How Social Media Brings Out the Worst in Us

Is social media harming my well-being? This is a question I often ask myself, wondering if I should keep using it or take a deliberate break from it. As someone who follows the science of well-being, I’ve seen its potential for harm and the benefits of not using it. But I also enjoy it and feel it helps me preserve my relationships and keep informed.

However, after reading Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by journalist Nicholas Carr, I’m starting to rethink the benefits of social media. Carr takes readers on a deep dive into the history of mass communication to illustrate how technology has been problematic from the beginning, not delivering on the promise of spreading democracy, educating the public, or increasing our sense of common humanity. Alongside current findings from social science research, he makes a strong argument that social media is hurting more than helping our mental health, relationships, and society. And, he thinks, we need to do more about it.

I spoke to Nicholas Carr about his new book and what it reveals about our relationship to social media.

Jill Suttie: Can you talk about some of what you learned from diving into the history of technological advances in communication?

Nicholas Carr: It was interesting to me as I did the research that whenever new communication systems were introduced, it spurred both fears and dreams of an impending utopia. And it changed society in deep and often unexpected ways.

Around 1900, Charles Horton Cooley, an early American sociologist, wanted to figure out why society changes and why it seemed to be changing much faster in the modern era. He concluded that changes in communication were responsible, and that society is, essentially, communication—people talking together and sharing ideas. As advances in communication and technology sped up, the pace of societal change sped up, as well.


The year 1900 was around the time that the telegraph and telephone were emerging. But the real big change came about 20 years later with the introduction of the first commercial radio station. When radio was first invented, it was assumed that it would just be a wireless telegraph, sending Morse code to places you couldn’t reach with wires, like ships and lighthouses. But radio turned out to be a great tool for broadcasting music, news, opinions, and everything else. That’s when it became possible for a central source of information to instantaneously reach a very large audience simultaneously.

With new communication technology, there’s always a great deal of excitement about it being an educational tool, building understanding among far-flung people. But there’s also deep uneasiness around one central source exerting enormous influence over listeners. In the early days, in the United States, this was fairly benign; it was a source of entertainment, mostly, though people did think it was dumbing down the population. But, in Germany in the 1930s, when the Nazis were coming to power, the first thing they did was take control of radio stations and use them as a propaganda tool.

Whenever a new communication technology comes along, we don’t really know how it’s going to be used or what the societal effects will be. They often surprise us, sometimes in good ways, but often in bad ways.

JS: OK, so now we’re in the era of social media. You argue that it’s a poor tool for building greater social connection. Why?

NC: When social media first started to emerge in the early years of the 21st century, there was this sense that simply by allowing people to communicate more, speed up the exchange of messages, enlarge the volume of messages, and expand the network of connections, it would have beneficial effects. If communication in general is good, then the assumption was more communication must be better.

I argue in the book that this turned out to be a misperception on a very large scale, because it’s not true that more efficient communication is necessarily better communication. In fact, what we’ve seen is that when people have to handle extreme levels of messaging, going back and forth with lots more people simultaneously, it overwhelms their ability to be thoughtful, build empathy, or understand one another. Instead of building understanding and greater trust, it ends up creating misunderstanding and mistrust. And it triggers psychological reactions that are actually antisocial rather than prosocial.

We should have predicted this, because there were lots of psychological studies indicating that learning more about other people doesn’t necessarily make you like them more or understand them better. In fact, the odds are slightly higher that as you gather more information about another person, you’ll end up disliking them rather than liking them. That’s because as soon as you find some way that the person is different from you, you begin to emphasize differences more than similarities. And the psychological literature tells us that we tend to like people who we feel are similar to us and dislike those who are different.

So, now we’ve created this system where there’s no end to the amount of information you can gather about people. Online, we’re much more prone to talking about ourselves, sharing information about what we’re doing every day, sharing our political opinions, posting photographs of our vacation, and so forth than when we’re talking person to person. So, we’ve created this system where differences actually become more salient than similarities.

Also, when you’re overwhelmed with information, you don’t think deeply about it; you have to process it very quickly. So, you tend to process it through existing biases, and that encourages people to form groups in tension with other groups. If you define yourself by your group affiliation, you can filter information based on what the group believes is true and good. And, if different groups define themselves in opposition to one another, that creates tension and polarization.

JS: Despite the harms of social media, you argue that it’s very difficult to stop. Part of the problem, you write, is that “we’re not being manipulated to act in opposition to our desires. We’re being given what we want in quantities so generous, we can’t resist gorging ourselves.” Does that mean you think we’re to blame?

NC: About 10 years ago or so, it became very clear that there were lots of problems with social media, from creating polarization to generalized anger to anxiety and depression among people who felt always on display and always judged. Our reaction, when we started seeing all these problems, was to immediately blame the companies and their algorithms. The sense was that we were being exploited and manipulated, and it’s the big company’s fault.

