What exactly are we missing out on when we only experience something online rather than IRL? Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at the New Atlantis and fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the lure of the digital world, with its ease and convenience, and the physical and personal connections we leave behind when we choose a contactless experience. Her book is “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.”
What’s the future for human connectivity?
By Madelyn Walton, Think Intern
Technology has become a central force in many of our daily lives. It controls how we communicate with others, how we complete everyday tasks, and essentially how we learn basic skills.
Instead of going to the grocery store, people rely on food delivery services. When we attend concerts there are very few hands in the air, but instead thousands of phones waving in the crowd. The appreciation for moments in our daily lives has been diminished by a small device that human beings depend on.
“We’ve never been more connected technologically and we’ve never been more isolated and lonely than we are today,” says recent Think guest Christine Rosen.
Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at the New Atlantis and fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She joined host Krys Boyd to talk about the impact of the digital world and the future for human interaction. Her book is “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.”
Rosen explains that the implementation of technology has limited the need for some of our most essential skills.
“If we remove one of those skills like learning to write by hand or learning to write in cursive, we’re not just improving kids’ ability to use computers, which we all assume they’ll need to use all the time as adults; we’ve removed the skill that we don’t fully understand, but that has some connection to other things we need to do,” says Rosen.
The ability to write is an important tool for our memory and cognitive abilities, she says. Without it, we easily forget the things that matter. These losses compound until we find ourselves forgetting how to simply show up for one another.
“Our duty of care to others disappears because we’re filming it,” says Rosen. “We’re doing something but that is not the same thing as stepping in or calling for help or doing any number of other things that we used to take for granted as the appropriate response when some other human being is in peril.”
Technology has disrupted humankind, she says. In the event of an emergency, a person’s first instinct is to take out their phone and film, rather than call for help.
Additionally, these technologies have convinced us that they know us better than our own selves. Now, we avoid eye contact in the hall and call our friends when they are a room away.
“The promise of a lot of these technologies is that they will read our bodily signals and read our emotions for us and then tell us how we feel,” Rosen says. “I think we need to learn to do that work for ourselves because that’s what it means to be a fully developed human being.”
Rosen posits that we have become reliant on a form of technology and a device that is continuously evolving.
“We learned, or should have learned, a pretty tough lesson from social media, which is that if you create a device that knows how to exploit some of the strongest and most powerful human feelings and emotions and behavior, we will indulge in it,” she says.
- +
Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Remember at the start of the pandemic, the new buzzword in retail transactions was contactless. Work meetings went virtual delivery. People dropped food orders on our doorsteps and took off immediately Rather than handing our purchase directly to us and exchanging a few pleasantries. We stayed off public transit. We stopped attending community events. The thing is, while we are no longer being advised to avoid most human contact, large numbers of us actually prefer it this way. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. It is true we can now do everything from grocery shopping to modified visits to interesting places by moving our cursors on a screen rather than our bodies through physical space. It is also true that interactions with other people can be frustrating or annoying or time consuming. But while my guest is no Luddite, she does think we should all be paying attention to what we might be sacrificing as we prioritize the ease and convenience of the digital universe over the serendipity of the physical one. Christine Rosen is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at the New Atlantis and fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Her book is called “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.” Christine, welcome to Think.
Christine Rosen [00:01:23] Thanks for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:25] Of course, humans evolved for face to face interactions and they help us, You explain to form a shared reality as human beings. Why do human beings benefit from a shared reality?
Christine Rosen [00:01:38] Well, I think one of the ways we’re starting to appreciate how our face to face, in-person reality differs from the reality that we all experience online is just by comparing the experience. So when you’re online, you can connect to lots of people. We’re having this conversation thanks to this incredible tool. Many, many connections are made, but there are certain kind of connection qualitatively different from the sort of connection you make when you sit down across the table from another human being. When you’re gathered in small groups with other people and you have to confront them in your embodied form. And I say that deliberately because so much of what we do, so many of the hours of our daily lives are now spent in this disembodied reality. It’s no less real in terms of how it makes us feel, but it dampens a lot of our natural intuitions and in the natural ways that we understand each other as human beings.
Krys Boyd [00:02:31] And it’s not just a disembodied reality, right? Our technologies are often exquisitely calibrated to serve up whatever personal reality we prefer, which presumably causes us to lose perspective on what’s actually real.
Christine Rosen [00:02:46] Yes, this is one of the you know, it’s we’re recording this on an election day in the United States. And I think our politics is just one example among many of of what happens when people no longer have a sense of shared reality, when we can wall off the opinions of others with whom we disagree, when we can set ourselves apart from even our local neighborhoods and communities and the people who live and work there. There there is a sense of isolation. And I think one of the things that concerns me is that our preference for on demand products answers everything combined with our ability now using these tools to isolate ourselves from things that make us even mildly uncomfortable leads to a culture where there’s more mistrust, there’s more loneliness, there’s more anxiety. And and that’s not the world we were promised. When the Internet started to become the way we live our lives.
