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Review: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

Philip Ball finds Nicholas Carr’s “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart” disturbingly compelling.

When an Instagram and YouTube influencer posted pictures of herself among the flowers, the hashtag #superbloom went viral, and before long, the place was overrun, a traffic officer was injured, online discourse curdled, and the media began speaking of “Flowergeddon.” As a result, according to Christopher H. Achen and ‎Larry M. Bartels in their 2016 book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, “the political ‘belief systems’ of ordinary citizens are generally thin, disorganized, and ideologically incoherent.” Dismissed as an antidemocratic elitist, Lippmann wasn’t suggesting that people are too stupid to handle all that information, but merely too finite. The prevailing attitude was that adduced by the philosopher and educator John Dewey in his 1927 book The Public and Its Problems: he imagined a “Great Community” united by a free and open system of communication that would usher in a utopia of harmony.

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