When the real can't compete

Time of India

02-05-2025

On humanity's surrender to #Virtuality
Think of the Bible's opening verse, 'God said let there be light and there was light.' The original act of creation here is communication. Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr is not just about how modern communication has failed us. It's also a reminder that it's with words we bring ourselves into being and also our world.
When words began to be translated into codes and human messengers got replaced by mechanical ones, efficiency gains in communication were widely viewed with a sentimental lens. Tellingly, the 1865 International Telegraph Conference called itself 'a veritable Peace Congress'.
In the decades to come, radio and telephone acolytes similarly thought these new technologies would bring nations together and end war. That WW I onwards the 20th century would be the bloodiest one ever proved, the book says, that we had been telling ourselves lies about communication – and about ourselves. Still, with the internet, the smartphone, social media, LLMs, again and again the peace fallacy, as much as the 'democratisation' one, would resurface.
But think back to the email exchanges in the 1998 romantic comedy You've Got Mail – those were expansive, intimate and heartfelt. There was a continuity with the way letters, once upon a time, sustained and deepened relationships. John Donne said, 'More than kisses, letters mingle souls.'
Then our inboxes got overwhelmed. IMs and textspeak happened. In 2006 Facebook introduced News Feed, which replaced personal agency in seeking info about each other with machine agency. We barely flinched. In 2004 when Google introduced Gmail service, this new mailman announced he would read all our mail and use this data however he wished. We said, cool.
By now we've surrendered so much agency that 'digital personal assistants' are less gofer, more doppelganger. Except, they super multiply our 'connections' even as social media blurs conversation and broadcasting. What the book explains is the tragedy of communication, where too much of it begins to undermine the very social and personal qualities we look to it to foster.
A half century ago, Baudrillard coined the term 'hyperreality' to describe an existence governed less by reality than by code and simulation. The poppy superbloom from which the book takes its name was a 2019 LA flowering that millions of social media feeds turned into frenzied, farcical mob-like mass mimicry. As if the superbloom never happened and only #superbloom did.
The more rapid and shallow our processing of information becomes, the more we depend on stereotypes, which we then retweet, like, share, rebroadcast and amplify. Repetition also becomes a proxy for facticity.
This illusory truth effect is what 'put power into the hands of the people' sentimentalists did not anticipate. What increases engagement is good business for the tech companies. But don't just blame the algorithmically generated echo chambers and filter bubbles. Research shows that even a more balanced info diet can stimulate greater partisanship.
Because people experience information from outside their echo chamber as an attack on their identity. Because opinions emerge from affiliation, not vice versa. They're a byproduct of tribal allegiance. Group identity is rooted in emotion, not reason, the book says.
How can the real world compete against the programmed delights of the virtual? How can we resist immaterialism? Let's begin with a walk or penning a letter. Without the smartphone.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.