Krys Boyd [00:03:38] How does this relate to the difference between eye sight and vision?
Christine Rosen [00:03:43] So I think one of the things our technologists like to argue, both in their marketing and when you listen to some of the leaders of tech companies talk, they say, you know, technology is neutral. It’s just a tool. We’re just handing you something and you decide what to do with it. So you really shouldn’t blame us if people do terrible things with with this neutral tool. It is not neutral. Eyesight’s the ability you have to see. Right? So you give someone a pair of glasses as a tool, a technology that that allows your eyesight to to be a little clearer. Right? That’s a neutral tool. Like it improves your your eyesight. Vision is something else. And I would argue that our technologists want to be in the vision business. And by that I mean they want to shape our perception of reality. They don’t just want to help us see a little sharper. They want to now have tools, whether they’re embedded in sensors in our smartphones now or in the near future, placed on our bodies. If you have, you know, like a smartwatch, there are all kinds of bodily sensors that are coming down the pipeline. They want to be able in real time, moment by moment, to understand how we are feeling and thinking and experiencing the world so that they can guide our behavior with these tools. That is no longer the eyesight. That’s vision. They’re in the vision business, and I think we need to stop and consider whether every aspect of our lives, particularly our private and our emotional lives and our family lives, are an area where we want that kind of integration of of technologies, of vision for us rather than the world that we want to create privately for ourselves.
Krys Boyd [00:05:16] There are also these endless videos available now that show us other people’s reactions to pretty much anything we might encounter, whether it’s news or fashion trends or sporting events. It’s like watching other people’s experience has become the primary experience.
Christine Rosen [00:05:32] Yes, vicarious experience is now its own form of entertainment. You know, it’s not just unboxing videos. It’s watching people eat massive quantities of food or, you know, jump out of airplanes. And the thing that’s interesting about that is that the emotional experience of watching someone else do something kind of wild or risk taking or happy or fun, we do have some sense of emotional response to that. We’re seeing other human beings do things that we might not be willing to do ourselves. However, my concern is that in in filling our hours and we spend on average over seven hours a day staring at screens, it’s more if you’re younger, but if you if you’re spending that much time consuming the vicarious experience of others, number one, you’re not having experiences yourself. You’re being passive and you’re in some ways being manipulated emotionally into into thinking that you’re sharing in the human experience, that in fact you’re not. You’re simply a spectator in watching it.
Krys Boyd [00:06:32] I remember toward the end of the pandemic, this spate of articles that fretted about all of us having lost social skills during the time we were mostly locked away at home. And at the time I thought that concern was overblown. But looking around now, it does seem many people would prefer looking at their devices while, say, walking down a hallway or riding a bus. They would rather look at their phones than risk making eye contact and risk having a moment with someone else.
Christine Rosen [00:06:59] Yes, it’s interesting. I think the pandemic actually accelerated trends that were already had already formed. It sped them up and we noticed them more as we started to reemerge into some sort of public space and social life. Younger generations do not spend as much time in each other’s physical presence, looking into each other’s eyes, having conversations, knowing how to deal with strangers in public space. So I think what we’re seeing is a is an attempt to re reform public space so that
none of us actually have to experience other human beings. It’s very easy to go through your day just staring at your phone in every interstitial moment of time, whether you’re waiting for the bus, you’re on the bus, your, you know, at a stoplight in your car. You can just look at your phone. You don’t have to look around and be aware. And that lack of awareness, we know from decades of sociological research has an impact on our daily experience of each other and of our communities. So people are more impatient. They’re more insistent on having their way there, their general there’s a general sort of cultural, almost malaise about how we treat each other, and we all recognize it, but we also all participate in it every time we take ourselves out of our physical space and stare at the screen instead. So I worry particularly about younger generations who need to learn new skills. These are skills that we have to practice from a very young age. We need to teach kids, you know, you shake hands, you look someone in the eye. These seem like things that we can take for granted. I would argue we can no longer take those human skills for granted.
Krys Boyd [00:08:31] And, of course, these younger generations don’t necessarily know what they are missing because they’ve never lived in a different world.
Christine Rosen [00:08:38] Yes. And this is so I have I have two sons who are each now a freshman in college. So I like a lot of my motivation for writing this book came from watching what their world was like and the differences. I’m a Gen Xer, so sort of seeing the difference. The book title itself comes from a naturalist, Robert Michael Pyle, who had this concern about nature. He worried that younger generations who didn’t spend time outdoors, mucking around, getting muddy, dirty, seeing animals and plants and understanding the ecosystem that later on in life, if you told them a species had gone extinct, they wouldn’t care because they wouldn’t know what they’ve missed. And not reading that essay from years ago, it really struck me that the way that we’ve allowed technology to intermediate so many of our human relationships and our experiences with the world is creating that same sort of thing writ large. So we’re it’s not just about nature and not knowing what we’re missing in nature. We don’t remember what it means. We won’t remember what it means to write by hand or to know how to have a conversation with a stranger, or how to just sit and be patient when that’s required of us. So these skills, very qualitative, they’re not the kinds of things that’s easy to gather a lot of data about, but we all experience it. We know there’s been a shift. And so part of what I wanted to do is try to capture what in this particular moment where we are in that process.
