[HN Gopher] Review: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection T...
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Review: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
Author : pseudolus
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-01-30 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| bell-cot wrote:
| A point not made about that #superbloom: When many people feel
| anxiety and insecurity about the future, then web-scale social
| media catalyzes a nasty, desperate scramble - to be at least a
| relevant-sized fish, in a planet-sized pond.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| There isn't much beauty left in lots of people's day to day
| lives that isn't gate kept behind a dollar requirement. I can't
| blame people for wanting beauty in their lives.
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'm a regular volunteer in natural areas, in SE Michigan.
|
| Unless it's _right_ next to a big university campus, and
| their friends are there, it 's amazing and sad how few people
| show any interest in adding some free, open-to-the-public
| natural beauty to their lives.
|
| From the article's description (of #superbloom), I'd say that
| nobody actually wanted beauty in their lives. But everybody
| wanted to visit a trending-now location ASAP.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I do this as well where I live. We have some beautiful
| spots right in the city.
|
| When I go and help do ecological restoration, very few
| people are around. Some paths go by these areas, but no one
| stops. They're going somewhere. I don't blame them; my days
| are packed too.
|
| My local subreddit is FULL of people wondering where these
| places are. They hate living in the city because it's ugly
| or they miss rural life. Some even ask how to help. No new
| volunteers show up, though. No uptick in people visiting
| these areas.
|
| We've got this one beautiful ravine that needs so much work
| done, and we can't really get funding or a go-ahead at all
| until it's clear we'll have the resources. This means
| volunteers who have stuck around for a few jobs and
| expressed an intent to return. We've got around 10 people,
| but would need more like 20. I'm not sure it's possible. We
| put up signs, put out social media, get people in the group
| to reach into their network. No luck.
|
| If people won't visit the beautiful places, what are the
| chances they'll help restore the parts that need our help?
| It's rough. Oh well, just have to keep at it. It makes a
| real difference.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > My local subreddit is FULL of people wondering [...]
| Some even ask how to help. No new volunteers show up,
| though.
|
| _Oh, yes._ I 'm in a local volunteer group here. We have
| just under 1,800 "members" on Meetup - supposedly
| interested in regularly doing Good Deeds with us.
|
| But there are less than 18 members who ever show up and
| do things. Evidently the other ~1,782 had Good
| Intentions...that mysteriously vanished when they clicked
| "Join". Or only care about polishing their online images.
| Or something.
|
| A great many things were different back in the early
| '90's. One of which was that branding yourself as a
| volunteer do-gooder required you to actually show up and
| do some work. Somehow, our group had far more actual
| workers back then.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Oh, nice. You've been at it for a while now. I'd love to
| have some of the insights you have. Though, I guess they
| don't help you grow the group much if you're only 18.
| Yet, I have no idea how we'd get to 18.
|
| The most successful group around here has about that many
| volunteers (I'm one of them), but they're focused on a
| huge range of land trusts outside of the city. Given the
| city is small, it still seems insane that so few people
| want to contribute. My kids have no interest. Friends
| have no interest. But it's literally the only way things
| get better...
|
| For example. A creek nearby smells awful and is full of
| drug paraphernalia and garbage. The city has expressed
| with clarity that they aren't touching it.
|
| The only solution is people like you and I taking a
| Saturday to clean it. Yet we're not actually allowed to
| unless the city approves it (more specifically the Parks
| branch), which requires meeting their criteria such as
| number of people involved, short enough time frames,
| available expertise, etc.
|
| Sometimes I think I might just go guerilla and pull a
| bunch of crap out on my own, take it to the dump on my
| own, whatever.
|
| Okay, I got that out of my system. If you have any advice
| on making groups like this more effective, I'm all ears.
|
| Bringing coffee and muffins to the work events certainly
| helps.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| You sure it's not the equivalent of the local 'what to do
| this weekend' section of the newspaper?
|
| I know people from the bay area would see my posts get all
| excited then sad when they learned where I live now and too
| far away, and none of them were trending or made to look
| cool by boring old me.
