The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr is a well-known thinker and Pulitzer Prize winner who writes about how the Internet has affected our brains. In his latest book published last year, he explores once again what social media has done to our brains and offers some antidotes to take our thinking back from the algorithms that subvert us. He writes:

"As for the rather small set of voters who spend a lot of time reading, thinking, and talking about politics, the research reveals that their heightened engagement rarely broadens their minds. They're actually the ones most inclined to narrow and fervent partisanship. The more news they gobble up, the more convinced they are that they're right and anyone with a different view is wrong."

More than just cataloging the way our thinking gets warped by the algorithm, though, Carr explores a potential solution through frictional design. The idea is to reverse the trend of reducing all friction in the digital world and instead embrace it as a design feature rather than a bug. Key to this idea is the introduction of so-called "desirable inefficiencies" to limit the unchecked virality that can cause so much cultural and geopolitical damage:

"Limits could be set on the number of times a message can be forwarded or the number of people it can be forwarded to ... a delay of a few minutes could be introduced before a post appears on a platform. A broadcasting license might be required for any account with more than a quarter of a million followers or subscribers."

If you want a broad view of how media shapes our modern society combined with a powerful argument for why the best impact we can have is to change our own media habits instead of focusing on trying to change the algorithm, we might be able to reinvent the way we see our society and one another.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.