Krys Boyd [00:10:00] Writing by hand might strike people as just something quaint to, you know, think about and be nostalgic for. But it turns out that if, for example, we’re taking notes, our recall is different depending on whether we are writing with a pencil or a pen on paper or taking notes with a keyboard.
Christine Rosen [00:10:18] Yes, this fascinated me. I’m left handed. And I don’t know for any of your listeners who are you know, the world is sort of against left handers. Things are more difficult if you’re left handed. And I’ve always been fascinated by handwriting and then teaching my own kids to write by hand. And I thought, you know, I assumed like lots of people do, that keyboards are great, more efficient, You could type faster. It’s it’s all a benefits, all positive. And when elementary school stopped teaching cursive writing, a lot of people shrugged and said, well, that’s fine. They need to learn these computer skills instead. But it turns out that’s not the case. Study after study has shown that learning how to write first print letters and then cursive is implicated, not just in whether or not you can write legibly as an adult, but in the way that we actually retain knowledge in our future literacy skills, including memory retention, including the ability to analyze text, the brain and the mind and the body connection are quite complicated and still quite mysterious in many ways. And neurologists who study this are finding all kinds of fascinating
connections. So if we remove one of those skills like learning to write by hand or learning to write in cursive, we’re not just improving kids ability to use computers, which we all assume they’ll need to use all the time as adults, We’ve removed the skill that we don’t fully understand, but that has some connection to. Other things we need to do.
Krys Boyd [00:11:40] So the loss of some of the simplest forms of connection, you know, eye contact on a train instead of looking down at a device. It’s probably bad for our social lives and social skills. At times, though, it has proved literally dangerous. Will you share the anecdote that you have in the book about this?
Christine Rosen [00:11:56] Yes, there are some there are several that that I came across in my research, most of which involve people behaving violently. In one case, on the on the Bart train in San Francisco where someone was waving a gun around but no one was paying attention. There have been cases where people have been shoved onto subway tracks violently. And instead of helping these people off of the tracks, everyone’s filming it. The distraction isn’t just neutral. There are many fights that break out. There are now entire channels which you can upload fighting videos of. And if you see if you’ve been in public space and seen something dramatic happen, it used to be someone would call for help, run for help or step in and help themselves. Now, most people’s reaction is to pull out their phone and video the event. And that worries me. Our duty to others, our duty of care to others disappears because, we’re filming it, so we’re doing something. But that that is not the same thing as stepping in or calling for help or doing any number of other things that we used to take for granted was the appropriate response when some other human being is in peril.
Krys Boyd [00:13:03] It is really scary because I think typically most of us feel pretty safe in a crowd, like no one’s going to try anything terrible if there are tons of other people around.
Christine Rosen [00:13:12] Yes. That’s no longer an assumption people should have, I’m afraid. I mean, there have been many cases where you see, you know, fights break out or riots start and and everyone steps back and pulls out a phone. And this is I was explaining this to a younger colleague of mine who said, well, of course you want to document what happens. And I said, okay, but what’s happening is dangerous or what’s happening is is possibly going to injure someone. Don’t you have a responsibility to do something about that? And his feeling really was, no, I don’t understand. He didn’t understand the question, which concerned me because I feel like our sense of obligation to others is something that we’ve now outsourced to technology in the form of, well, if I pull up my phone and take a video of it, I’m sure that’s helpful rather than if I step in and try to de-escalate this dangerous situation, I might actually prevent violence.
Krys Boyd [00:14:02] Christine, look, lots of people have pushed back on criticism of our text of our tech dominated world, reminding us that there was a time when people were sure that the introduction of the novel or radio or television, which now seemed pretty benign, would, you know, bring on the decline of civilization. But you actually think we need more of a moral panic around the encroachment of 21st century technology?
Christine Rosen [00:14:30] Yes, It’s funny. Everybody who criticizes technology is called a Luddite or is called is accused of inciting a moral panic. And when I say I think we need more of a moral panic, what I mean is I think we need to pause and consider our moral duty to others. And what I what I’ve noticed with some of the embrace of our new technologies is, first of all, things like radio, telephone, television and even the early desktop, computer based Internet access, all of those things had a period of time of integration into people’s private lives in particular, right? If we brought these things into our
home, there were years, sometimes decades until most people were using these tools. So we had an adjustment period. Human beings are very adaptable. It’s one of our great skills, but that takes time. The difference with a lot of these technologies now is that that period of time has shrunk dramatically and the power of our tools has expanded dramatically at the same time. So we’re way behind our sort of evolutionarily developed brains are decades behind in adapting to some of the things that these technologies offer us. At the same time that the people designing these tools in these platforms know very well how to push every single button that will help us respond with anger, fear, anxiety, these very powerful emotions, because for them, that’s fine as long as they have our attention. But for us as people, we’re experiencing a very different climate, both in our in our public lives and most importantly, in our private lives, where some of these tools have really undermined the foundations of family and community and our interpersonal relationships.
