Me, Myself, but Mostly, I

Technology writer Nicholas Carr is a fellow Cassandra. For those not up on their Greek mythology, Cassandra was the original #metoo victim who spurned the sexual overtures of Apollo. In return, he cursed her to become a prophetess whom no one would ever believe. 

I’ve been channelling my inner Cassandra for over twenty years, issuing stark warnings about the digital train wreck hurtling down the tracks. The consequences of what, in my opinion, was being recklessly foisted on us, especially by smart phones, were obvious to anyone not blinded by misplaced techno-optimism and delusions of grandeur. I often felt like I was screaming into the wind. Turns out, I was right.

Our society, not surprisingly, now suffers from an alarming rise in narcissism along with a noticeable diminishment of empathy. It’s especially prevalent in the Gen Z cohort. How could it not have happened to kids who can’t see the eyes of the friends or for that matter, strangers they are hurting with their words?

I’m not just an old fart ranting about kids without manners or lacking in the ability to hear an opinion that is different from their own. The stats support me. Read “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” by Jonathan Haidt. I’m not making this stuff up.

Nicholas Carr, the author of “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart,” has been a personal hero of mine ever since his 2008 article for The Atlantic: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He quickly followed up in 2010 with “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” Now, his latest offering examines the human consequences of technology. Like Haidt, he charts the rise of this solipsistic generation. 

Carr believes there is a direct line between a self-centred and selfish cohort of children and the anti-empathy machine, aka the Internet. Social media, in particular, is a “neurosis machine.”

“We know we’re always being watched and judged and we know the shamers lie in wait, knives sharpened….Rather than relying on empathy and intuition to navigate social relations, we’re forced to decipher others’ attitudes by tracking and evaluating explicit, often quantitative measures: follower counts, numbers of likes and shares, the time that elapses before responses arrive, the types of emoji that appear in a comment, the number of exclamation marks that punctuate a reply.” His conclusion?

The more mediated our lives become, the more we come to see ourselves, and others, as abstractions.

It’s hard to feel anything for an abstraction.

The theme of identity is just one of many explored in “Superbloom.” It just happens to interest me the most. Readers also are provided with an excellent historical overview of how humans have communicated for the past fifty years or so. In a word, Carr says we’re now communicating too much, too fast, and with the predictable results.

“What if too much communication breeds misunderstanding rather than understanding, mistrust rather than trust, strife rather than harmony?” he asks.

And here we are.