Book

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

Jan 2025 🇺🇸 W. W. Norton & Company

Superbloom, Carr's 2025 book, argues that social media and constant connectivity have coincided with a fraying of shared understanding rather than the closer community that early internet boosters promised. Named a Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 in technology, it traces communication technologies from the telegraph through today's platforms, arguing each leap in ease of connection has been associated with new frictions, including outrage, polarization, and a diminished sense of shared public reality, rather than resolving earlier ones. Carr frames heavy platform use as reshaping users' sense of self and their relationships with others, without attributing this to any single design choice or company. TechKids Foundation includes it as Carr's most recent and most directly social-media-focused book, extending his decades-long argument about technology's effect on attention and thought to platforms' effect on collective life.

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CITATION

Carr, Nicholas. Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.

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