'The Extinction of Experience' (book review)

Christine Rosen offers fresh arguments for why we should get off our phones.

“You had to be there.” It is a phrase we have all heard, used when trying to describe the particular feeling of a situation to others who did not witness it directly. Often, “you had to be there” is deployed when a person gives up, acknowledges that there is no way to convey the true sensibility of an experience to anyone not present, with an underlying sense of “too bad you missed it.”

This phrase, according to Google Ngram, which tracks word frequency in published materials, grew steadily in popularity from the 1960s until 2012, but then it dropped off precipitously. Why? It no longer applied. Thanks to the smartphone, everyone feels as if they can be anywhere. No one is missing out because everything is documented online, livestreamed perhaps, posted for continual rewatching and commentary.

According to Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World,we now spend as much time consuming the experiences of others as we do having experiences of our own. But we pursue and settle for vicariousness at a cost; Rosen suggests it indicates an aversion to risk, which could lead to a “withering of experience.” We diminish the quality of our lives when we allow technology to mediate much or most of what we do.

Rosen’s book, which came out in fall 2024, is a beautiful defense of a life rooted in reality. It is highly readable, full of eye-opening stories and statistics and thoughtful analysis. I found myself nodding enthusiastically in agreement and marking up dozens of pages with sticky flags and pencil underlines.

Her approach focuses less on what’s been termed by Cal Newport as the “primary” harms of digital devices, such as the direct negative effect on mental health or the problem of chronic distraction, and more on the “secondary” harms—no less important—which are all the things individuals miss out on when they prioritize time on devices over time spent with others or doing meaningful activities.

Rosen asks tough questions like, “What kind of person is formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world? What do we gain and what do we lose when we no longer talk about the Human Condition, but rather the User Experience?”

The book is divided into sections that focus on core aspects of what it means to be human and how these have changed in recent years with the rise of digital devices and our new dependence on them. These include being present, face-to-face communication, the shift from handwriting to texting and typing, how we handle the age-old experience of waiting, how we convey feelings and emotion, the ways we experience pleasure, and finally, greater uprootedness and the loss of a sense of place.

Emotional Mercenaries

Rosen is deeply concerned about the effects of a “mass emotional deskilling,” where we outsource our memories to Facebook and Instagram, our curiosity to Google, our sense of direction to GPS embedded in our phones and cars, our generosity to one-click GoFundMe campaigns. We now consult our phones to check our heart rates, how many steps we’ve accumulated that day, whether we’d had sufficient sleep and how much of it was deep versus light. There’s a sense of voluntary disconnect from our own bodies, a surprising willingness to hand over decision-making to devices that rely on highly personal data to determine our next steps.

In the future, we might even allow devices to determine who our friends are. Already, social media platforms make strong suggestions, but Rosen tells of one particularly alarming app called PPLKPR (short for “people keeper”) that promises to “track and ‘auto-manage’ your relationships using GPS and a heart rate-monitoring wristband that computes ‘when you’re feeling emotional.’” The idea is that, if you signal stress or anxiety in the presence of certain people, the app uses that information to “determine who should be auto-scheduled into your life and who should be removed,” ignoring the fact that there are many reasons why a person might make your heart race a bit faster.

The app’s creation was meant to be a bit of an experiment, developed by artists whose previous work probed the limits of technology use, but it was met with enthusiasm by undergraduates who tested it. One young man said he was “thrilled to have an excuse to ignore people” who stress him out. When we turn our devices into our “emotional mercenaries,” however, we fail to fill a void that persists. We remain lonely and emotionally hungry, starved for the kind of real connection with others that we are hard-wired to crave.

Safe, Timid Pleasures

An overreliance on devices fuels alarming ineptitude, as well. I was fascinated by Rosen’s section on travel, where she writes about the rise in inexperienced travelers putting themselves in dangerous situations because they possess a false sense of security, thanks to the presence of a device. This happens in both urban and remote settings. Adventurer David Roberts describes an “epidemic” of search-and-rescue operations for inexperienced backcountry campers, aka “yuppie 911s”, who can summon help with a satellite phone as soon as the going gets tough, instead of relying on their skills and wits.

