Moving forward: what threatens humanity with advanced technologies
In the Russian translation of the title of the book by American journalist Nicholas Carr, the publishers have noticeably added drama to attract reader interest. The fact that advanced technologies are "destroying society and driving us crazy" is not mentioned in the original title: Superbloom: How technologies of connection tear us apart. It's just about how mass communication technologies, ostensibly aimed at connecting people more effectively and promoting mutual understanding, are actually increasingly driving them apart. However, it is not necessary to lose your mind at the same time. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Nicholas Carr
"Super-flowering: How technology is destroying society and driving us crazy"
Moscow: Alpina non-fiction, 2027. 320 p.
The only way to avoid "being trapped in hyperreality," Carr advises, is to leave the room more often and perceive the surrounding reality, given to us in sensations: "No matter how much we love the virtual world with its easily accessible stimulations (or at least, no matter how it turns our heads), we will never get used to it. it's real there—unless, of course, we sacrifice our minds and feelings, that is, those qualities that basically make us us." Only direct empirical experience can ensure the "rootedness in the world" necessary for normal human existence. However, in order to receive it regularly in sufficient quantities, you will need to summon the will and turn off the gadget that sucks you in and paralyzes your thinking: "Salvation (if this is not too pretentious a word) may consist in a personal, volitional act of excommunication, self—exclusion from communication - in first individually, and then then, perhaps, we can jointly take a position not outside of society, but somewhere on its outskirts, not beyond the reach of the information flow, but where its diluting effect is not felt."
The starting point for these conclusions, which gave the book its name, is an incident when in the spring of 2019 thousands of people rushed to Worker Canyon, 120 km from Los Angeles, to take pictures for social networks against the backdrop of incredible poppy blooming. As an experienced publicist who has long been involved in the topic of technology development that is far from harmless to the human psyche, Carr extracts the maximum metaphorical meaning from this mass psychosis, turning it into the figurative core of the entire book: "We are now living in a state of continuous super—flowering - not of poppies, but of messages. Our phones have turned us into living transceivers — nodes of a communication network of unprecedented scale and speed. <...> We share information all day long, we are constantly in touch, more engaged than ever, but the more we communicate, the worse it seems to us. The poppies are so luxurious, so bright, so mesmerizing. And they are vulgar, pervasive, intoxicating."
"Superblow" offers a fairly detailed history of the development of human communication, starting with writing and the invention of printing, which was the first to change the way people perceive information about the world around them: "... the written word not only accelerated the spread of knowledge, but also spurred the growth of individualism. The reader, interacting with the book one-on-one, could chart his own, unique trajectory of intellectual development." An important guide in the world of social communication for Carr is one of the classics of American sociology, Charles Horton Cooley, who did not really like to communicate with people himself, but probably because of this he understood all the mechanisms of human interactions very well.: "Despite his monastic isolation, Cooley had a distinctive and surgically precise way of talking about the intricacies of social relations."
However, from the height of his modern experience, Carr has every reason to speak somewhat condescendingly about the idealism of Cooley, who nevertheless believed that the more and better people communicate, the more cohesive the social structure will be.: "Perhaps, due to the separation from the everyday "difficulties" of his time, Cooley retained a sentimental view of human nature. Endowed with the freedom to choose sources of influence and objects of solidarity, to create their own environment, people, he believed, would make meaningful, reasonable decisions. Having the opportunity to get acquainted with more facts and opinions, they will become more knowledgeable and acquire broader views."
Contrary to this idealistic notion, Carr's "Super-Flowering" is precisely tracking, step by step, how in practice, with the technological development of communications, everything turned out exactly the opposite. He rather ruthlessly debunks the illusion, which originated in the Enlightenment era, that the more and more actively people communicate, the better they understand each other. One of the first milestones that refuted this hope was the invention of the telegraph, which did not prevent the outbreak of the First World War.: "Despite the exciting and incessant growth of human opportunities to exchange information, despite the fact that the whole world was entangled with wires and overwhelmed with streams of messages, despite the unprecedented favorable conditions for friendly interaction between peoples, history does not know a bloodier century than the twentieth. We lied to ourselves about communication—and about ourselves."
Describing the current situation, Carr draws a dichotomy between the "analog" world lying in ruins with its film cameras and vinyl records, which have become iconic artifacts, and the modern digital one, when the unification of media technologies erased the differences between the categories of information (in form, register, meaning and importance) that the "epistemological architecture of the analog era" protected and emphasized. As a result, "there was a collapse of content — it collapsed, as evidenced by the featureless, flat term "content", which we have become accustomed to calling any result of self-expression." For those who came frantically to shoot poppies in Walker Canyon, Carr writes, in an effort to "integrate into the paradigm of super—flowering," virtual reality replaced physical reality: "The Canyon existed for them only in the form of content - content that they wanted to become a part of."
Of course, at some point, the famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the author of the catch phrase The medium is the message, becomes the necessary commentator on Carr's reasoning, complaining about the degeneration of content into content. Carr, however, uses another figurative aphorism of McLuhan, who noted that people initially try to use each new method of communication in exactly the same way as the old, convenient and familiar one.: "We are moving backwards into the future. We are squeezing new content into the old form." Picking up and twisting this metaphor, Carr consistently introduces a rather simple idea into the reader's consciousness: to drive into the future backwards, that is, by burying oneself in a computer or smartphone screen, humanity is unlikely to succeed unless it comes to its senses and voluntarily turns around to face the physical reality surrounding it.
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