Krys Boyd [00:16:07] Usually day to day interactions, you know, making eye contact, nodding to somebody, passing by, whatever are neutral or even pleasant. But occasionally they are awkward. And we walk away thinking, Well, I wish I had avoided that. Why, though, do we find it so much easier to just avoid all these interactions to stave off the small minority of the ones that feel weird to us?
Christine Rosen [00:16:31] Well, this is one of those things where I think our tech, the combination of our technology and what it delivers to us as the technologists like to say seamlessly, you know, with no friction, frictionless, seamless. These are the terms often used in positive ways to describe what these tools can do for us. The problem with being a decent human being is that we learn by having some friction, by having to stop and wait, by having to learn skills like patience and thoughtfulness and awareness. So I look, I take mass transit a lot. I understand that sometimes there’s going to be a very annoying person on the bus next to me. And it would it’s nice to just bury my nose in my phone. I understand that impulse. The problem now is that we have to actively choose not to bury our nose and our phones all the time because that’s what most people do. And that is a real switch from even five, ten, 20 years ago. So that changes public space and it does allow, I think, for less of a sense of connection and community. And we’re all in this together. And so that’s why we do see heightened rates of things like road rage and now we have air rage and they’re all everyone’s very full of rage when they’re made to wait or when things don’t go their way. We need to learn those skills. There are times in life where we cannot control every situation, where we cannot just tune everybody out. And those are things that we need to start developing from a young age so that when we’re in those situations, we know how to behave because we can’t always escape into our phones.
Krys Boyd [00:17:59] I have to say, I loved your chapter about waiting when you say it isn’t what it used to be. What do you mean by that?
Christine Rosen [00:18:07] So I grew up in Florida and I would go to Disney World with my family. When I was a kid. They’d have these Disney days for Florida residents. And I just remember endless lines. The lines. It’s so hot. You’re waiting. It was boring. There was nothing to do. It was terrible, but all worth it because you got on the right at the end. Now, if you go to Disney, which I did with my kids when they were younger, waiting has been turned into its own form of entertainment. And when I started researching why Disney made these changes to its its queue queuing and all the things that their science of guestology and I found out that they said the number one complaint is that people no longer like to wait. We cannot wait for a split second for a page to load or for, you know, if you look at online shopping will abandon our shopping cart. If we have to wait more than a split second. We have grown accustomed and habituated to tools that that teach us. We should never have to wait for anything and an on demand. Society lacks patience for lots
of things, not just for your DoorDash order. It lacks patience for complicated long term solutions to political problems. It lacks patience for other people on the road who are just as stressed out and trying to get to work like you are. And I think that what that means is that we have these habits of mind have formed over over a generation, and we need to start thinking about whether we need to undo some of those habits, those habits which our tools give us have not made us a healthy. You’re happier, more smoothly functioning society. They promised us that. But it’s not what we’ve what we found to be the case.
Krys Boyd [00:19:36] There’s also this question of who is made to wait. These days we can buy our way out of waiting in certain lines, such as with the Disney fast pass. So this once like Democratic condition in which everybody who was there at Disneyland waited for their turn. It’s like one more way. We now privilege people who have the money to pay more.
Christine Rosen [00:19:56] Yes, this is a fact. There’s fascinating behavioral science research about lines and waiting and how people feel about waiting. And the number one thing that bothers people is when they don’t mind waiting as long as everybody is subjected to the same rules. Once you start allowing for a class of people to buy their way out of waiting or to skip the line in any way, that seems unfair, people become furious because there’s a sense of injustice in that. And I would extrapolate from that to say that we are moving, unfortunately, into a world where it’s actually going to be human contact and human interaction that becomes a luxury good for lots of people. So if you’re if you’re can’t afford really good health insurance that provides, say, mental health care and a human therapist, you’re going to be given a chat bot, an air field chat bot that a therapy bot like there’s one called woe, bot or whatnot, and everyone will say, that’s great, that’s better than nothing. In my opinion, that is not better than nothing because human beings owe each other human interaction, particularly in our most vulnerable moments of life. So just waiting in line. Yes, people buy their way out of that. But I think you can extrapolate from that and see down the line into a world where some people will be treated with thoughtfulness, empathy and human care because they can afford it and others will be given these technological substitutes that are qualitatively less useful and helpful. And we’ll tell ourselves that that’s an improvement, that that’s progress. I don’t think that’s progress at all.