| asdff wrote:
| It really depends on the natural area in question. Not
| everyone is really motivated to build up the skills
| required to do things like navigate via map and compass to
| actually tackle natural terrain safely. People die every
| year in the Angeles National Forest and its almost always
| because they didn't prepare for the conditions and didn't
| let anyone know that they were hiking that weekend and
| therefore where to aid search and rescue when the missing
| persons report is filed.
|
| However I think smaller urban/suburban trails have probably
| never been more popular. You know the sort of 1-3 mile loop
| in the hills or woods trails with a convenient parking lot.
| Those are filled with trail runners, dog walkers, people
| pushing strollers, etc.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Good article. I think I need to add this book to my reading list
| now.
|
| I'm not sure I fully agree with the conclusion, though, that we
| can't change the tech and can only change ourselves. I think
| there's a lot of room to explore variations on tech that are
| healthier for us and for society. Adding friction as mentioned in
| the article is one example, but I think there's more we can come
| up with if we treat our attentional and societal health as a
| primary goal.
|
| This probably does, to some extent, involve changing ourselves
| too. Frictionlessness and seamlessness are comfortable, and
| rejecting those will probably always involve some conscious
| effort. But we don't have to do it all alone, as individuals!
| Those of us with the skills to do so can try to build healthier
| tools so that people have alternatives when they go looking.
| argomo wrote:
| Reminds me of an old Bruce Sterling quote: "politics pulls us
| together, technology tears us apart". That always struck me as
| being directly opposite of our intuitions as technologists.
|
| As a species, we need a wider exploration of how to structure
| online spaces in a way that builds and sustains social capital
| instead of usurping it. That's difficult to do with out resorting
| to censorship and ideological totalitarianism. And it's probably
| not compatible with the ad-funded addiction-driven business model
| of most modern platforms.
|
| One historical example of note here is Wikipedia. It was a
| complete failure as a for-profit product, but it skyrocketed in
| significance when it opened up and adopted the relatively new
| social interaction model of the wiki.
| asdff wrote:
| By far the biggest issue with the internet is the power it
| represents. And there is no avoiding that when it is by
| definition a way into the hearts and minds for every person
| connected to it on earth. It will always be ripe for
| advertising, for propaganda, for misinformation, because the
| incentives are just too damned great to not let it be. It was
| one thing when it was 25 years ago and internet users
| represented a small fraction of the worlds population compared
| to today. A fraction that might have gone unnoticed from a
| certain degree of mass advertising and propagandizing that
| always seeks to put itself where it can get in front of the
| most eyeballs, but that is no longer the case so long as so
| many people use the internet.
|
| I'm not sure what the solution is beyond niche little forums
| (tribes) that somehow tip toe the line of having the website be
| supported at all and also not growing too big to be of much
| interest for advertising and other forms of propaganda. And
| even then, how do you discover these little tribes? All the
| discovery mechanisms for internet content today are centralized
| or gated away from the upstart individual. Search engines,
| social media, even advertising in the meatspace takes serious
| capital. People don't have their own sites with webrings
| linking to other sites anymore. They have social media profiles
| and even then most people just lurk after highschool and
| college vs use it to share actual content or ideas. Search
| engines favor directing you to mass media and social media
| results for queries rather than small sites and forums.
|
| I feel like what is left of these niche interest and niche
| forums are doomed to die out in a few generations, since its so
| hard to actually come up into this world and find these refuges
| on the web unless you knew about them from years ago when the
| internet was smaller and signal to noise ratios were much
| higher. Kids today aren't even interested in using the web, let
| alone a desktop OS. At least there are still computer science
| college programs but who knows how long that will be the case
| everywhere in the chatGPT/cut everything era we find ourselves
| in.
| burningion wrote:
| I think of "social" media as a fundamentally isolating
| experience.
|
| On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own,
| personalized feed.
|
| As their feed becomes more personalized, it gets more and more
| isolated from a common, shared cultural context.
|
| According to Wilbur Schramm's theories of communication, human to
| human messages must occur over a shared cultural context, and
| social media shrinks that shared cultural context.
