Review by Booklist Review
Carr (The Shallows, 2010) does a deep dive into the history of social media and examines the damage it's doing to modern society. Our craze for communications technology began with the invention of the telegraph, when people predicted that our expanded ability to communicate would put an end to wars. This echoes language we hear today from tech moguls who believe social-media platforms will bring about unprecedented freedom and democratic ideals. But it never turns out that way. Carr considers what we know about human communication and psychology and argues that modern social media is ideally suited to increase intolerance, anxiety, and factionalism. Turns out, more communication isn't automatically better. Quality matters more than quantity; efficiency is anathema to deep understanding. He examines the history of how governments have regulated communication media over the years and the ramifications of deregulating both news media and the internet. We sacrificed accountability to the public good for the sake of innovation and convenience. Far from empowering all people, social media has accelerated the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of only a few. As always, Carr's perspective is urgent and bracing, a necessary challenge to idealistic visions of a democratic internet.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize finalist Carr (The Shallows) frames his argument for changing one's media consumption around the phenomena of the superbloom; he suggests that experiencing natural phenomena like the superbloom in real life is different than experiencing nature as a virtual event. To explain the difference and disconnect, he details the history of personal privacy amid technological advances, citing the Olmstead Act, the Secrecy of Correspondence Doctrine, and the Telecomm Act of 1996 as pivotal moments when humans adjusted their behavior to accommodate technology. The emergence of Facebook's news feed, he argues, was the pivotal moment when expectations of content, personal privacy, and connectivity avalanched into the content collapse and feeling of overwhelm that users are now experiencing. After exploring the envy and lack of empathy that social media can elicit, the book's focus turns to AI and humanity's unpreparedness for its potential; this section is the book's strongest. Carr's conclusion has a few ideas for changing media habits, but they're immersed in regret for the 1990s, when humans squandered their chance to influence then-emerging social media. VERDICT Insightful, but not as revolutionary as The Shallows, as Carr is now one voice among many warning about social media.--Tina Panik
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A call to change our relationship with communication technologies. If a little of something is good, then more must be better, and a lot more must be much better. According to journalist and author Carr, this assumption is longstanding, straightforward, and terribly wrong--at least when applied to communications technology. The theme of his book is that social media has taken over our society with such speed that we have not been able to absorb its ramifications or develop mechanisms to effectively control it. Carr has already addressed some of these ideas in a previous book,The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, but here he delves more deeply. He brings together the opinions of commentators who had once applauded the rise of social media but now see it as personally dangerous and socially disastrous, and he cites a convincing body of research as well. Many young people in particular seem to have lost the capacity and willingness to engage with life beyond the screen, even as they exhibit unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety, and pessimism. Some of this is due to the addictive nature of the technology itself, but more of it comes from a failure to confront our own fears and weaknesses. Reality is difficult; the screen offers an easy escape. "That's the trick for us humans, to sense the real world appropriately and often enough," Carr writes. "It's a trick we'll need to relearn if we hope to escape imprisonment in the hyperreal." Carr persuasively sounds the alarm about the destructive nature of social media and the corporations that control it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
