[The new book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World highlights key debates about the psychological and sociological impact of presence-evoking technologies. The critical review below from The Washington Post emphasizes the importance of using clear and precise definitions, explications and arguments based on relevant evidence and consistent logic in these debates. A review in Reason is similarly critical. For a more favorable take – and some important academic context – see the review in Public Discourse. Reviews in the conservative Wall Street Journal and National Review are behind paywalls. You can listen to a 31-minute interview with the book’s author at First Things. –Matthew]

Is digital technology leading us to the ‘extinction of experience’?

In her new book, Christine Rosen says yes, but is imprecise about exactly how and why — and what exactly we’re losing

Review by Becca Rothfeld, the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess”
September 27, 2024

In 1796, a German tract cautioned against a popular but dangerous new technology. Its effects, the tract warned, could be dire: The technology’s users often became so obsessed that they were unable to part from it, even for a moment. Converts ignored their friends and shirked their obligations, retreating into a private world. They even reached for the diverting new device at dinner and “at the toilet,” according to the disapproving authors. Other vices paled in comparison: “No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee habit” as the users of this new technology were to its charms.

I regret to inform you that you are exposing yourself to the toxic effects of the technology in question at this very moment. Reading, established as a mass pastime in the early modern period, was the target of the tract’s ire. Books and printed material are now so familiar that we scarcely think of them as “technologies,” but they were once frightening novelties that threatened to change the texture of human relations. What artifact wasn’t once a startling new invention that some grouch predicted was the beginning of the end of civilization?

There is no answer to this question in “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World,” a new book about the pitfalls of digital technology by Christine Rosen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Rosen’s central thesis is that contemporary experience is endangered by a vague yet menacing bundle of “mediating technologies.” “By ‘technology,’” she continues,

I mean the devices such as computers, smartphones, smart speakers, wearable sensors, and, in our likely future, implantable objects, as well as the software, algorithms, and Internet platforms we rely on to translate the data these devices assemble about us. Technology also includes the virtual realities and augmented realities we experience through our use of these tools.

Unfortunately, this supposed clarification presents us with a list, not a definition. What, if anything, do all the items that appear in the litany have in common?

Rosen’s best attempt at an explanation appears very briefly in the introduction. The experiences that are undermined by present-day technologies are, by her lights, “what, historically, have helped us form and nurture a shared reality as human beings.” But I’m not so sure that “we” (who?) ever occupied much of a shared reality, even when older technologies were predominant. What swatch of reality did serfs share with their feudal overlords?

In any event, what emerges in the following 200 pages is not a unified thesis — much less a meditation on “being human in a disembodied world,” per the subtitle’s promise — but a grab bag of complaints. “The extinction of experience” is a crisp and redolent phrase, a line borrowed from the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, and on its basis I expected a monograph about the steady erosion of sensory delight. Rosen does pay lip service to the physical pleasures that are becoming ever rarer, but for the most part, her book reads like a catalogue of the many hazily associated technologies that turn out to be deleterious for a multitude of reasons, not all of them relevant to embodiment in the least.

Social media is bad because it “gives everyone the opportunity to promote themselves,” while digital communication is bad because it prevents us from registering one another’s facial expressions, thereby abolishing what anthropologist Edward T. Hall called “the silent language” of physical communication. Surveillance technologies are bad because they allow employers to monitor employees. Looking at screens is bad because it leads us to ignore the people in need of help around us.

Some of these risks do involve the body, and to be sure, all of them sound dire. “The Extinction of Experience” is best read as a compendium of engrossingly dystopian cautionary tales. Rosen reminds us, for instance, of the conspiracy-addled vigilante who showed up at the D.C. pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong with a rifle in 2016, because online paranoiacs had convinced him there was a pedophile ring operating out of the basement. (Reader, there is no basement, but the pizza is very good.) Rosen also treats us to other horrors: Sheinforms us that “in 2010, in South Korea, a couple allowed their infant to starve to death while they raised a virtual child online in a game called Prius,” and that there is a railway station in Japan where an app called SmileScan checks whether employees are making appropriately friendly expressions.

Most poignantly of all, she calls our attention to more mundane losses, by now so commonplace that we hardly think to lament them — for instance, the steady decline of the art of handwriting.

By the end of the book — and, in truth, before I even started it — I was sympathetic to Rosen’s orientation. I believe in my marrow that there is something uniquely demoralizing about emerging glassy-eyed from hours of YouTube videos or tweets. I desperately want to understand what, if anything, differentiates the evident cesspool of X (formerly Twitter) from earlier communication technologies, which is why I was disappointed to find Rosen’s account so imprecise.

For instance: She posits that online exchanges inhibit our ability to read each other’s “microexpressions,” but haven’t epistolary relationships predating the internet by centuries always offered an alternative to physical interaction? She worries that “reality has competition, from both augmented and alternative forms.” But hasn’t art always offered alternatives to reality? And besides, when in human history has reality ever been unaugmented?

Here are the germs of a counterproposal regarding what is so distinctly crushing about life online. The problem with the internet is not that it augments reality, as do St. Peter’s Basilica and the Ninth Symphony and every other piece of gorgeous artifice we’ve ever been gifted enough to dream up, but that it so often denies us the lush joys (and titillating debasements) of physicality — biting into the luscious velvet of a peach, blinking at the golden glint of waning daylight, flinching from the sharp slap of an unexpectedly cold day.

Blaringly, this idea is present in Rosen’s subtitle, and to her credit, she does include a few obligatory nods to the pleasures of carnality. It is good, she writes generically and unconvincingly, “to live in the real world, with all its messy physical realities.” (Such as?) Dutifully, she ticks off the many delights she believes are under threat — travel, sex, eating, looking long and hard at a painting in a museum — but absent from her book is any substantive, extended celebration of sensory pleasure, or any language that might evoke the tang of tactility.

After all, being online is a physical experience, too. Clicking and scrolling are motions we perform with our bodies, but they are arguably the least inspired choreography of which we are capable.