|
| LLMs as a platform could shrink this shared cultural context even
| more, unless we become more deliberate about fighting back
| against this "shared experience" shrinking:
|
| https://www.makeartwithpython.com/blog/social-media-is-the-f...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's a bummer that there's a whole generation that doesn't know
| how much fun it was for everyone to watch and discuss the same
| episode of the same show at the same time week to week.
|
| And yeah, now imagine everyone watching their own personalized
| media. Under the surface it's so empty.
| pesus wrote:
| Are there even any more shared cultural moments/experiences
| like that anymore? The closest thing I can think of is maybe
| large sporting events, but even then, they seem much less
| impactful than before.
| skydhash wrote:
| I'd say movies.
| airstrike wrote:
| Sports are also totally about betting in the 21st century,
| at least in the US
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Who is into that?
| Syonyk wrote:
| Based on the amount of sports betting apps I see if
| there's a game on at a restaurant or something, a lot of
| people.
|
| And in actual numbers, about 20% of Americans at least
| have an account with a sports betting platform.
|
| https://www.sbu.edu/news/news-
| items/2024/02/05/st.-bonaventu...
| skydhash wrote:
| I currently think status feed (WhatsApp, RSS) and discussions
| group (Messaging Apps, IRC, forums, Email threads) is the
| best way to connect socially on the web. Any algorithms that
| includes personalization is inherently selfish.
|
| One great thing that I like to find is interest or curation
| lists. Like themed books, favorite music albums, software one
| uses,... Better than any recommendation engine.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yeah, but actually people do talk about the same topics like
| Elon, Trump, etc. It's just not the same view anymore, but
| the same issues.
| saurik wrote:
| I mean, this does still happen: there are many extremely
| major TV shows from the likes of Disney and Apple that are
| being released to streaming on a weekly schedule, and the
| world does in fact talk about them -- even on social media --
| in lock step.
| baxtr wrote:
| Not refuting your point, just want to point out that I can
| think of many other isolating experiences like:
|
| - reading a newspaper/books
|
| - binge watching Netflix
|
| - refreshing HN every 2 minutes
|
| I'm not sure that's a specific aspect of social media.
| burningion wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. The essay I linked to adds the cost of choice
| for a medium against a potential reward too.
| jchw wrote:
| The interesting thing about reading a newspaper or book,
| though, is that it is the same for everyone. So you can feel
| a sort of connection to others who are or have also done
| this. I think this is also a good explanation for why it's so
| easy for people to bond over things like sports.
|
| Same for Hacker News and older bulletin board style forums:
| it's largely the same experience for everyone (at least at
| any given moment). When you load the frontpage, it's roughly
| the same stories at the top for everyone (sans whatever
| you've manually hidden, of course.)
|
| Social media isn't _completely_ different, but it sure is
| weirder, especially with algorithmic feeds. I don 't use
| social media anymore, but sometimes when I would talk with
| friends it would become apparent that the posts that were
| surfacing for them were _completely_ different than the ones
| surfacing for me, which gave us _very_ different ideas of
| what the general feeling on some issues was. I think this
| probably amplifies the living shit out of false pluralities.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd agree reading a book is isolating. At a
| minimum, you can (assuming a human author...) "get inside the
| author's brain." Some books are better at this than others,
| certainly.
|
| But even without that, look at the popularity of book
| discussions, book clubs, and things like that. Multiple
| people, reading the same book, at the same pace, and
| discussing it. That's the opposite of isolating, and is
| impossible to achieve with "personalized feeds." There's no
| common point to discuss.
|
| And, as yet another example, have you ever read a book that
| someone else has marked up and taken notes in? Passing a book
| around a few friends, each with a different color pen to make
| notes, is certainly not isolating.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > I'm not sure I'd agree reading a book is isolating. At a
| minimum, you can (assuming a human author...) "get inside
| the author's brain."
|
| I think that's it.
|
| You are not connecting with "people", but you are
| connecting deeply with the highly concentrated (and
| presumably original and high quality) thoughts of one
| person.
|
| Quality beats quantity for most types of relationships. We
| don't need lots of close friends, although that's great.
| But we really benefit from even one, two or three very
| close friends.
|
| Social media increasingly isolating, full of dreck, and
| often shallow. But the last one, shallow, is not the
| problem the other two are. It is also healthy to maintain
| wider looser social circles.
