From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. But Nicholas Carr's new book, Superbloom , tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, Carr argues, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us. How well are we suited to the “superbloom” of information that technology has unleashed? Does modern communication really encourage self-expression, free speech, and media democratization? What are the effects of “digital crowding”? How does new media shape society and affect our sense of reality? This event will probe the intricacies of modern communication in a time of radical dislocation.

Nicholas Carr is a journalist and the author of multiple books about the human consequences of technology including The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), a New York Times bestseller that remains a touchstone for debates on the internet’s effects on our thoughts and perceptions. His last book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart has been published in January 2025 by W.W. Norton. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Audrey Borowski is a research fellow between the Universities of Bonn and Cambridge. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Her first monograph Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant was published by Princeton University Press.