From Anxiety to Animosity: How Social Media Damages Relationships A preview of Nicholas Carr’s new book Superbloom
There were a few prophets warning us that we should be cautious about moving so much of our social and intellectual lives onto computers and later phones. Among the greatest of them was Nicholas Carr, who wrote an article in The Atlantic in 2008 titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”– Jon Haidt
“Society is formed and sustained through acts of communication — through people talking with each other — and that simple fact has led us to see communication as a powerful moral force in human affairs. Self-expression is good, we tell ourselves, and it’s good to hear what others have to say. The more we’re able to converse, to share our thoughts, opinions, and experiences, the better we’ll understand one another and the more harmonious society will become. If communication is good, more communication must be better.
But what if that’s wrong? What if communication, when its speed and volume are amped up too far, turns into a destructive force rather than a constructive one? What if too much communication breeds misunderstanding rather than understanding, mistrust rather than trust, strife rather than harmony?
Those uncomfortable questions lie at the heart of my new book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Drawing evidence from history, psychology, and sociology, I argue that our rush to use ever more powerful online media technologies to ratchet up the efficiency of communication has been reckless. Even as the unremitting flow of words and images seizes our attention, it overwhelms the sense-making and emotion-regulating capacities of the human nervous system.
The ill effects ripple through the lives of everyone today, adults as well as kids, and they’re warping relationships at both the personal and the societal level. With social media, we have constructed a hyperkinetic machine for communication that is more likely to bring out the worst in us than the best.
The Fragility of Relationships
To understand why that’s so, it’s useful to look at the fragile process of relationship building. Back in the 1960s, Dalmas Taylor and Irwin Altman, two young psychology researchers at the Naval Medical Research Institute, began a study of how relationships develop between people working in tight quarters under stressful conditions—in a submarine, say, or on the deck of a destroyer. They quickly discovered that surprisingly little research had been done on how relationships deepen, or fall apart, as time passes. To fill the gap, they extended their study through years of experiments, surveys, and fieldwork. They laid out their findings in Social Penetration: The Development of Interpersonal Relationships, an influential 1973 book that is still considered an important text in social psychology.
Relationship building, as Taylor and Altman describe it, is a slow and delicate process, contingent on the pace, content, and reciprocity of communication. When two people first meet, they’re careful about what they reveal about themselves. Wary of creating conflict when forming initial impressions, they discuss fairly trivial matters, like the weather or the traffic. If some affinity is established, they start to talk more freely, letting more of their personality show, and they discuss more sensitive subjects, like their political views or their families. Still, they remain circumspect. They avoid revealing details about their inner lives.
Only when a relationship has successfully progressed through this early “feeling out” stage does a true friendship emerge. Conversations shift from exploration to revelation. The previously hidden private self comes into view, as the friends discuss intimate aspects of their upbringing, their emotions, and their beliefs. As they open up to each other, the tone of their conversations becomes more spontaneous and animated—less self-conscious, if not altogether unguarded. Ultimately, as bonds tighten further, conversations flow easily, without restraint or restriction. Mutual trust is established, allowing the most private personal information to be shared, including information that is a source of shame or sadness.
In building relationships, Taylor and Altman stressed, communication consists of more than just words. Gestures, facial expressions, and touches also matter, as do the way people orient themselves in the physical space they share. Communication is embodied. The researchers also emphasized that in healthy relationships self-disclosure is balanced by self-withholding. Privacy matters. Boundaries matter. Human beings need communication, but they also at times need protection from communication. Without limits, excessive communication triggers defensive, antisocial reactions on the part of individuals and of groups.
“Extensive self-disclosure” might seem benign or even laudable as a social goal, Altman explained in a 1981 journal article, but it’s dangerous. It can end up undermining the very cohesiveness that we desire communication to engender. “Extreme openness might actually increase the probability of conflict, violate self-integrity, and detract from the mutuality that was being sought in human relationships.” Whereas measured and thoughtful communication tends to produce affection, unbridled and chaotic communication is more likely to produce enmity.
Virtual World, Real Strife
In The Anxious Generation, Jon Haidt describes the profound differences between socializing in the material world and socializing in the virtual sphere, between embodied and disembodied communication. Those differences are crucial to understanding the psychological stresses plaguing young people today. They’re also crucial to understanding why online social relations in general are so fraught, so often characterized by suspicion and polarization, anger and insult.
