Superbloom
A Review and Collaborative Discussion
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
by Nicholas Carr, 2025
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324064617
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This past Thursday (March 13), we held a rousing book talk about Superbloom.
Today, we bring you a review of the book by Jacob Pleasants, interspersed with commentary from several of our book talk attendees: Dan Krutka, Ted Pedersen, Tiffany Petricini, & Jeffrey Radloff
Carr’s work has been pretty influential for me. Way back in 2010, I was just beginning my journey into the world of technology criticism. Neil Postman was my gateway drug, but The Shallows helped me look at digital technologies in new ways. While Postman offered a great critique of a technological society that was before my time, Carr helped me recognize and describe the ways that the technologies I was using every day were deeply affecting me in ways that I neither intended nor desired. I was a sympathetic audience, already predisposed to be skeptical about digital technology, but it was eye-opening all the same.
For me, Postman seemed so hyperfocused on TV, which, by our time, was a normal feature of everyday life. The "internet," and especially participatory media felt so shiny and new back then. It was nice to read about media that felt so relevant and personal.
-Tiffany Petricini
15 years later, a lot has changed. The technologies have changed, of course. But so too have the conversations around those technologies. And I, of course, have changed. I’ve read a lot more in the intervening years, and I would like to think that I’ve obtained a more nuanced view of how technologies affect the way we live and relate to one another. Naturally, then, I wasn’t expecting Carr’s latest book to be the revelation for me that The Shallows was. All the same, I was eager to get into Superbloom and hear what he had to say.
The book’s title comes from a social media phenomenon that Carr presents as an opening vignette and later describes as something of a catalyst for his work: #SuperBloom. In 2019, an unusual amount of rain in California’s Walker Canyon caused a “super bloom” of wildflowers, a visual treat for any traveler to the ecological reserve. Naturally, such a traveler is wont to take a selfie and post it to social media. Also, naturally, anyone seeing that post is wont to make their own trip to Walker Canyon to do the same. Walker Canyon soon went viral. #Superbloom was born… with predictable consequences. Influencers, compelled to snag their #Superbloom shot, flocked to the canyon, trampling the flowers and generally making a mockery of the landscape. The park was even shut down for a time to try and preserve the wildlife. Eventually, though, the social media tide turned as people came to realize just what all those influencers were doing. Where once a selfie could draw admiration or jealousy, now it would draw ire and criticism.
Now, as I reflect on your review, I wonder--is this an analogy for what we've done to the communicative/community landscape? We've stormed in like bees to online spaces, doing sadly, what humans do. We've destroyed something that had so much promise. Well, something that was at least marketed as having such promise.
-Tiffany Petricini
How, Carr wonders, did we get here? How did the technologies that were supposed to connect us manage to create this? #Superbloom may appear to be a particularly egregious case, but Carr argues that it is not an outlier. For Carr, #Superbloom was not merely the result of some foolish people doing foolish things, but the culmination of patterns and tendencies that our technologies have encouraged, or “nudged” as behaviorists might say. In this respect, then, Carr’s argument is very much in line with what he put forth in The Shallows. In that book, Carr showed how the internet changes the way we think. In a subsequent book on automation, The Glass Cage (2014), Carr contended that technology changes the way we act, making us more passive and less creative. In Superbloom, it’s about how internet technologies change how we relate to one another. And as in his previous books, Carr’s estimation of those changes is that they have not been great.
So, what exactly are these changes that our social technologies have brought, and how did they produce the absurdity of #Superbloom (among other unintended outcomes)?
Carr takes us through a sweeping narrative of communication technologies through history, highlighting the perspectives of prominent time-period scholars and figures. He tells of written messages sent by courier and postal service, and the social and technical systems that supported those practices. The structure of those systems engendered certain approaches to communication (e.g., the long-form personal letter makes sense when the transit time of messages is long). As the methods of communication changed, becoming ever more rapid, our approaches to communicating with one another changed as well. Carr’s account has a distinctly McLuhanite flavor.
But there is a telos to this history of technological change (Tiffany wonders: What is the telos? Efficiency? Aristotle would roll over.). Our technologies of communication have become steadily faster and more efficient. Digital communication has become dominant because it is simply more efficient than the alternatives. Further, all of our forms of communication have been subsumed by the internet-connected computer (or smartphone) as the all-technology. Carr refers to this as content collapse, in which nearly all content is now channeled through a single medium: the internet. More specifically, Carr focuses on social media as the dominant form of communication, the structure of which is ultimately responsible for #Superbloom.
It is worth pausing here for a moment. I admit that by summarizing Carr’s much lengthier argument, I am inevitably leaving out plenty of his nuance. Even its longer form, though, Superbloom paints with a very broad brush. Digital communication technologies - the internet - are, for Carr, represent a singular medium. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all the “socials” are just flavors of the same thing, minor variations on the march toward maximum efficiency.