Krys Boyd [00:21:24] You referred to that Disney study that found people no longer liked to wait. I mean, I would argue we’ve never liked it. We hate the idea of wasted time, which is understandable. But it is strange, Christine, how much time we can waste on our devices without worrying about it at all. So maybe we’re not bored if we’re playing some game on our phones as we wait to be called at the doctor’s office. But it’s not like we did something productive with that time.
Christine Rosen [00:21:48] That’s right. And well, it’s interesting to me because I think the opportunity cost question is one that’s long fascinated me when it comes to technology. We all use these things sometimes just to, like you said, to deal with tedium, to deal with boredom. When we don’t have those things, though, there’s something that happens that’s kind of unusual, which is that our brains are allowed some fallow time. They can do things like wander, our minds can wander. And what happens when your mind wanders? Well, lots of interesting things. You can experience boredom. You can. You can be anxious and impatient. You can also daydream a bit. You can have creative insight. You can think. You can suddenly kind of recall something that you’d been trying to find in the reaches of your brain before. If you’re my age and it suddenly appears to you, that’s why. So this idea that that interstitial moments of time should be filled with constant entertainment and, you know, looking at our phones, scrolling through Instagram, whatever it is, that means that you’re not getting your brain break. And we do need those breaks were designed to
daydream were designed to have some moments where we’re not constantly stimulated. I do think we live in a world now where our expectation is to be constantly stimulated, constantly entertained. And that’s not good for us as individuals. But again, it takes us out of the world that we’re actually sitting in. I you know, I’ve spent I was in a doctor’s office recently. Everyone was on their phone and someone stumbled and nobody looked up. And this person might have fallen and needed help. And there are just these moments of awareness that I think have disappeared from public space in a way that really does concern me.
Krys Boyd [00:23:24] Why is physical proximity more conducive to collective work and creativity than even the best digital communications platforms can offer?
Christine Rosen [00:23:34] Well, this is this is really fascinating when people bump into each other serendipitously in an office, for example, or are all forced to sit around a table and hash something out. We have so many unspoken bodily signals we give off that we pick up on from each other that help us communicate that when you take those away, when you put everybody on a screen, even where you can see each other’s faces, like on a Zoom meeting or whatnot, it’s not the same thing. There’s something about people being in each other’s physical presence that allows for smoother communication, less falsehood. There are fascinating studies about how likely people are to lie when they’re face to face versus, you know, on a screen hugging each other on the telephone. We are hard wired to read those signals. So when I look at someone in my office who’s got their arms folded and is kind of, you know, scowling, I can instantly tell if they’re angry or they’re concentrating on something or or perplexed about something. It’s harder to do that when I’m looking at them on a screen. So I think a lot of the ways in which our tools promise greater efficiency and creativity. I think of email here where email was supposed to make everyone’s life more efficient. But as we all now know, you know, email is the deluge. It just never stops coming. And I think the unintended consequences of some of these technologies are, again, to take us away, take away some of those qualitative experiences that help us get things done better, help us get things done in a more human way. That that that is really how we can solve, particularly solve problems and come up with creative ideas.
Krys Boyd [00:25:07] And those unspoken signals are important. If we’re giving them off and nobody is paying attention, we feel unseen.
Christine Rosen [00:25:16] Exactly. And this is where studies in public space about how people treat each other are really interesting. There’s there’s this phrase you look someone is look through someone as if they’re not there. And they’ve done these studies in like public squares and on college campuses and whatnot, where people walk by and and stare through someone like they’re not even there. And then they’re asked the person who was stared at in that way is asked later on how they how they felt. And it changes people’s moods. Again, it might register at a very low level and for some people it might not register at all. But if you go through life day in, day out, feeling like everyone around you is completely unaware of your presence and buried in their phones, that’s not a good feeling. And I think if we look at rates of loneliness and isolation in this country right now, we can see the effects of some of this. We’ve never been more connected technologically and we’ve never been more isolated and lonely than we have than we are today.
Krys Boyd [00:26:13] You quote Simone Weil in the book, who said that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. We are not just feeling unseen ourselves. We’re missing out on opportunities to be there for people we care about.
Christine Rosen [00:26:26] Exactly. And again, I I’m often I often argue with my friends who do work with data. That’s why I constantly saying qualitative versus quantitative. But when it comes to attention, we live in a world where our attention is spliced, diced, auctioned in real time every time we go online. And it’s a commodity now, but true attention in the way that while and others have written about it is an act of generosity. We choose. It’s in our power to choose to give it to the people and the ideas and the things we find valuable. So if we’re allowing others to treat it as a commodity, I think we devalue it in ourselves too. And so it starts to become we start to see other people in this very instrumental way. We start to become more machine like in the way we interact with each other. And that’s that’s not a good thing.