Traveling with devices and relying on them for restaurant reviews and guidance and recommendations may feel convenient in some ways, but it leaves us with a homogenized experience that matches that of so many others. Our data-driven trips become conformist, not unique or unusual. We are wary of stepping off the beaten track, preferring to know that our preferences are endorsed, vicariously and virtually.

Rosen suggests that there is a timidity to posting and filtering our experiences through the same apps and platforms as everyone else, presenting our adventures as a “constant flow of curated ephemeral moments.” Doing so might be a form of retreat from a real-life experience that could feel “too intense, too real, too risky, too uncontrollable, too physical, or too nonconformist. Pleasure is delethalized so that it can be more easily digested and shared in digital form.”

Fallow Time

We eliminate boredom at our peril. Tests of children’s creativity have seen declining scores in recent years, and researchers think one reason might be that kids’ downtime is increasingly dedicated to screen-based devices, instead of being left to play, imagine, and come up with fresh ideas.

Adults are affected, too; we think of idleness as negative, when in fact boredom gives way to daydreaming, which has been linked to greater sensitivity, curiosity, and willingness to explore new ideas and feelings. Mind-wandering has numerous positive effects, including self-awareness, improvisation, memory consolidation, future planning, empathy, moral reasoning, and reflection on the meaning of events and experiences.

Civil Inattention

Rosen brings up the topic of “civil attention,” which refers to how we engage with strangers in public spaces. We have become far ruder since smartphones arrived, often ignoring cashiers, store clerks, and fellow commuters entirely, rarely making eye contact, not smiling, focusing our attention instead on the small glowing screens in our hands. Many service workers describe this as hurtful, a form of objectification where their humanity is not recognized, where they’re often just looked through or past, as if they’re not even there.

When we fail to pay attention to other humans in a common public space, we disengage from our societies more broadly—and then wonder why we feel so disconnected and out of sync and baffled by others’ political or religious viewpoints. Perhaps it would be helpful to start looking up, saying hello, engaging in small acts of attention, reclaiming the basic etiquette that once formed (and still does) the basis of civil society.

A Justified Moral Panic

Rosen’s conclusion is bold. She thinks that solutions advocating for “balanced use” of technology are insufficient, that we face a real crisis. Advice for doing a digital Sabbath or avoiding multitasking or putting phones away at the dinner table are not enough.

We need to be more like the Amish in our approach to technology, cultivating a robust skepticism about each new device and app, even if most of us will not be as strict as the Amish in rejecting them. The Amish ask the right questions before embracing something new: How will this impact our community? Is it good for families? Does it support or undermine our values?

We have an urgent responsibility to defend the sensory world and remember that there are things that cannot be made by machines—serendipity, intuition, community, spontaneity, empathy. As for those critics who accuse Rosen and her ilk of a misguided moral panic, she thinks that, when it comes to our understanding of experience, “we could use a great deal more panic.” This is a fight that matters, and we cannot shy away from it.

I felt a wave of emotion at the end, reading those words. Sometimes I feel like I water down my message to try to meet families where they’re at and accommodate people’s reluctance to get rid of digital devices, particularly in their kids’ lives, even when, deep down, I feel that same sense of moral panic that Rosen describes. It is deeply moving to know that someone else out there is more concerned about the erosion of experience than even the direct negative effects of a device and the fact that these things get in the way of living, which should terrify all of us.

“Defending reality is not a privilege,” she writes. “It’s crucial to ensuring a flourishing human future.” If you want to flourish—and if you want your children to flourish—get off the screens and come back to reality.

You Might Also Like:

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• 7 Parenting Books I’ve Enjoyed Lately

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