This is not the first time that Carr has treated “the internet” as a singular entity. He takes much the same approach in The Shallows, which similarly investigates the impact of “the net” on our thinking. However, this “internet essentialism” has significant shortcomings. Consider this critique of The Shallows offered by Evgeny Morozov (2013):
Does "the Net" that Carr writes about actually exist? Is there much point in lumping together sites like lnstapaper - which lets users save Web pages in order to read them later, in an advertising free and undisturbed environment - and, say, Twitter? Is it inevitable that Facebook should constantly prompt us to check new links? Should Twitter reward us for tweeting links that we never open? Or punish us? Or do nothing - as is the case now? (p. 19)
Like Marshall McLuhan before him, Carr wants to score, rank, and compare different media and come up with some kind of quasi scientific pecking order for them (McLuhan went as far as to calculate sense ratios for each medium that he "studied"). This very medium-centric approach overlooks the diversity of actual practices enabled by each medium. One may hate television for excessive advertising-but then, a publicly supported broadcasting system may have no need for advertising at all; TV programs don't always have to be interrupted by ads. Video games might make us more violent-but, once again, they can do so many other things in so many different ways that it seems unfair to connect them only to one function. There's very little that the New York Times has in common with the Sun or that NPR shares with Rush Limbaugh. (p. 20)
These critiques readily apply to Superbloom as well. For instance, one of the communication practices that Carr laments is “textspeak,” the style of writing common in direct messaging services (including, but not limited to, text messages on phones). He observes that this style of communication is an outgrowth of the medium itself, which prioritizes short and rapid exchanges rather than the longform of the personal letter. That’s true as far as it goes, but is internet communication truly so uniform? Can we really speak of internet communication as a singular entity? And even if our communication practices have changed, is that truly such a bad thing?
I appreciate Jacob’s point that Carr oversimplifies technology such as “The Net” into a singular deterministic force. Of course, the internet and social media are complicated. But I’d argue that Carr’s writing—while not as precise as academic prose—is needed. When technology moves at the pervasive speed it does, it’s hard for humans to respond and ensure we’re cultivating the relationship with technology we want. Carr helps us see the broader changes that can cement into ways of life. Sure, not all social media is bad, but its overall effects might be degrading human relationships. I’m okay with Carr’s oversimplifications when writing for a general audience because while his topic sentences might be slightly off, I think he nails the thesis.
-Dan Krutka
This makes me think about the fact that now rather than getting email from students written in "textspeak" I sometimes get rather formal messages that are pretty clearly written by ChatGPT ("I hope this finds you well, ... an extension to this deadline would facilitate my learning and comprehension, etc"). I do not see this as an improvement.
-Ted Pedersen
These early missteps eventually give way to some strong chapters in the middle of the book. Carr’s arguments gain precision as he seeks to explain several apparent paradoxes of communication technologies. Specifically, why haven’t these technologies lived up to their promises to bring us together and foster democracy? Carr offers some interesting replies to both.
Agree so much--there were some great chapters. His historical contextualization helped draw out some of the reasons we've ended up where we are--in a field full of flowers, trampling around blindly. He was also great at making a strong argument that regulation has had a significant impact on communication technology and how it has shaped culture and community over the last century in the US.
-Tiffany Petricini
In the first case, he scrutinizes the notion that the kinds of personal sharing encouraged by social media like Facebook will yield pro-social results. If Facebook helps us know each other better, shouldn’t that foster greater connectedness and thus social harmony? Carr points to psychological literature that questions that assumption. It turns out that the more I learn about someone else, the more likely it becomes that I’ll surface reasons to not like that person.
(Tiffany’s Note: Sort of--it takes more than just exposure. Mindful, intentional engagement with the other, which again, connects to our tech use. It should be guided by mindful and intentional thought.)
It is true that we know the most about the people we like the most, but that reflects a selection process. Those people also tend to be rather similar to ourselves. The more you know about someone who is very different, the less likely it is that you’ll like that person. In traditional communication patterns, social harmony is achieved largely because we don’t share all that much with our acquaintances. The over-sharing that is encouraged by social media breaks down those norms and opens the door for antipathy.
As for the failure to democratize, this is already pretty well-trodden territory. “Democratization” is pretty well known by this point as little more than a Silicon Valley buzzword. Nevertheless, Carr’s discussion is well-reasoned if not revolutionary. The technologies of the internet may very well give more people access to information and the platforms to share their ideas. But there is no reason to assume that those features will necessarily promote the kinds of truth-seeking processes of rational citizens that are needed for democracy. The “democratization” myth is based on the misguided assumption that somehow the internet will be a “free marketplace of ideas” in which the best will naturally rise to the top. Clearly, this has not happened.