| ljm wrote:
| I think there's something quite cosy or comforting about
| simply enjoying the company of a friend with a book as
| well. Don't even have to read the same thing, it's just
| another way of spending time together and is anything but
| lonely or isolating.
|
| Maybe it's just one of those things that becomes more
| pleasant as you grow older and enjoy a more laid back pace,
| but I appreciate having those friends you can just chill
| with without really having to 'do' something or needing to
| fill the space with conversation. You've become close
| enough (not necessarily romantically) that you can just
| enjoy the presence.
| nine_k wrote:
| The idea is that your newsfeed eventually becomes uniquely
| tailored to you.
|
| Of course it contains posts that may be shared widely and
| thus unifying, or posts from your close friends and relatives
| and thus also unifying in a way. This is not a given though,
| and the context of your newsfeed is effectively unique.
|
| This is one of the reasons community feeds exist, which are
| the same for the members of a community and thus somehow
| unifying, around a topic of interest.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's the Internet itself.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| I'd rather say it's the targeted ads part of the internet.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| > On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own,
| personalized feed.
|
| I notice this with streaming platforms like Netflix as well,
| there is no longer a channel that we all watch (not even in the
| same household), so a lot of water boiler talk about TV shows
| have disappeared. The only conversations I have about TV shows
| are now on reddit.
| boxedemp wrote:
| Adding to this thought, I've found the move from scheduled
| content to on demand does this too. Often viewers are at
| different spots in the series which diminishes conversation.
| gessha wrote:
| For a long time I've read/watched media that none of my
| peers do - manga/anime/light novels and what I've works for
| me is to invite people to talk about what currently excites
| them no matter what media type it is and go into detail.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's actually fascinating to think how many things I watched
| just because other people watched them. Now I hardly watch
| anything, even though I never thought my motivation for
| watching things was to talk about them.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| > On modern social media platforms, each person gets their own,
| personalized feed. > As their feed becomes more personalized,
| it gets more and more isolated from a common, shared cultural
| context.
|
| I see this as a feature. I was so bored in high school, kids
| talking about football games ad nauseam. There was no easy
| cohort to chat about things I cared more about. Why should we
| force one shared experience on everyone? After all, that is why
| i'm on HN and not CNN.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| There's an optimal middle ground and physical real world
| communities built around a shared interest generally fit this
| well- you still get a diversity of people, but they all want
| to be together for a reason.
| saurik wrote:
| But like, the front page you and I each see on Hacker News is
| the same, the comments we see are the same, and everything is
| in the same order; if we talk to each other about trends in
| posts on Hacker News, we have some basis of shared reality.
|
| Is this everyone? No. But "forcing one shared experience on
| everyone" is a straw man that wasn't being argued: the
| argument is about the other extreme, where every user has
| their own feed, and worlds splinter so hard that they are
| inherently irreconcilable with anyone else's.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| was that "medium is the message" (or massage) ?
|
| by Marshall McLuhan, as noted here:
|
| https://zandercutt.com/2018/07/16/the-cosmetic-class/
| devindotcom wrote:
| I look forward to reading this.
|
| But anyone who thinks it's new should go back and read the first
| part of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_ ; there, a fictionalized
| Democritus, accused of insanity, turns the accusation back on the
| world at large, citing a surprisingly large and still relevant
| list of issues: information overload, self-serving politicians,
| charlatans, rubes, general bullshit. The phenomenon of _meteoria_
| goes back that far and further. I 'm actually curious whether
| Carr cites Burton!
