Just finished reading: The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (2024) by Christine Rosen. Its main idea is that it’s inadvisable to allow the ascendance of smartphones and similarly attention-sucking entertainment and communication technologies to extinguish the non-mediated experiences they often replace, all of which have benefits. The threatened experiences she covers are:
- face-to-face communication,
- working with your hands,
- waiting, idleness, and boredom,
- interpreting our emotions with our own senses,
- expressing our emotions with our own bodies,
- direct intake of pleasures (travel, art, sex, cooking, eating) instead of their simulacra or attendant digitalia (constant communication with one’s existing social network while traveling, repros, pornography, and cooking shows),
- serendipity, and
- a sense of place.
This is one of those reads that’s preaching to the choir. But I’m in that choir, and I like it. It prepares me to make my case with evidence. Here are some of my notes from her chapter on the value of face-to-face communication:
- It’s demonstrably easier to lie and be lied to via communication that isn’t face to face. This helps explain our current political climate. Rosen claims that Hancock’s studies even shows that when liars use screen-mediated communication, they are more motivated to lie.
- Face-to-face communication is also a demonstrably more reliable way to get a request fulfilled.
- Frederickson claims that the more attuned to others you become, the healthier your literal heart.
- “Looking someone in the eye is a subtle gesture of inclusiveness, a small but significant act of civil attention.”
- Empathy development is stunted in the absence of face-to-face communication.
However, after the chapter on face-to-face communication, and especially after the chapter on working with your hands, the precise, evidentiary quality of the argumentation all but dissipates. Additionally, it became difficult for me to take her seriously after I read the following phrase: “the passage from the New Testament book of Ecclesiastes.”
So mostly, I wouldn’t recommend reading the book, but I do strongly recommend the overall idea.