed and sloppier and meanwhile because the email was so efficient

00:24:34.460 we stopped writing letters so the technology shaped the way we correspond with people change the very form

00:24:42.520 of it and made it i think much less intimate and much less careful and much less thoughtful and again

00:24:49.000 it was because we had no choice we had to keep up with a email inbox that never stopped growing

00:24:54.020 my wife talks about that she's noticed that she's always like remember my emails that i used to write

00:24:59.360 i wrote these like just really long emails to my friends we had these like long correspondences and

00:25:04.340 the emails would look like some letter that was written from the 19th century like you said had the

00:25:08.780 the courtesies and then you know there was like a catch-up of what i've been up to

00:25:12.460 and then there would be this long like exploration of an issue and i mean they were really well done

00:25:19.220 and she says like i haven't written those type of messages in a long time and she's like i feel like

00:25:25.280 i'm missing something because i haven't because the act of writing a letter like that or an email like

00:25:30.140 that it forces you to be self-reflective it forces you to contemplate what you're thinking and

00:25:36.680 think about the other person in a deeper way than you do when you you know just send out these

00:25:42.160 you know short bullet point missives right and you certainly see that if you look back to when

00:25:46.960 letters themselves the mail became cheap enough that normal everyday citizens could actually

00:25:52.880 write frequent letters this was in like 1860 1870 there's histories of that and it it became kind of

00:26:00.140 central not only to how people communicate but kind of central to their lives that when you sat down

00:26:07.260 to write a letter you kind of isolated yourself from all the business of the world and all the

00:26:12.180 distractions you had to go through and it gave you time to kind of compose a narrative about your life

00:26:18.620 you wanted to tell people what you'd been up to and stuff so you had to kind of shape it into a story

00:26:23.640 and you had to think about what was important to you so it was really in addition to being a

00:26:28.320 communication tool this kind of long form writing to other people that you're friendly with or our

00:26:34.520 family members or other whatever kind of had a deep effect on our ability to think about life and put

00:26:41.480 everything that was going on in our lives into some kind of context that made sense and in the early

00:26:46.800 days of email i think that was also true but that's all that's all gone now yeah and it's only gotten

00:26:52.740 worse as we shifted our communication from email to text messages or social media updates it's even

00:26:59.240 more perfunctory oh yeah and i what amazes me and i i have a chapter in super bloom that's about this

00:27:06.260 because i don't think it's been talked about enough is is what's happened to personal correspondence

00:27:13.700 you know now everybody's texting going through messaging apps and stuff and their group texts and

00:27:18.780 whatever so so even email now is going the way of the written letter emails too slow emails too slow

00:27:25.220 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

00:52:54.680 to resources we delve deeper into this topic

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

00:53:21.900 but put what you've heard into action

The Art of Manliness - January 28, 2025

Familiarity Breeds Contempt (And Other Underappreciated Consequences of Digital Communication)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript