The Politics of Attention: An Interview with Nicholas Carr

OCTOBER 21, 2019

This week, we're pleased to feature an interview with writer and technology critic Nicholas Carr, a member of the Institute's Scientific Advisory Board. Carr is the Richmond Visiting Professor at Williams College, and his books include The Shallows, The Glass Cage, and Utopia is Creepy. We spoke about the ways digital technology affects our cognition, relationships, and politics.

PTI: Most of our readers will be familiar with the broad strokes of your work, but by way of introduction, could you describe what you view as the core misconceptions we have in our relationship with technology? Specifically around information and knowledge, as well as communication and community.

NC: One thing I’ve been exploring is how we tend to be overly optimistic about new technological developments. We get very excited and focus on the benefits that we perceive coming from them, but ignore the possible negative impacts until they're staring us in the face. And so the first area that I looked at was how, when we thought about the internet, for quite a long time, we focused on simply the fact that it would make lots of information that used to be tough to come by readily and immediately available. And we all thought that that was great. The more information, the better our understanding. But what I argue is that we ignored how the technology delivers the information. If we're concerned about our cognition, about the way we think, then actually the way a technological medium delivers information is at least as important and probably more important than the speed and volume with which it delivers that information.

And what I argued, first in an article that was published in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” and then subsequently in the book The Shallows, was that the way the internet provides information actually gets in the way of deeper contemplative thinking. It essentially keeps us perpetually distracted. And what we know from the psychological literature is that distractions, interruptions, shifts in attention really do undermine our ability to think in lots of different ways: to solve problems, to deal with very difficult issues, and certainly to engage in reflective, contemplative, attentive thinking. 
When social media emerged and we all then began to access Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and the rest, particularly through our phones, we again focused on what seemed to be the obvious positive benefit coming out of that, which was that it expanded community. And what we've learned since then is that community isn't always great. What the psychological literature tells us is that the more we learn about someone else, the more likely we are not only to become their friends, but also to become their enemies. And in fact, it seems like there's a little bias toward becoming enemies. And I think we see that playing out in lots of the hate speech online, and political polarization, the inability to compromise, and so forth. 

And then a second place where we see some unanticipated, negative consequences is the fact that what's important about communities is not simply that there are groups of people; it's the reason why these groups form. And some of those reasons can be very positive, but other times people form communities around racism, sexism, and very negative qualities. And we've seen the proliferation of these kinds of communities through social media and other online tools as well. So again, it's an example of how we rushed to believe that the effects of informational technologies in particular would be purely beneficial. And only later do we see some of the psychological and social complexities begin to emerge, many of which we should have anticipated. 

PTI: To expand on the knowledge point, you make a distinction in your work between different ways we can come to “know” the world -- not just explicitly or propositionally, but also implicitly and procedurally. How does technology alienate us from these forms of knowing, and what effect do you think that has on our psychology?

NC: When we look at digital media, we're talking about symbolic media, ways of experiencing the world and people around us at a remove from the actual physical spaces and physical presences that we've evolved to expect and to get lots of signals from. And increasingly, because it becomes so convenient and so easy and so quick to substitute the image or the symbol in place of the physical reality, I think people do that more and more. In fact, if you look at recent surveys of teenagers, for instance, only about a third of American teenagers now say that they prefer to converse with their friends in person. Two thirds say that they prefer to interact with friends through media. And this is a radical change, I think, not only to our behavior, but to our attitudes to something as intimate as friendships.

PTI: Do you think this disconnect explains some of the discord we see in our politics?

NC: I think the political polarization that we're seeing is definitely related to the media we use to gather information. It doesn't mean that that's the only factor involved, because I think there are many different factors ranging from the economic to the historical and so forth. But I certainly think that this is another example of how our expectations become warped by a kind of utopian view of technology. There was the expectation that if people had unlimited access to information, they would end up broadening their minds by sampling lots of different viewpoints, looking at opposing arguments and trying to make sense of them, and so forth. And what we found -- and again, this is basic psychology -- is that for most people, not all people, but for most people, if you give them unlimited information, they will spend all their time reading or looking at information that supports their existing biases. And as they do that, because they're getting so much confirmation, those biases become steadily more extreme. 

So I think that basic dynamic of the way we gather information inevitably leads to a more tribalistic view of politics. Before we had all this access to information, you developed your politics in a setting. It might be your workplace, it might be the community you actually live in, where there were a diversity of views. You had to accommodate other people's views and listened to them by necessity. And over time that has a tendency to temper your own views, and at least, if it doesn't create unanimity, it increases the likelihood of things like compromise and understanding.

The information environment we're in now simply encourages people to become more extreme in their views and more polarized in their views. And then because we are often speaking to people through informational media rather than face to face, people become more comfortable saying extreme things, insulting things, hateful things that you would rarely say to your neighbor or a person sitting with you in a room. And so that ideological polarization turns into a polarization of speech, which then further amplifies ideological polarization. So we've created this technological arena that unfortunately does encourage polarization, particularly because all of this is happening against the backdrop of traditional media editors and gatekeepers being taken out of the picture. So there's no buffer zone anymore. It all gets poured into the public square, unmediated and often thoughtlessly.

PTI: As you mentioned, many of these problems are occurring against the backdrop of a collapsing traditional media. We’re in the midst of a shift from the constrained but unifying world of broadcast media, to the decentralized, omni-directional environment of online media. Do you think a return to shared narratives is possible, now that the genie is out of the bottle? 

NC: I don't think we’ll be able to return to the world of shared narratives, at least as that world existed, say, when there were three television networks and people got a newspaper or two during the course of the day. It seems to me that it just isn't in the realm of possibility to back up to that place. So we're in a media world where there are just going to be vastly more choices. And again, I don't want to imply that that's all negative. There are benefits to broadening out your choices. But there are also unintended consequences. We don't necessarily tend to gravitate to accuracy or truth or level-headed analysis. One thing that's happened is that the media, because it's so fast paced, tends to emphasize and reward the emotional over the rational. And again, it seems to me that that's built very, very deeply into, into social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

PTI: So if there's no return to centralized, shared narratives, do you hold out hope for some other way of organizing our sensemaking that's more collective and decentralized?

NC: Our sensemaking is still, in a very real way, a collective exercise. It's just that the collectives have been fragmented. In many ways, we're taking our political and ideological identity from groups more than ever; it's just that the groups are now are now homogenous and there's not much room for any dissenting voices.

PTI: There is a debate in tech criticism now about whether we should be focused on design solutions or more systemic/political ones. Between, say, adding screen time metrics to phones and dismantling the capitalist system, where do you stand? Feel free to reject that dichotomy as well.

NC: I think that dichotomy might be a little too stark. I certainly think there's a tension there, but I think it's possible to both question technological design and also question the structure of the economy, given the new technologies we have. 

For instance, if you look at the design issues, particularly the possibility of regulating the designs of apps and social media in a way that might provide civic benefits, what you get up against very quickly is that you confront the possibility of government regulating the flow of information. And that becomes problematic in and of itself -- you don't want the cure to be worse than the disease, where you set up the structures by which legislators and government bureaucrats begin to be able to determine what people are able to pay attention to and to look at.

On the other hand, you could certainly envision legislatures regulating design characteristics of the technology. One representative has suggested, “why don't we ban endless scrolls?” It seems to me that's a viable option; in the history of media, governments have imposed laws that regulate the design of those things. And it certainly seems to me that if there are clearly designed characteristics of media that encourage addictive types of behavior, at least compulsive types of behavior, and undermine the ability of a democracy to function, then maybe we should, as a people, begin to look very seriously at regulating the design decisions of a Facebook or a Google.

On the other hand, due to the value in the flow of information in personal data online, we've created new kinds of companies, and we may need to look at revisions in antitrust laws that were basically established for earlier forms of corporations. I think there's a danger of saying, “Oh, well, we can't change any of the design or regulatory aspects of this, so we'll have to throw out capitalism.” 

PTI: There’s also a fair amount of disagreement, though, about whether addiction is the appropriate framing, or whether these technologies are having a net negative effect on our wellbeing at all. Do you have an opinion on that debate?

NC: For a long time, I was very wary about applying the term addiction to the internet and social media and smartphones, for two reasons. One is that we Americans are very quick to turn to anything that we like to do a lot of into an “addiction,” and that doesn't seem very illuminating or helpful. And second, you immediately get into the question of, “what do you mean by addiction?” You're talking about a clinical definition, and I certainly don't think that being addicted to Instagram isn’t the same as being addicted to an opioid. There seem to be very different biological things going on. 

But on the other hand, I think at this point we've learned enough about how the design characteristics of social media in particular are geared toward encouraging what I would call compulsiveness and what Silicon Valley would call engagement. It's gotten to the point where, by the common sense usage of the term addiction, meaning something that an individual knows isn't in his or her best interest but they can’t stop doing, it does seem to me that a lot of social media and other online apps and games and stuff are addictive. So I've kind of gotten over my wariness, as long as we're up front about the fact that we're not talking about addiction as a clinical term, but we're talking about it as a behavior that we engage in compulsively.

PTI: And on the wellbeing debate? Do you think psychologists are asking the right questions?

NC: I'm teaching a seminar course right now in social media and we've been looking at some of the research. I certainly think that it's not clear cut what the answer is if you're talking about mental health effects. It's clearly changing behavior, particularly young people's behavior. It's changing their attitudes about very intimate types of things like friendship, as I already mentioned. But the research isn't at the point yet where you can make broad generalizations about questions like, “is this increasing depression?” or “is it increasing anxiety?”, at least in a way that shows it is really clearly having a deleterious effect. 
So could we do a better job? One of the problems is that a person's mood and their mental health depend on so many variables that it's very, very hard to tease out the influence of Instagram or something and make sure that it's causal rather than just a correlation. I think as the psychological research continues, we'll get a clearer and clearer sense of what's really going on, but it's going to take time. So I don't think we're going to get definitive, big answers really quickly. I certainly wouldn't be complacent. We know enough about the way that being constantly on display, particularly for younger people on social media, can increase anxiety. It can certainly increase people's tendency to think about themselves and the image that they create. And it does seem to me that we should be worried about that.

PTI: How confident are you in the research to speak to the broader existential (meaning-in-life) questions you’ve raised in your work?

NC: I certainly wouldn't suggest that science is the only way to approach these things. I noticed this as a writer on technology and not science, that we've come to rely too much on scientific evidence and not enough on our own common sense and our own self-examination. It does seem to me that people would be wise to think critically based on their own experience of how the technologies influencing their lives.

So I don’t want to suggest that the scientific method is the only way to make sense of these changes, particularly if we're talking about existential, phenomenological changes in how we develop a sense of self. We shouldn’t underestimate our ability to make sense of our own lives.

PTI: Another line of defense here is that, at least superficially, the kinds of criticisms that you’ve been voicing about digital technologies have been brought up about many other technologies, dating back to Socrates and his suspicions about the written word undermining our memories. There’s also a sense in which our cognition is always extended out into the artifacts of culture. So what do you think makes digital technologies different?

NC: There's certainly no question that, whenever there's been a technological change, particularly when it has to do with media technology or information technology, it spurs a lot of worries -- some of which end up being substantiated and some not. Certainly Socrates was right that reading and writing would lessen richness of memory, but he was probably wrong about the full benefits that would come from reading and writing. I think that's important to keep in mind, and it's equally important to keep in mind that any technology also has a utopian, over-enthusiastic reaction too, so there are both sides. But I think it's a fallacy to say, “People have worried about such and such before and the human race is still around so we don't have to worry about this other thing today.” And I think the reason that's particularly important now is that I really don't think there's been any media technology -- and perhaps any technology -- that has become so deeply entwined with an individual's moment-by-moment existence as digital technology has become, particularly since the proliferation of the smartphone. All you have to do is look at the behavioral evidence of how people interact with their phones. Most people, the first thing they do when they wake up is look at their phone, often because it's where their alarm is. And most people, the last thing they do before they go to bed is look at the phones. And in between, they're looking at their phones all the time, every few minutes. There really is nothing in history that we can say is like this. 

One of the things people look at is the influence of television. People were worried about television; they still are. But if you think about how people used television, they spent lots of hours watching television, but it tended to be isolated in particular times of the day. There was a reason primetime was called primetime. Whereas, if you look at the usage characteristics of a smartphone, it's all the time, all day long. For many people, and probably most people today, they're not experiencing life, they're not thinking, they're not communicating without their phone somehow being involved. If it's not directly involved, it's in their pocket and they're thinking about it.  So we have to deal with this as a new phenomenon with its own characteristics and some consequences.

PTI: A final question: it seems that lurking behind these debates are differing ideas about the nature and possibility of progress. You seem to believe that progress is certainly possible; you’ve written that “to resist invention is not to reject invention.” But what do you think the dividing line is between the type of progress you advocate for and a utopian ideology of progress?

NC: There are many different ways to define progress or many different manifestations of progress. There's material progress. Is our health better? Are we more comfortable? And in general, I think the story there has been quite positive for quite a long time. I certainly don't want to understate the importance of material progress. Then there's progress as defined by the quality of our lives and the quality of our thinking. And there, I think, it's a much more complicated story. It's also complicated on the material side; I don't want to pay short shrift to that. 

But I think the great benefit of technology, at a personal level, is that it can expand our interaction with and our understanding of the broader world, the world outside us. And the danger with technology is that it can have the opposite effect, that it can narrow our engagement with and our understanding of the world around us. We've created, in the pursuit of comfort and convenience and choice, a media environment around us, a digital environment, which is increasingly where we live, which is an impoverished version of the actual world itself. And it seems to me that whenever we talk about progress and the nature of progress, that’s something we need to take into account. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length.