I don’t dispute that in the book. There’s a lot to blame on the companies, because they’ve figured out a very powerful way to manipulate and exploit us. But it’s important for all of us to recognize our own complicity, because the way they manipulate us is by feeding us information, stimulation, and experiences that we desire. The algorithms read what triggers our attention, what grabs our attention and, by proxy, seems to be what we desire, and then give us a lot of it.

I think we have to take into account both the way the machines exploit our desires, but what we’re demonstrating through what we read, look at, and say online. If we’re honest about what’s going on, we have to begin by questioning our own desires and why we want the stuff that we’re getting in such enormous quantities.

JS: What does social media provide that people find attractive?

NC: It begins with some very deep instincts that humans have, two of which are particularly important. One is the seeking instinct. If there’s new information around, we want to know it. Some psychologists say that the desire to know everything that’s going on around us is our strongest desire, and you can understand it from an evolutionary perspective. The odds of you surviving a million years ago were much better if you spotted the predator coming at you or the source of food.

With social media, and with the internet in general, we’ve created an environment where there’s no end of new things going on. If you carry your phone around with you all the time, you know that there’s always some interesting new piece of information on it. Therefore, you’re always thinking about it and always looking at it.

The other one is the social instinct. Human beings are social creatures, and social media is a system for sending social signals, a lot of it about us. People mention us, tag us in a photograph, respond to our texts, like or don’t like something we post. Knowing that there’s social information that has something to do with us, and it’s always available, amplifies that desire to constantly monitor what’s going on.

The companies understand that and are built to constantly feed us novelty and to encourage us to post about ourselves. At an instinctual level, this taps into things that are very hard for people to resist.

Beyond that, if you’re constantly inundated with information and messages, the things that stand out tend to be things that are provocative, controversial, or make you angry or happy, that trigger strong, visceral emotions. That’s what quickly cuts through all the noise that’s out there. Less appealing or attention-grabbing are reasoned arguments, deep complex ideas that require you to shut off the flow so you can figure out what they mean.

JS: Self-disclosure is an intimacy-building tactic. Why doesn’t it work well with social media?

NC: This was one of the most interesting threads of research I found. As relationships deepen in the real world, they’re much more balanced around disclosure and maintaining privacy. Meeting someone in person, you wouldn’t pull out a photo album and start showing them everything you’ve been doing. You don’t immediately tell someone your political views or everything about you, like you would on Facebook or Instagram. You’re very deliberate in disclosing things. And, because the person’s right there, you can read their expressions, their non-verbal communication, to help you figure out how far along you are in your friendship and whether you can get a little deeper and more personal.

The strongest and deepest relationships play out slowly, in a deliberate fashion. They aren’t, “Hey, here’s everything about me; make up your mind” the way they are online. When we socialize online, we often sacrifice the ability to build deep and lasting relationships. That gets supplanted by having more but superficial relationships.

JS: I have a Facebook account that I mostly use to stay in touch with old friends who don’t live nearby. Do you think that’s harmful and that I should completely disconnect from it?

NC: I think there is harm in it, psychological harm. But it’s more harmful for the young, who, from a very early age now, have crafted their persona online and are constantly monitoring how it’s going over, as if their self is a product. They do market research to see who’s liking it, who’s not liking it, who’s responding, how many followers they have. That creates anxiety.

As young people get more and more used to communicating online rather than in person, it becomes more natural for them. I think that’s one of the reasons we see high growing levels of loneliness and even depression, particularly among the young. But the effect influences everyone who spends a lot of time on social media.

It would be naive to say everybody should just stop, because that’s not going to happen. I don’t think it’s just a matter of personal choice anymore. We’ve built the expectation that people are always connected; there are social norms and practices, and it’s very hard to get anything done these days without being online.

The biggest problem is that it’s always there. If we could temper that at the societal level, by removing or tamping down some of the expectations that people have to be always connected and respond quickly, that would help. At the personal level, we could stop carrying our phones all the time and stop filling it up with apps that are notifying us about the novel stuff coming in. A mix of changing social norms and personal behavior would lead toward a healthier use of the technology.

Having said that, though, I’m not very optimistic that that’s going to happen. We’re dependent. Even if we realize that the technology may be making us unhappy, leading to more shallow relationships and social and political strife, we like the stimulation.

JS: Is there anything you are hopeful about, or would advise our readers to consider?

NC: The technology continues to change very rapidly. Now, machines are not just transporting content and choosing which content to show people; generative AI is actually creating the content in huge quantities precisely targeted to every person.

One of the things I want people to take away from the book is this fundamental idea that all new communication technologies change social relations and change society writ large. Rather than just doing what we have done in the past, which is to allow technologists and the companies profiting from the technology to make decisions on our behalf about how these technologies will evolve, we need to take more responsibility as individuals, but also as members of the public. We need to be asking, what’s good about the technology? What’s bad about it? Where should we use it? And where should we not use it?

We can actually have more influence over how technology evolves through law, regulations, and social norms. That’s something that we haven’t done in the past. My hope is that by understanding the dynamics of how communication technologies and human psychology are sometimes in conflict, and knowing it’s going to have big effects on the way we all live and the way we all interact with each other, we can exert more agency over the course of technological development.