We assume more information means we’ll like people more because the people we know best tend to be people we know the most about. For ages, we’ve predicted more and faster information would end war. But we forget the many people whom we spend less time with once we learn more about them.
This is a very normal human process that has been industrialized by social media. The “online disinhibition effect,” in which we share more online so there’s no small talk like neighbors but rather ” “deep cascading dissimilarity.” This is Wilder’s sense of proximity.
That’s from Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, a new book from journalist Nicholas Carr. As Carr writes: “By turning us all in the media personalities, social media has also turned us all into rivals.”
Chart communications technologies over time, and Carr says they came in three stages. First, the machines were just carriers (telephones, telegraph, early internet), then they began to exert editorial influence by social media algorithms curating, and now AI threats to also create the content. This gets us more and more, but runs in the “naive view of information” problem that historian Noah Yuval Harari has also argued: “Information has no essential link to truth,” and so more information does not necessarily lead to more truth.
Carr’s Superbloom is enjoyable and enlightening. I recommend it. Below my notes for future reference.
My notes below:
- A 2017 “superbloom” of flowers that generated a swarm of social media stars to a tiny California town
- Robert Frost: they plant dead trees for a living
- In his 1902 book “Lookingglass Self“, Charles Cooley coined “social media” for those with “like natures”, predated Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 “medium is the message.” But Cooley thought more groups would strengthen the whole, “ permitting man to organize his higher, sympathetic and aesthetic impulses”
- Charles Cooley: “Two things that must always cooperate are human nature and the mechanism of communication” (“human nature,” a relatively stable aspect, and “the mechanism of communication,” a variable factor, are interdependent)
- In 2012, Zuckerberg writes about Facebook’s “social mission” and in 2016 sounded like Cooley when he said Facebook was “social infrastructure”
- Joan Didion: “ the ganglia of the fantastic electronic pulsing that is life in the United States”
- Author: “One of the curiosities of the early 21st century is the way so much power over social relations came into the hands of young men with more interest in numbers than in people.”
- Western intellectuals have long pursued a worldwide “republic of letters”
- Boston minister Ezra Gannett (1801-1871): “Men who talk together daily cannot hate or disown one another”
- In the 1858 book, The Story of the Telegraph:: “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth”
- In 1912, Marconi said the invention of radio would “make war impossible”
- In 1932, RCA VP Orrin Dunlap said TV would “usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth”
- 1914, WWI was triggered by the speed of the new telegraph (broadcasting Ferdinand’s assassination)
- “Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication.“
- Harold Innis (1894-1952): “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult”
- The 1978 George Carlin “filthy words” Supreme Court case: speaking at home IS different than public air waves
- Secrecy of Correspondence doctrine
- Privacy of correspondence was in postal service doctrine before the Declaration of Independence or the US constitution — 1878 Ex parte Jackson case gave 4th amendment protection for letters (personal vs mass communication)
- Congress didn’t keep up with telegrams, which were viewed as a technologically different than letters (Western Union officials had to transcribe the Morse code), but state laws and code/honor of the profession ensured telegrams were meant to be kept private
- But there were scandals: 1868 Andrew Johnson impeachment trial and 1876 presidential election there were western union leaked telegrams
- 1928 Olmstead case overseen by Justice Taft argued wiretapping wasn’t an illegal search and seizure because it was listening — Louis’s Brandeis dissent said court wasn’t adapting to “a changing world” — until the 1934 Communications Act brought rules (common carriers)
- Marconi’s radio was invented as an extension of telegram but Reginald Fessenden’s 1906 Christmas bible was first radio “show”, as he demonstrated what would become mass media
- Titanic was in some sense a radio failure — noise in the system drowned out and confused the distress message, leading to the radio Act of 1912, which pushed amateurs to shortwave, required licensing and prosecution. Radio shifted to be dominated by one way medium
- 1877 Supreme Court hearing upholding a difference between businesses with a private and a public calling, with the majority writing that “property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence and affect the community at large”
- Following Hoover commerce conferences, a new Radio Act of 1927 passed — a body blocked the renewal of a license for quack doctor John Brinkley
- Communications act of 1934 created the FCC and continued to make regulation more permanent
- Common carrier and public interest standards coupled together
- Author: pubic interest isn’t just a legal standard it’s “an ethical standard” so of course it will and should evolve — but it must ensure the public should have a say in its airwaves
- Whatever radio did to help democracy it also helped autocrats as well
- Roosevelt’s Committee for National Morale (included Margaret Mead and George Gallup) considered that since radio’s one-to-many created an “authoritarian personality” could a many-to-many model create a “democratic personality”
- Author describes the friction of analog media gave us so many different contexts and choices — in contrast to frictionless digital media
- Claude Shannon’s 1948 esoteric mathematical theory of communication was later discovered as demonstrating the separation between transferring a message (letter carrier or telephone) was different than the content of the message. His paper made science of network management. The compression of content into binary digits (bits) means any idea can be translated and transmitted (von Neumann and JCR Licklider made the paper famous among mathematicians)
- 1970s-1990s deregulation to 1996 Communications Act
- “The combination of deregulation and digitization erased the legal and ethical distinction between interpersonal communication and broadcast communication that had governed media in the twentieth century. When Google introduced its Gmail service in 2004, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail. The public, in thrall to Google and eager for free email accounts, barely flinched. The centuries-old secrecy-of-correspondence doctrine was tossed aside just as personal correspondence and conversation were moving online. On the internet, the wiretap wouldn’t be a bug; it would be a feature.”