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| It's not connection but the software and motivations of the
| companies behind it along with the structure of our society that
| is the problem. I make music for fun. Half of my online
| interaction is people looking to make a buck. Connecting in a
| music space wasn't like that 20 years ago. The conversations I
| had online 20 years ago are now still happening just in private
| discords. Connecting in public spaces driven by algo's based
| purely to serve profit motives and people whose motives aren't
| connection but clout/politics/selling something doesn't define
| some universal tech/connection rule.
|
| I'm on a locals hiking mail list. We share things like when the
| kokanee are running. That doesn't get blasted to 20,000 people
| with zero interest but who will go because they saw it in the
| equivalent of the local 'what to do this weekend' section of the
| newspaper. Society has arranged itself so that there is very
| little to do without spending money. And so those few things of
| beauty, free, and semi easy to get to get 'devoured' by a very
| hungry populace.
|
| But on the hiking/biking app I have no fear sharing trails
| because the 'social media' people on the app are only going to
| trails they can get to within 2 minutes of the highway. People
| that are going on a 2 hour mountain hike that requires an hour of
| fire road driving self select out. Plus if we don't get enough
| people going the trails get overgrown so I need exposure. I am
| only sharing because I want something out of it (enough traffic
| to keep the trail accessible) and I don't share my favorite
| trails outside of the mail list. Social media companies have made
| sure their experience is purely transactional at this point, not
| 'connective', but things like selective highly connecting
| discords/email lists exist and very much connect people in
| healthy ways.
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's like we're re-learning something humans have intuitively
| understood since humans have existed: a cohesive community
| needs to be human-scaled and has standards it enforces.
|
| Online "communities" often fail at both. They allow any rando
| to show up (or even encourage them to do so via algorithms),
| and there are no barriers to entry or consequences for leaving.
| hedayet wrote:
| Like home-cooked meals, real-life connections are hard to build
| and nurture. On the other hand, web connections are cheap and
| fast.
|
| It takes less than a minute to go from opening an Instagram
| account to "connecting" (following) with someone and see their
| semi-nude photos
| quercusa wrote:
| Once again, Douglas Adams was ahead of his time:
|
| _Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all
| barriers to communication between different races and cultures,
| has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the
| history of creation._
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Do we need to have a single, common cultural experience? Mass
| media, and the resulting mass culture, are a recent phenomenon,
| and certainly one that has been heavily criticized.
|
| My sense is that we're in the middle of a phase-transition, and
| the unhappiness and dislocation that people feel is because the
| old world (shared cultural context) is dying, but the new world
| hasn't yet been born.
|
| Our generation will have the hardest time because we have a foot
| in both worlds.
| lantry wrote:
| What existed before mass-media was a shared experience with
| unmediated interactions. With mass media, the interactions are
| mediated but there is still a shared experience. With social
| media, there is neither unmediated interaction nor shared
| experience.
|
| So I think you are correct that we are transitioning to a new
| "phase", but I disagree with the implication that things will
| be better once the transition is over. They could be worse!
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "a shared experience with
| unmediated interactions."
|
| Without mass media, how did people share an experience? Do
| you mean sharing with your friends/family/church? If so,
| isn't that option still available post-transition?
|
| Or is your point that social media destroys personal
| interactions, so the next generation is left with nothing
| (kind of like porn destroying healthy sex lives)? If so, then
| I agree the future might be worse.
|
| But it's also possible that social interactions are changing,
| and it is only because they are different for us that we
| think of it as "worse". Moreover, society hasn't yet had a
| chance to adapt to the new technology, so we don't know
| exactly what social interactions will be like in the future.
| It could be that kids tomorrow will learn to adapt to social
| media just as our generation learned to adapt to TV.
| glial wrote:
| Here's an essay reflecting on the value of having a shared
| experience of the world, cultural or otherwise:
|
| https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/common-worlds-com...
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I certainly think there is value in shared cultural values.
| But my point is:
|
| 1. We value a shared culture because that's what we're used
| to. There's no guarantee that future generations will agree.
|
| 2. Shared cultural values also have downsides, and depending
| on your perspective, the downsides might outweigh the
| benefits.
| brokebit wrote:
| The author, Nicholas Carr, is doing a free Zoom event with
| Christine Rosen from the American Enterprise Institute on Feb
| 10th. They are giving out free copies of the book to those that
| attend. - https://www.familyactionnetwork.net/events/superbloom-
| how-te...
