Rex’s Reviews > Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart > Status Update

Despite our love of or at least infatuation with the easy stimulations of the virtual, we can never make a true home there, at least not without sacrificing the qualities of sense and sensibility that make us most ourselves. Live in a simulation long enough, and you begin to think and talk like a chatbot. Your thoughts and words become the outputs of a prediction algorithm.

People routinely say they worry about how the internet distracts them from their surroundings. But their behavior suggests the reverse is probably closer to the truth…. Reality has become a distraction from media.

If you're good with words, people will understand you. They'll understand you even if you don't know what you're talking about.

It is prudent to consider the existential risks associated with AI, particularly now that, after decades of disappointment, the technology is advancing at a pace far beyond what most experts were predicting just a few years ago. That we don't understand exactly what's going on inside an LLM's neural network, just as we don't understand how our own neurons produce thoughts, is disconcerting, to say the least.

But what the phenomenon makes clear is that the transmission of messages can be metamorphic, altering physical and mental states at a deep level. Through its emphasis on repetition and imitation, social media does more than influence people's opinions. It shapes and sometimes shakes the very foundations of their being.

Familiarity may breed contempt when it comes to judging people, but when it comes to judging information, it breeds gullibility. If social media has an intellectual creed, it is a creed of repetition - the creed of the mob, the huckster and the tyrant.

"(Several studies) reveal how ill-suited the human psyche is to our new media environment. As connections multiply and messages proliferate, relationships get stretched thin. Mistrust spreads. Antipathies mount. That's the tragedy of communication."

"…Media efficiency, when pushed to an extreme, so accelerates the flow of information that people no longer have the luxury of careful reading, methodical evaluation, and contemplative inquiry. The breezes of influence combine into a whirlwind. Attention splinters, understanding grows thin. Rather than leveling barriers to knowledge and sympathy, communication itself becomes a barrier."

"If, as William Wordsworth suggested, "the origin of poetry lies in emotion recollected in tranquility," then the writing of a letter brought at least a little of the poetic sensibility into people's otherwise busy days…The writing of letters gave them a means of constructing a distinct experiential self. Letters served as testaments as well as sacraments."

“letters of friendship, love, and affection, are sacred things, and should be so imbued with the spirit of the writer, as to render them worthy of the devoted attention they call for.”