Are Humans Abandoning the Physical World in Favor of Smartphones?
The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen, W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99
Human beings are not brains in vats. We are not computer code. We are sensory, social creatures whose minds are inextricable from our bodies. Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World proceeds from this truth to a sweeping condemnation of digital technologies.
We have sacrificed essential human qualities, Rosen believes, for the seductive convenience of clicks, swipes, and ever-present smartphones. As a result, she argues, “Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus.”
Her book aims to shake readers into recognizing the technological danger to our humanity. “Social critics of technology are often accused of inciting a misguided moral panic,” she writes. “When it comes to our understanding of experience, however, we could use a great deal more moral panic—if moral is understood as reminding us of our obligations to one another.”
Unfortunately, the book fails to meet an author’s obligations to the audience. It is riddled with contradictions, cherry-picked examples, and question begging. It is bereft of historical context. And contrary to the promise of the subtitle, it never reveals how Rosen imagines “being human.” That ideal seems to involve writing handwritten letters to distant loved ones—but not texts! never texts!—and embracing the boredom of long lines at Disney World.
Rosen gives some of her most promising evidence short shrift. She accords pandemic Zoom classes about a page. She doesn’t explore why online schooling is ineffective, nor does she consider when instructional videos—such as the how-to’s found on YouTube—do work. Letting the abysmal effects of Zoom schooling stand in for all online instruction, she simply ignores the value of digital convenience for teaching such real-world skills as making a sewing pattern, fixing a garbage disposal, improving your passing game, or tying a tie. Perhaps she simply doesn’t know that how-to videos are common on YouTube. (Khan Academy also gets no mention either.) From Rosen’s viewpoint, if something is online it has nothing to do with the real world except to undermine it.
In keeping with her lack of nuanced curiosity, her defense of boredom conflates it with idleness. She doesn’t explore why—as she acknowledges, citing worry beads and smoking—we are less bored when our bodies are engaged in some activity, whether her example of walking between terminals or my hobby of catching monsters in Pokémon Go. True boredom is not idleness. It is not the “interstitial time” that fosters creative daydreaming.
Boredom occurs when you have nothing to do but sit or stand, often while trying to pay attention to something
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