Carr alludes to the idea of content collapse in terms of the real versus virtual worlds. That is to say, the lines between them become blurred as we increasingly accept, interact with, and even trust proliferative technologies that mimic real life (e.g., artificial intelligence and generated content) despite knowing a lot about their developers. On a certain level, the superbloom never happened unless it was uploaded. At what cost are we engaging with these technologies?
-Jeffrey Radloff
I think there might still be truth seeking behavior out there, but we are fighting against so many algorithms that steer you towards what they think we are likely to agree with and like, so we might imagine we have found the truth but it's really more so a kind of automated confirmation bias. Google search is also in shambles and so truth seeking has become even more difficult and almost requires that you know a priori where to find information which seems more likely to lead you back to what you already know and agree with. Finally, I think in general the goal of our truth seeking tools (Google, X, ... etc) is first to make money and not to help us find the truth, which seems at the root of all this.
-Ted Pedersen
So, Carr is at his best when challenging mythologies around social media. The trouble is that he is no longer at the leading edge of tech criticism. The Shallows was provocative because it came at a time of heady optimism, where mainstream discourse about technology might not question the assumption that technologies of connection would bring us together and would be a democratizing force. To be clear, Carr was definitely not the first to offer critique, but for many readers, The Shallows was their first contact with those kinds of arguments. The same cannot be said today. Social media remains a dominant presence, but the optimism has largely faded, even from its vigorous users.
This seems like a really important point, and relates to what I said in our book talk where I felt badly for people trying to write books that touch on AI or social media these days, since so much is moving so fast, and at least for me I am awash in criticism all the time (since I follow some of the usual sources of that). Also, there has been so much in mainstream news and social media about the dangers of social media and even AI where I wonder how many readers will be caught by surprise.
-Ted Pedersen
In the obligatory “solutions” chapter at the end of the book, Carr returns to the rather techno-deterministic outlook laid out at the beginning. He seems to have little faith that we can redesign or re-envision our communication technologies at this stage. That’s largely in line with his narrative that sees our current technologies as the logical endpoints of the quest for maximum efficiency. Ultimately, then, the solution is simply to disengage. Go touch grass. No, not like those #Superbloom people did. Leave your camera behind and just live in the world. I can get behind that message. At the same time, I don’t suspect that Superbloom is going to be the book that finally catalyzes societal change.
Ted’s Perspectives
One of the things I liked best about Superbloom was that it gave a big picture perspective full of historical anecdotes. Carr divided the development of electronic communication into three stages. The first was when electronic communication kept the form of more traditional surface mail or printed publications, where the electronic channel simply delivered the content without accessing it (much like a human mail carrier delivering a letter without opening it). The second stage was when the communication channel began to access the content of the message to help direct it to potential readers (in the case of social media posts) or to target us with advertisements (when sending personal email). The third more recent stage is where our technology creates the content, as in the case of ChatGPT writing a post for us that may then be targeted to recipients based on some kind of social media similarity algorithm. I think the combination of the second and third stage may leave us to wonder what role humans have to play in any of this any more.
While reading Superbloom, I often thought about a family history project I've taken on in the years since my parents died. They were both of a generation that wrote and saved correspondence, and so I have been going through boxes of letters that go back to the 1930s and extend up until the early 2000s. The handwritten letters dwindle as we approach the 1990s but as it happens my mother was very true to her generation and printed and filed all the email she wrote and received. That simple act preserved 10 to 15 years of correspondence that I don't think could be recovered any other way. What struck me is that my biographers will have a difficult time piecing together my life via my correspondence since so much of that has been electronic and seems very likely to disappear if it isn't already gone.
Now, let's bring this back to Superbloom. There is a dilemma developed throughout the book, and that is that our electronic media seem to increasingly diminish and exploit our human contributions. Despite this, we embrace these tools and cannot imagine living without them. Given that, do we simply continue "as-is" and accept the all consuming media loops that want to moderate what we consume and "help" us to create content, or do we somehow break out of this? In the last page or two of the book, Carr tells the story of Dr. Johnson kicking rocks to prove that reality exists outside of our minds. I think this is his way of telling us we need to step back. But how?
My own very partial answer goes back to those boxes of letters. I've realized that many of them pre-date computers (1946?), a good percentage of them pre-date the Internet (1969?), and quite a few pre-date the Web (1991?). They have survived tidal waves of technological change by being outside of it, and if I am careful with them they will outlast me as well. Now, it's hard to find people who will correspond by traditional surface mail, but if you can it is a welcome change of pace. I have not had many takers, or it doesn't last too long. So, what I've done in the last few years is started keeping an old fashioned diary. I write in a Moleskine notebook and when one is full I start another. I may be the only person who will ever read any of it, but it gives me great satisfaction to know for certain that there is nothing in the world that is scanning my words or trying to autocomplete my thoughts. It's oddly relaxing even as I muse about the chaos of our day to day of late. I suppose this is my version of Dr. Johnson's rock kick.