Krys Boyd [00:27:15] I am also Gen-X. Christine I’ve reached the age where a fair number of my contemporaries have lost a parent. I have no doubt that people’s condolences like on Facebook are genuine. I’ve sent them myself. But I also think about how touched I was when some of my friends and colleagues attended my father’s funeral. I hadn’t expected this, but like seeing those spaces in the church, getting those brief, brief hugs after the service, it’s something I won’t forget.
Christine Rosen [00:27:41] Showing up for each other matters. It just does. And I think this is one of my thoughts. One of the things I worry about the most when people say, well, maybe we’ll figure this out. Well, we’ll strike some balance. It’s so much easier to avoid that tough work of leaving your house and showing up for other people, whether that’s showing up at work. And if you talk to younger employees, they don’t like coming into the office. They would like to work from home a lot more. It’s about friendships where, we’ll just have a text chain and we’ll we’ll all keep in touch via text, but maybe only get together once a month when we used to get together every week. These little shifts in how we behave and how we attend to each other. They matter and they matter. Because again, it it it is the difficulty of leaving your house and showing up for other people. It is the difficulty of leaving your house and going to an art museum and looking at a. Piece of art and the humility that requires to submit to to someone else’s time and vision. We’re losing that, and we’re choosing this other way of doing things, thinking it’s an improvement. And I don’t think in every case it always is.
Krys Boyd [00:28:48] What do we know in hindsight about why Zoom school was largely a failure, despite many parents and educators and students trying hard to make it work in kind of extraordinary circumstances.
Christine Rosen [00:28:59] Yes, I had two kids who spent a year doing Zoom school during during the pandemic lockdowns, and it was very interesting to talk to them at the end of a school day where they’ve been staring at the screen and where, again, a lot of their social lives had to happen on screen, too, because people weren’t allowed to meet up and all their activities were changed for adults. Same thing I went to. I went to cocktail hours, I went to bar and bat mitzvahs all on Zoom. And I also did my job every day on Zoom, as many, many of us were fortunate, I should say, to do, because lots of people weren’t allowed that that privilege of being able to isolate themselves. I what’s interesting is that we had no clear delineation of time, time, events, time horizons and space. Everything happened on the same platform. Everything happened in this mediated context. And what that does and there are interesting studies of this, it affects your ability to retain memories. So if I go to a Zoom wedding at 2:00 and then at five, I have a Zoom conference call at work, my brain is not going to register that in the same way it would if I attended that wedding in person and then went across town into the office and sat down and had the meeting. There’s something, again about the mind body connection when it comes to memory formation and recall that we know to be the case. So I think especially for kids who couldn’t see each other in the same context and and couldn’t really interact in
physical space, Zoom School just became one blur. And for some kids that was a whole year. And so it’s no surprise that on the other end of that we all tried to do the best we could. But on the other end of that, they didn’t retain a lot of what they learned in Zoom school. And they had a they had a lot of social deficits that they that they many of them are still trying to make up.
Krys Boyd [00:30:43] Christine, Humans, of course, have always looked to one another for examples of how to behave, how to look, even how to feel. How has that tendency been remade by the availability of things like memes to communicate thoughts and emotions?
Christine Rosen [00:30:59] It’s it’s a great question. And I think one of the one of the most interesting things about modern life today is that nobody wants to say, I just trusted my gut, All right? Trusted my instincts. We’re all supposed to trust data. We’re all supposed to trust information about experience. Information about ourselves is supposed to be a more neutral arbiter of our own experience. And I would like to push back against that a little bit, in part because I think we what we know from meme culture, for example, which is fascinating, is that you can have very powerful messages and emotional experiences conveyed in a short image, a brief word, a tiny snippet of video. It’s not as if these things aren’t powerful. The difference, though, is how do we also understand our own emotions and read the emotions of others? Well, we do that by being around each other, not just sharing memes, not just not just, you know, endless scrolls of TikTok videos where everyone’s doing the same challenge. We need to actually understand each other in many contexts, and I think we’re losing some of the places where we used to do that. The third places of life that aren’t home, that aren’t work, that aren’t the screen that used to be pubs or cafes or places or coffee shops. And those are all now colonized by technology in significant ways. So we do need to have a kind of open space where humans can be humans and where we can learn about our own emotional responses. The promise of a lot of these new technologies is that they will read our bodily signals and read our emotions for us and then tell us how we feel. I think we need to learn to do that work for ourselves because that’s what it means to be a fully developed human being.
Krys Boyd [00:32:36] Yeah, I got it when I updated my watch, it offered to, you know, remind me however many times a day to stop and think about my feelings. And I thought, that is the last thing that I need to dwell on, whether I’m upset or happy or whatever, rather than just sort of experiencing things and getting through it. But maybe that is a uniquely Gen-X perspective on this sort of thing.
