Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

by Nicholas Carr

The environment in which we live—the “real environment”—is “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance,” Lippmann argued. “To act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model.” Drawing on whatever information is available to us and filtering it through our own desires and biases, each of us creates a mental “pseudo-environment”—a simplified and necessarily fictionalized picture of reality—and then we fit our thoughts and actions to the mirage’s contours. Depending on the individual and his or her education and personality, the pseudo-environment can take the form of anything from a “complete hallucination” to a scientific “schematic model,” but it is never a true and full picture of reality. This is the reason, Lippmann suggested, that the beliefs and behavior of others often seem so mysterious to us. People all “live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.” It is also why we’re so susceptible to attempts to modify our sense of reality by manipulating the information we receive. “What is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?”20 We construct our pseudo-environment out of what Lippmann termed stereotypes. When confronted by “the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world,” we have to rely on rules of thumb, intuitive judgments, and other mental shortcuts—heuristics, as cognitive psychologists call them—to make se...