Book Review: Nicholas Carr’s “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart”

The more we use communication technologies, the more we become like them. Our nervous systems adapt to the logic of their designs (Carr 8). After enough time, these “mechanisms of communication” reinforce certain aspects of our human nature over others (Carr 9).

As Nicholas Carr wrote in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, technologies (such as the Internet) influence our minds, especially the more they are embedded in society:

When we begin using a new intellectual technology, we don’t immediately switch from one mental mode to another. The brain isn’t binary. An intellectual technology exerts its influence by shifting the emphasis of our thought. Although even the initial users of the technology can often sense the changes in their patterns of attention, cognition, and memory as their brains adapt to the new medium, the most profound shifts play out more slowly, over several generations, as the technology becomes ever more…