Superbloom: How Technologies of Connnection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr

This book reinforces my beliefs that we are much more a product of our environment than we like to admit. As with the concept of Blue Zones where if we are in an environment that encourages healthy habits, we will do them; this book discusses how social connection technologies shape us and are the root cause of many problems today.

I like Blue Zones because (1) Dan Buettner bases his ideas and hypothesis's on a lot of empirical research and then, most importantly, he tests them out and finds that they hold up in areas where he gets cities, organizations, etc to make changes in their environment to encourage more healthy behaviors.  Simple changes such as putting healthy foods is better locations in stores, making areas more walkable, etc.  Living in Tokyo, I find that the environment encourages much more walking so I walk more than when I live in the US.

In Superbloom, Nicholas makes the point that we are now overwhelmed with data from a zillion different sources.  To deal with this, our minds use shortcuts, rules of thumb, etc as that is the only way we can deal with it.  The problem is that the rules and shortcuts do not work well with this mass of data.  One rule is that if something is repeated a lot, we pay more attention to it whether it is true or not.  As he states "Repetition is, in the human mind, a proxy for facticity," which unfortunately is just not true with all the data we are exposed to these days (e.g. Trump and the Republican party is a great example of this problem).

We are also changed by all this data and the shortcuts we take to make sense out of it.  The screens full of abstract, often incorrect information cause us to become dislocated from reality.  We start making decisions based on alternate realities, instead of based on what is best for our physical selves just to get more cred, more attention in that alternate reality (e.g. people doing internet challenges that hurt themselves, people seeing family members dying from covid, but still refusing to be vaccinated).

This problem is especially acute for children as they are trying to make sense of their world.  They a need a firm basis in the physical reality before being exposed to all the data of the internet.  I feel they need to be taught and trained how to critically view the data they see via screens, especially with the ability of AI to basically fake anything these days.  Anything you read, hear, or view over a screen needs to be treated as untrusted unless you have some basis in reality to trust it (e.g. you see the bank branch, you trust the source of the information you are reading because of their reputation, etc.).