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| I call partial nonsense. Faddish tech bashing and harping on de
| jure boogeymen like "misinformation", which overeaches beyond
| valid criticisms to apply social connection technologies as a
| cause for the harm between people that has perhaps always been
| the case in many contexts. Cherry picking can make any argument
| seem valid and especially if you rule out other considerations in
| favor of a specific narrative agenda.
|
| We still always have the option today of connecting with real
| people in the real world, as much as or more so than we have at
| any time in our history, while also being able to use social
| media and other related technologies to connect with distant
| family or friends in ways that are completely unique to a modern
| context.
|
| This duality is a fundamental good, because it allows for new
| options from more contexts than ever before.
|
| Yes, there are difficulties with social media and some people
| misuse these technologies in ways that emotionally harm them, but
| people who misdirect their efforts to socialize with others and
| balance their emotional lives have always existed, albeit with
| fewer options than today for staying in touch.
|
| One can choose who to reach out to, and the presence of social
| media doesn't make it any less important or more difficult to
| simply choose people who are capable of caring. Those who don't
| care for contact are no more the case no than they were before
| digital connectivity was a thing in human society.
|
| As for social media and misinformation? Give me a break. Legacy
| media has a vast, long, torrid and dirty history of spreading
| propaganda on an industrial scale, with few avenues for finding
| out differently, and they hate losing control of that, so now we
| get contrived fears about misinformation from the same industry
| that promoted yellow journalism and absurdly grotesque beliefs
| upon the public for many, many decades.
|
| Politicians and other social actors have taken up this same
| banner of fear mongering for their own pet reasons and interests,
| and at least some segments of the wider public have swallowed
| these fears without giving them proper analytical context.
| Shameful.
|
| At least now, the very fact that nearly anyone can post nearly
| anything allows for those who have better information, closer
| sources and more reasoned insights to spread their points with no
| controlling middlemen, even if they need to swim among tides of
| charlatans and conspiracy nuts. That however is a price to be
| paid for the democratization of access to instantly posting
| anything for worldwide access.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Would someone like to post a rebuttal comment with a modicum of
| substance, instead of a childish downvote? (what a particularly
| idiotic functionality of this site)
| groby_b wrote:
| I'm just going to say that it's Nicholas "Filter Bubbles Make Us
| Stupid, We Should Talk To Opposing Viewpoints All Day" Carr.
|
| If you believe social media is tearing us apart, a significant
| chunk of responsibility lies on his shoulders. (We _knew_ shared
| cultural context matters, but by Jove, "Filter Bubbles" was a
| term that could be milked for book deals, so milk he did)
| jjulius wrote:
| Hello, untruths!
|
| >The term filter bubble was coined by internet activist Eli
| Pariser circa 2010. In Pariser's influential book under the
| same name, The Filter Bubble (2011), it was predicted that
| individualized personalization by algorithmic filtering would
| lead to intellectual isolation and social fragmentation.[1]
|
| Ctrl+F for "carr" on the "filter bubble" wiki reveals two
| instances of "carrots". Similarly, Ctrl+F for "bubble" on
| Carr's Wiki returns 0 results. The book Carr is most famous for
| was based on an article that he wrote two years prior to
| Pariser coining the term, and was published the same year the
| term was coined. His following two books also don't seem to be
| riding on some kind of "filter bubble" coattail (I mean, unless
| you've found a way to connect his next book, a 2014 release
| about _automation_ , to filter bubbles!). It was Pariser who
| published "The Filter Bubble" a year later.
|
| Essentially, what you've done is written this piece off
| entirely based on a false assumption, and suggested that others
| do the same.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
| throw7 wrote:
| Kind of surprised McLuhan (medium is the message) wasn't
| referenced in the story. It's helpful to think of these
| technological innovations as being the message and what that
| means when you interact with them.
|
| The piece says Carr believes reality can't compete with "the
| internet's steady diet of novelty and shallow, ephemeral
| rewards".
|
| I disagree. I do think one remedy is reality. I remember turning
| the corner into St Peter's Basilica and facing the Pieta. Now,
| I'm not one for being moved by statues, but tears immediately
| started streaming down my face. I'll never forget this moment.
| It's seared into my brain.
|
| I'm not saying you have to go to Rome. I'm not saying go travel
| the world. I'm saying it might be as simple as not pulling out
| your cell phone (i.e. "the medium") during the concert you're
| going to tonight.
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