Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

As communication speeds up, once-stable social structures and relations become as malleable as water.

What we gain by substituting fingered speech for reading and writing is the ability to keep up with a conversation that swirls around us all the time. What we sacrifice are depth and rigor. Turned always outward, speech becomes less a way of sorting out our thoughts, of thinking for ourselves, and more a way of reacting to others. We rely on quick

Broadcasting’s centralized design, with its concentration of power and its tight control of information, seemed to mirror the political structure of the authoritarian state.

inefficiency and fragmentation served important social, intellectual, and artistic purposes. By imposing what Mark Zuckerberg disdainfully calls friction on the processes of information production, distribution, and retrieval, the specialization of media networks and devices also imposed order on the welter of information that was suddenly pouring

the separation of the meaning of a message from the mechanism of its communication.

A computer network exists to maximize the speed of data transfer and processing, to shorten the delay between input and output. The more we rely on computers to mediate what we say and see and think about, the more we have to adapt our thought, speech, and behavior to their characteristics and requirements.

It has blurred the distinctions between categories of information—distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance—that the epistemic architecture of the analog era preserved and even accentuated. Content has collapsed, as our adoption of the drab, generic term content to refer to all forms of expression testifies. Everything now has to fit th

The “content of the self”—again, Cooley’s wording is prescient—varies “indefinitely with particular temperaments and environments.”8 The “I” is contextual; it changes as situations change.

Every communication medium is political, a conduit of power as much as thought. In extending the range of speech, writing widened the scope of personal and institutional influence. A written word had the potential to shape the thinking and behavior of far more people, around the globe and down the ages, than a spoken one ever could. The expansion o