Nicholas Carr, author of Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, begins with an alarming anecdote. Jaci Marie Smith, an influencer with a YouTube channel and Instagram account, took a selfie in Walker Canyon among the masses of flowers during poppy season. Only it wasn’t a normal poppy season: heavy rains had caused a superbloom, an unprecedented number of blooming flowers after their seeds had lain dormant for years. Swarms of social media users traveled to Walker Canyon to take selfies and pick and trample the flowers. The police couldn’t control them. A beautiful photo on the internet dissolved into pixels of chaos and destruction.

Carr describes the damage done by the increasing speed of communications and the inadequate amount of time to reflect before phoning, texting, or emailing a reply, or in the case of the photos of the poppies, an unimaginable destruction. In the first chapter, he writes about the invention of the telegraph, then on to the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and phones. He also talks about the influence of letters, books, newspapers, and magazines. Communication is dangerous. Less is more?

And so I began to think about the “superbloom” of book “influencers.” I prefer the blog to YouTube, but many bloggers seem to have tired of writing their blogs.

The good part: I have learned about so many English books online. I discovered Pamela Hansford Johnson when Capuchin Classics (now defunct) reissued her novel, An Error of Judgment. And I don’t know how I found out about Capuchin Classics. Did I happen upon their website? More likely an English blogger wrote about it.

I have also enjoyed Persephone books, though they are so expensive that I haven’t bought any in years. The prices never go down on eBay. But Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady (Persephone), is one of my favorite books. Ferguson delineates the painful struggles of an older woman living in genteel poverty. Persephone also publishes Dorothy Whipple’s popular novels about women’s lives. Where did I find out about Persephones? Again, I don’t really know, but it was online.

But then we get into editions of classics. There are millions of Jane Austen fans , and if they hold up a new edition of Pride and Prejudice on YouTube I will check it out.

I learned my lesson when I went to B&N to look at hardback edition of P&P illustrated by Marjolein Bastin. These are basically gift books, but who knew? The vloggers didn’t tell us! Tiny illustrations of flowers (and why flowers?) appear randomly in corners of the page. It is pretty, but I prefer the Penguin hardbacks, if I’m going in the hardcover editions.

So we have the superbloom effect, but on a much smaller scale, I hope.