Christine Rosen [00:32:56] Well, the concern isn’t that, well, we are we are the best generation. Everybody underestimates us, it’s true. But I would say that the future isn’t just checking in. Having your watch remind you to check in the future are what’s already here. Air fueled sort of technologies like the friend. Have you seen this friend? You wear it like a necklace and it monitors everything you’re doing and it sends you text messages throughout the day. And it’s a it’s an AI friend and it says you’re doing great or get back to work. And those become, I think, or are at risk of becoming substitutes for human relationships and people will embrace that substitute. Because it’s easier, it’s thoroughly personalized, and it requires no effort on their part.
Krys Boyd [00:33:38] Well, that quantification is interesting, too, because, for example, devices that offer to measure your sleep. I’ve had a poor what felt like a poor night’s sleep before, but my watch told me I slept seven hours or whatever, and I thought, well, I guess I’m wrong. Like, are we are we starting to to question our own experience of things in service to trusting these quantifying data devices?
Christine Rosen [00:34:01] Yes, a bit. And I think, look, humans are masters at self-delusion. We do it all the time. But there is a there’s a usefulness to it in terms of character formation and virtue formation. And when we turn and outsource some of these challenging efforts to technology, we get things like the persuasive technology field that says, you know what, you think you like this other person, but if we monitor your heart rate and your blood pressure and the tone of your voice, when you go on that first date, our sensor and our software will will decide for you whether they’re really a good match. And you don’t have to waste your time with that other person. And these these are already tools that we have at our disposal. My concern in that is that that there’s no there’s no device, there’s no technology that can truly capture all the weird stuff that makes us wonderfully human. And we are starting to believe that it can. And not only that it can, but in very crucial, life altering situations like in criminal justice and sentencing and parole decisions, that it’s actually better than human judgment because it’s objective or neutral or data driven. And these are very risky bets we’re making on technology that has no it only has a formula for what makes us human. We have an understanding of it or should. So we need to cultivate that, not to eliminate the technology. It is still a useful tool in many situations, but to understand where its appropriate uses are and where we should resist it.
Krys Boyd [00:35:31] Why is it so much easier for many of us to be cutting and cruel when we’re expressing emotions or reactions or opinions in the digital space than we would in face to face interactions?
Christine Rosen [00:35:43] The notorious online disinhibition effect. When you don’t have to look someone in the eye, you’re much more likely to be vicious about what your opinion is of them to be cutting and cruel. This is this is social media, which we were promised was going to be this thing that brought the entire world together. We’d finally have access to what other people felt and thought. And we all know how that went. And I do sort of see in all the debates right now around artificial intelligence and artificial generative intelligence, all these same sort of concern. And in this case, I think it’s valid. We learned or should have learned a pretty tough lesson from social media, which is that if you create a device that knows how to exploit some of the strongest and most powerful human feelings and emotions and behavior, we will indulge in it. We will turn a platform that started out with unicorns, rainbows, puppies and kittens into a cesspool of of anger and toxicity. So we know this about ourselves. Now. What lessons will we draw from that when we start thinking about, for example, where is the healthy place to have a political debate? Where is a healthy place to to look for a life partner or romantic possibility? Maybe that’s not always online.
Krys Boyd [00:37:00] Well, I think what makes this particularly challenging, Christine, is that it can be both, right? I mean, the cesspool thing, I agree with you 100%, but I mean, the friends that I have and stay in contact with online are pretty nice people and pretty universally can be counted on to say supportive things. I mean, maybe we’re reluctant to get rid of this or use it less because there are some really nice interactions.
Christine Rosen [00:37:26] Absolutely. And I think as a as a tool for connection, when it is a supplement to in-person interaction or when in many cases it’s a it’s a tool to encourage gathering in person. That’s what I think it’s best at doing. And it’s and when I think about I have I have friends who live in very remote parts of the world, it allows them a constant stream of interaction that they would never have had without the Internet. They never they would have been far more isolated. People with physical disabilities who actually can’t with or with great challenge leave their homes. It gives them an entire access to community and connection. So those are all for the good. The concern I have is that we are starting to prefer the replacement of these of these ways of interacting because it’s seamless, efficient, easy, free. And this is where I think t
canary in the coal mine because they are choosing more and more and more often to mediate all of their relationships. They don’t get together with their friends at the same for the same amount of time that previous generations did. They they just simply aren’t. They prefer to have the mediated form of communication, which means when they become adults and enter the workplace as as I’ve seen firsthand, they struggle with human interactions because having practiced.
Krys Boyd [00:38:47] And this can even be a problem when we use our devices to do something good. How is using a digital platform to say, gift a new pair of socks to an unhoused person? A radically different act from spending time working with a nonprofit that serves these folks directly?
Christine Rosen [00:39:05] So in one case, you get one click empathy, right? And I’m not against people giving giving online to charity. I do it myself. It’s a good support. The charities that you think are doing good work with your dollars. But to give your time and to go through the difficult and inconvenient process of finding that time, scheduling and leaving your house, getting to that place, and then seeing the people you’re helping, talking to them, interacting with them, that is a qualitatively different experience and it’s also a greater gift, the gift of your time, the gift of your effort, the gift of your humanity is quite different than one click. Here’s my 50 bucks and I’ll call myself charitable. Both are important and necessary because for some people it’s not possible to give their time at the same levels as others. But I what worries me is that we confuse the two. These are two different qualitative experiences. Both can have their value, but we shouldn’t mistake one for the other.