We’ve always used communication technologies to reveal ourselves to others. But by blurring conversation and broadcasting, social media takes this usually benign process to an unhealthy extreme. Facebook, Instagram, X, and other platforms have been painstakingly designed to encourage constant self-expression. By emphasizing quantitative measures of social status—follower and friend counts, like and retweet tallies—the platforms reward people for broadcasting endless details about their lives and opinions through messages and posts, photos and videos. In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet. In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am!
What we’ve done, with the eager assistance of big-tech companies, is to create an artificial social environment which promotes exactly the kind of “extreme openness” that triggers the antisocial behaviors Taylor and Altman documented. Not only do feelings of overexposure often leave us feeling stressed and anxious. They can also poison our attitudes toward others. As much psychological research has shown, we tend to like people whom we sense to be similar to us and dislike those who seem dissimilar. When we’re constantly inundated with a lot of stray bits of information about other people, as we are when we’re online, we start giving more weight to evidence of dissimilarity than similarity — a phenomenon the Harvard social psychologist Michael Norton calls a “dissimilarity cascade.” More information triggers antipathy.
Now that the internet has turned us all into virtual neighbors, we’re all in one another’s business all the time. We’re exposed, routinely, to the opinions and habits of far more people, both acquaintances and strangers, than ever before. With an almost microscopic view of what everybody else is saying and doing—the screen turns us all into Peeping Toms—we have no end of opportunities to spot dissimilarities and to take offense. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a communication mechanism more perfectly geared to the initiation and propagation of dissimilarity cascades than social media.
The personal information that circulates in such abundance through social networks can act as an attractant. More often, it acts as a repellent.
“Digital Crowding”
In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel gave a famous lecture called “The Metropolis and Mental Life” on the psychic consequences of urban living. However exciting and energizing it may at times be, the experience of being crowded together with others in the “extensive communicative life” of a city, Simmel argued, produces in people an unsettling sense of “mutual strangeness and repulsion.” The negative feelings usually remain hidden, suppressed behind an outward, defensive countenance of indifference or good cheer, but they can at any moment “break out into hatred and conflict.”
Simmel’s sense of city life may have been overly bleak, but his assessment of crowding and its toll on mental health has been confirmed by many studies. When we feel impinged upon by large numbers of other people and overwhelmed by a profusion of sensory stimuli, we experience a kind of social claustrophobia, with symptoms of stress, depression, withdrawal, and, at worst, aggression.
There are no bodies online, but there are myriad presences. With everyone pressing their virtual flesh on everyone else all the time, the communicative life becomes more extensive, and more oppressive, than it is in even the most densely populated of cities. Simmel’s description of the “psychological conditions” of the metropolis—“the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli”—seems if anything more accurate as a description of the social media environment than the urban one. In online society, moreover, the tempering influence of face-to-face conversation is missing. We can’t read people’s expressions and gestures; we can’t make eye contact. Virtual presence entails physical absence.
Adam Joinson, a psychology professor at the University of Bath in England, coined the term digital crowding to describe the “excessive self-disclosure . . . and social contact” that characterizes social media’s teeming but ghostly metropolis. “With the advent of social media,” Joinson and a group of his colleagues wrote in the book Privacy Online, “it is inevitable that we will end up knowing more about people, and also more likely that we end up disliking them because of it.”
That’s not to discount the many close bonds people have formed online. Facebook posts have kindled or rekindled friendships. Snaps have spawned romances. Exchanges of tweets have opened up into deep conversations. TikToks have inspired feelings of communal joy. Many people who feel isolated or uncomfortable in their physical surroundings have found companionship and a sense of belonging in the internet’s vast, disembodied social scene.
But social media’s benefits, as real and welcome as they can be, shouldn’t blind us to the deeper ways that digital technology is changing social dynamics. The discoveries that psychologists and sociologists have made about the fraught nature of human relationships—about dissimilarity cascades, about the slow and fragile unfolding of relationships, about the tension between disclosure and privacy—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.
Our mistake has been to assume that if we make human communication more efficient, we’ll amplify its beneficial effects. We’re now discovering that the opposite is true — that faster, more voluminous communication is shallower communication. We communicate best when we communicate thoughtfully and judiciously, when we pause to listen, when we don’t rush to make snap judgments or to react with an imprudent message. If we’re going to temper the ill effects of social media, we’re going to have to back away from the screen and reacquaint ourselves with the intimate art of real conversation. We’re going to need to spend less time broadcasting and more time talking.
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