- Zuckerberg’s squirrel and news feed: category error— in this way all information is flattened into content. Unlike Claude Shannon, the news feed was making editorial decisions
- In 2010 Jeffrey Rosen: “ Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.”
- “We may have stopped talking about the role of the public interest in governing decisions about what’s published and broadcast, but the public interest is still being taken into account. It’s just not happening out in the open, through established, political and judicial procedures, and institutions. The public interest is being interpreted in secret, by large corporations that see the public not as a polity, but as a customer base. We’ve outsourced the stewardship of speech to big tech”
- “In the battle for the public mind, the strongest ideas triumph. The belief had its origins in the Enlightenment. In Areopagitica, his radical 1644 treatise opposing censorship, John Milton declared that if “all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth,” truth would invariably win out. “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address, assured the public that “error of opinion may be tolerated” as long as “reason is left free to combat it.”* The analogy to industrial competition was made explicit by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in his famous dissent in the Supreme Court’s 1919 First Amendment case Abrams et al. v. United States. The “ultimate good” is served by “free trade in ideas,” he wrote. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market”
- “Whether we realize it or not, social media turns out information that’s been highly processed to stimulate not just engagement but dependency.”
- A 1974 Arpanet audit: email accounted for 3/4 traffic already; in a 1978 paper Licklider (with Albert Vezza) already identified its key features: no necessary small talk like phones, faster and more casual than letter writing, less intrusive snd asynchronous (just like today) — but initially general public email did mirror formal letter writing (in tone and formality)
- Marshall Mclulahn: “we march backwards into the future” — initially using a new technology in the same way as a familiar tool
- Wordsworth wrote that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility”
- Theodor Adorno in 1951 in minima moralia: the industrial “spirit of practicality” was expanding out of business into everyday social relations
- Linguist David Crystal in 2008 predicted that text speak would fade away as bandwidth and other tech constraints left — and we’d return to standard writing (but it was driven not by space constraints but by time constraints
- John McWhorter texting’s “cult of concision” of “fingered speech,” that textspeak gave us the speed to finally write like we talk
- Cooley thought more communication would let us consume more and think deeply but he overlooked that more efficient communication would overwhelm us — no time for system 2 thinking as Kahneman called it so we stay stuck in system 1
- Proximity effect: Ebbe Ebbeson in 1976, we are more likely to be friends the closer someone is — next door neighbor or 100 feet away — but we are also more likely to be enemies the closer someone is (because of “environmental spoiling”) — social media has supercharged this so now we can be close proximity to far more people (we find tribal friends and hate others)
- We assume more information means we’ll like people more because the people we know best tend to be people we know the most about
- 2007 Michael Norton et all: more information about people on average leads to liking more (our friends are the exceptions): dissimilarity cascades, we dislike those that are different than us even more than we like people who are like us (“self disclosure gets riskier as it goes deeper”) — short banal friendly neighbor chats might not ever go deep enough to start a dissimilarity cascade
- “Online disinhibition effect”: we share more online which means we don’t have short small talk like neighbors whom we can begin to like even if we are secretly/deeply different. Instead we are thrust into deep cascading dissimilarity
- “By turning us all in the media personalities, social media has also turned us all into rivals.” (Wider’s sense of proximity)
- Sherry Turkle: social media is an “ anti empathy machine”
- Taylor and Altman social penetration theory in four stages: orientation, exploratory affective exchange; affective exchange (true friendships begin) and stable exchange (closest) — Altman later added “privacy regulation theory” to balance this and reflect how we’re constantly balancing open and closed, there is no permanent state to a relationship
- Social media is “all sword, no shield” — we share too much and ask too much of others
- Adam Johnson digital crowding in “Privacy Online”: “it is inevitable that we will end up knowing more about people, and also more likely that we end up disliking them because of it”
His four steps of the process we’re experiencing:
- Content collapses into digital ubiquity (supply side and demand side lines close)
- Media technology moved on from purely transport to also include an editorial role (algorithmically)
- People are transceivers of high speed communication
- Social Media encourage unchecked self expression, driving envy
- The commercial internet arrived with the Fall of Berlin Wall, Fukuyama’s “end of history” essay and Frances Cairncross 1997 Death of Distance book, so the internet story was one of openness and democracy
- Notes Jeff Jarvis (chain reaction of revolutions) and Jay Rosen (the people formerly known as the audience) were (overly?) optimistic
- Yochai Bentley’s 2006 Wealth of Networks built on Justice Steven’s Reno v ACLU case for Internet being democratic
- Not everyone was overly optimistic. In 2001, legal scholar Cass Sunstein argued in his book Republic.com that the flood of low information could divide the body politic, warned of the risks of a fragmented media environment
- Benkler and others had faith in peer reviewed citation (author calls Benkler “thoughtful, logical and wrong”), because websites like Slashdot were just minor obsessions of early adopters but not how most use the tool
- Walter Lippman wrote of the “nausea of ideas” as he developed what became the New Republic amid WW1
- In “How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe” by George Creel outlines successful WW1 effort to turn American support for the war
- Lippman’s November 1919 Atlantic essay on “the basic problem of democracy” notes that democracy was for when we had direct experience with issues: “The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding,” he wrote. “News comes at a distance; it comes helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people.” He added the democratic citizen “must seize catch words and headlines or nothing.” — expanded in his 1922 book Public Opinion (not all citizens are “sovereign and omnicompetent”. This isn’t an “undesirable ideal” it is an “unattainable ideal”
- Marketplace of ideas relies on the idea of fully rational philosophical resident (homo philosophic is), but that’s as wrong as the behavior economics (home economicus)
- The 2016 book Democracy for Realists: “folk theory” of democracy is “fairy tales”, whereas “ the political ‘belief systems’ of ordinary citizens are generally thin, disorganized, and ideologically incoherent.”