Krys Boyd [00:40:03] Technology can encourage us to practice good habits, you know, reminders to stand up an exercise or take a pill at a certain time or whatever the case may be. But you note that the same technology works maybe even better to persuade us to do what is not so good for us.
Christine Rosen [00:40:18] Yes, these are really devilishly efficient tools. And if you look at the people who staff technology companies, many of them come out of behavioral psychology. And these are people who study how the human mind works and how human behavior works. And then they create tools that will make us the most efficient at doing whatever the company they’re working for wants us to do. So think of gambling gear. You’re someone who likes to gamble. Machine gambling technology now is so hyper efficient and good at keeping you sitting there playing whatever machine you’re playing, that it might make you a much more dangerous gambling addict than maybe the old time slot machines did it. It is just very these tools are very, very good at knowing what triggers us. And we, with our flawed human nature, are perhaps not as disciplined as we need to be sometimes with these tools. They are very difficult to resist. It’s why anyone who picks up their phone and starts scrolling Instagram reels will tell you where did that 30 minutes go? This is this is a common experience for a reason. It’s designed that way. The other thing I would add is that, you know, people used to fret about women reading novels and kids reading comic books, all these moral panics, But those tools didn’t read you while you were reading them. And all of our tools today read us back. Your smart TV is gathering data all the time. Your your Xbox is gathering actual haptics about your heart rate and other things. Now, these tools are extremely sophisticated and gather massive amounts of personal data, much of which I think people aren’t even aware they’re giving off when they use them.
Krys Boyd [00:41:56] How is digital guidance changing the way we travel down to how we choose and navigate destinations?
Christine Rosen [00:42:03] Well, this this one fascinated me personally because I do not have a great sense of direction and I am very reliant on my GPS. And I have been in situations that I describe. One of them in the book where I was my children were quite young and we got lost in Northern California without GPS. We were in an area that had no GPS coverage, was in a rental car, didn’t have a map. And I was worried that I would not find my way back. And I did. We did. After many hours of a detour and driving around aimlessly. But what that experience reminded me of is, is the need to have some analog tools and skills at my disposal. So I made my kids learn how to read a map. I always have a map in my car. These might seem like silly little, you know, indulgences, but there’s something there that I think we can broaden when we start thinking about our discussion of how we live today. And that’s that we outsource a lot of the skills that we still need as human beings to technology. And when the technology fails, where does that leave us? So if you’re just going to a new place, how often are you checking your phone using Google Maps? Basically having what I would call look down experiences rather than look up experiences getting lost, getting, you know, wandering when you’re a traveler is one of the great adventures of travel. It’s one of the greatest pleasures of it, actually. But I think we’ve all kind of become digitally enabled tourists nowadays because it’s easier and it’s less risky. And and there are, you know, many benefits to it. But I think we’re losing some of the the deeper pleasures of not knowing where we end up, you know, taking a side street, wandering around or, for example, going into a used bookshop or a library and just browsing. Browsing is this is something that people associate with doing online.
Krys Boyd [00:43:45] You live in the real world. You have two kids who presumably like to have you available when they need you. How do you make space in your life for genuine, unmediated experience?
Christine Rosen [00:43:57] So I am not on any social media. That was a decision I made very early on. I started studying social media platforms when they first emerged, and I very quickly said, this is bad news. And just for me personally, I’m not going to do that. I limited my kids screen time quite a bit when they were young. But as we’ve all gotten older, I think we have to actively have rules and there are going to be different rules for different people. Everybody’s different. In my household, we sit down around the table for a meal. Nobody’s allowed a phone at the table. I do try. I, I have a side hobby of I train and teach in martial arts. And when you walk into the dojo, there are no phones. Everybody puts everything aside and it’s you’re just interacting with each other on the mats. And for that hour or two, there is no Internet. There is just the experience you’re having. And I think I have a lot of friends who have been trying to find those sorts of hands on activities in the natural world. The friend who started climbing recently loves that. Whatever it is, I think it’s now incumbent on each of us to actively seek out those, for lack of a better term, old school analog experiences because they are disappearing and we have to reclaim them. We cannot take them for granted. So it’s going to look different for each person, for each family, for each community. But it is the attention to the fact that we need to reclaim some of that experience that I that I hope people will take away from the book.
Krys Boyd [00:45:21] Christine Rosen is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her book is called “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.” Christine, thank you for the conversation.
Christine Rosen [00:45:32] Thanks so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:45:33] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast for free. Wherever you get podcasts, just search for KERA Think or listen at our website think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