- In 2022 book “The Paradox of Democracy”: “ the most knowledgeable voters, the ones who pay the most attention to politics, are also the ones most prone to biased or blinkered decision-making”
- Educated people are more distorted (Ruffini showed that college-educated white voters make up the majority of political extremes)
- Donald Kinder: despite all the access to information “Americans are no better informed on public affairs than they were a generation or two ago”
- A 1977 paper on the illusory truth effect: the more something is said the more we believe it, frequency as stand in for facticity (as Todd Rose has also shown)
- Information cascades (and we lost professional journalists)
- Social media asked its users to “be creators, be repeaters (amplifying) and, yes, be audience
- A 2018 Science analysis of information spreads: fake stories spread more widely because they surprised more
- 2018 Wall Street Journal expose of internal Facebook presentation: “Our algorithms exploit the human brains attractiveness to divisiveness.”
- 2018 Duke polarization lab study: exposing partisans to tweets from the other side only reinforced their beliefs
- “In forming opinions or casting votes, people are motivated much less by political ideology than by group identity. Opinions emerge from affiliation, not vice versa.”
- Dewey’s great community in The Public and its Problems (1927) gave another optimistic read of when the machine age perfects its machinery it will be good for democracy — not quite (Lippman the more prescient)
- Patricia Lockwood describes the climate of social media as “tropical and snowing” — “the blizzard of everything”
- Cooley’s Looking glass self, introducing social media concept
- Friendster oral history: Danah Boyd
- Michael Wesch on early YouTubers, “crisis of self-presentation”
- All these ask: how can you speak to everyone all at once (without different tones and contexts?)
- Zuckerberg in 2010: “you have one identity” he said three times
- Jonathan Haidt’s book and research on youth mental health and social media as cause
- Twenge in Generations: “when most people own smartphones and use social media, everyone is impacted, whether they use these technologies or not.”
- “When we talk to chatbots, we are, in a way, communicating with the dead.”
- Yeats 1920 poem the second coming reminds of AI: rough heart, pitiless as the sun
- Ted Chang: ChatGPT is a blurry jpeg of all the info on the web, gets you the gist but no specific detail
- Three stages; first, machines were just carrier ( phones, telegraph, early internet), then got editorial by social media algorithms curating — now AI is also creating the content
- “Machines create the content, choose who will see it and deliver it”
- “Photographs furnish evidence” Susan Sontag 1977
- Data filtering and algorithm tweaking is editorial input by the LLM makers
- James Flynn (who is behind Flynn effect tracking rising IQ) wrote in a 2012 book that we are getting smarter: from utilitarian spectacles to scientific spectacles
- Baudrillard hyperreality, “ecstasy of communication” where “ there is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication” — and “cool use of digitality” in his 1976 book symbolic exchange: liquifying reality
- ((author says Superbloom didn’t happen only #superbloom which reminds me of thinking that Fyre Festival 2 actually was our generations Woodstock which wasn’t the biggest but the most iconic event of a generation))
- Sherry Turkle: screens are a shield against embarrassment from in person interaction
- “Socializing through apps reduces the sense of personal exposure while tightening the sense of personal control”
- The age of surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff: we didn’t enter the virtual world on our own; we were kidnapped
- But author reminds we are complicit, we are being given what we want
- “Even if we’re not looking for anything in particular, we’re always finding what we want”
- In 1952, Frank Walsh shot his TV and became a brief folk hero
- Frictional design from Brett Frischmann and Susan Benesch in the Yale journal 2023 : “time, place and manner” restrictions on speech should come to social media
- Lawrence Lessig: code is law
- Technology historian Thomas Hughes: only early on can a technology be altered before it gains “momentum”
- Samuel Johnson kicking rocks “I refute it thus” story
- Computer scientist Rodney brooks: AI will need robotics to actually experience the world
- Panela NcCorduck 1979: machines who think