Review by Jacob Pleasants

What do we give up for the benefits of technology?

“This is a book about the disappearance of experience.”

So begins Christine Rosen’s examination of how technologies have transformed and even erased many (if not most) of our most fundamental human experiences. Face-to-face interactions with other humans, traveling to new places, daydreaming, waiting in line, the pleasure and stresses of romance - these are the kinds of human experiences that Rosen examines in her book, all of which have become deeply mediated by modern (digital) technologies. And while those technologies certainly enable us to do some powerful and useful things, we also inevitably give something up for those benefits. Too often, Rosen argues, what we are giving up are essential parts of human life. We need to pay more attention to those losses and seriously rethink the technological bargains we are striking.

Rosen invites us to ask what happens when we decide to replace the “human condition” with the “user experience.” In embarking on this inquiry, Rosen naturally assumes that there is something inherently valuable in the “real world” as opposed to the virtual. Virtual (and mediated) experiences have their place, but they can never substitute for reality. She thus explicitly rejects the view of Marc Andreessen and other Silicon Valley tech-optimists that our technologies will enable us to create a virtual reality that is preferable to what actually exists. The real world is the basis for our shared experiences as humans. There is no replacement.

It is worth taking a moment to place The Extinction of Experience within the longer line of technology criticism that asks us to look more closely at the transformations that technology brings to societies and human life. For her part, Rosen recognizes that the kinds of anxieties she discusses are not new and cites many previous writers who advanced similar concerns (Theodor Adorno’s worries about television in the 1950s, for instance, and Wiezenbaum’s (1976) critiques of computing). Although she doesn’t draw from Postman, I am reminded of the opening section of Technopoly (1992) that relates “The Judgment of Thamus,” a Socratic story that appears in Plato’s Phaedrus. In this story, Socrates makes a case against the technology of writing because, for all its benefits, he argues that it would undermine the knowledge and skills central to an oral culture. It is an intriguing story because, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to dismiss Socrates’s views as naively conservative or backward. The irony, of course, is that the story was recorded by Plato who, in contrast to Socrates, was very much in favor of writing. And yet, even as we smugly point out how writing did not cause the collapse of society, we would do well to recognize that Socrates was not exactly wrong. We have given up something by abandoning an oral culture for a written culture.  Most of us have never spent any amount of time in an oral culture, so it is hard to imagine what we are missing. But it’s not nothing. The point isn’t that we should give up writing, but that we should acknowledge what we lost.

Given Rosen’s interest in the technological mediation of human experience, and the associated loss of contact with the real world, a closer conceptual touchstone might be Sherry Turkle’s work, especially Alone Together (2012) and Reclaiming Conversation (2016). Turkle was also deeply concerned with how communication technologies that have very real and legitimate practical uses can come to replace real-world interactions. The ease and convenience of the text message doesn’t just enable new avenues of communication, but also replaces other forms of communication. The technology isn’t just additive (allowing us to do new things) but transformative (changing or even replacing existing things). For further conceptual connections, we could also consider the works of philosophers such as Borgmann (1984) and Ihde (1990), who were deeply interested in how technology mediates our experiences of the world.

I bring up these connections to illustrate that Rosen’s basic thesis has good company, but also to raise the question: What does The Extinction of Experience add to these existing lines of technology criticism?

One chapter that I think best illustrates Rosen’s approach and contributions comes from the middle of the book and is titled, “How We Wait.” The experience of waiting is ubiquitous and commonplace. We wait at stop lights and checkout lines; we wait for appointments and to enter restaurants; we wait for all manner of scheduled endings and beginnings. Waiting, it should be said, is rarely regarded as a particularly desirable experience and Rosen points out ways throughout history that humans have found to cope with it. We fidget with objects, we smoke cigarettes, and we now poke at our devices. To point out that people these days seem to reach for their phones as soon as a wait begins is hardly a revelation. But Rosen goes beyond that quotidian observation and offers a deep and wide-ranging investigation of waiting as an experience as well as our ongoing attempts to rid ourselves of it. Drawing upon empirical studies and a variety of examples (from airport lines to traffic queues), her rich investigations of the transformations of this human experience are engaging and informative.

Rosen, for instance, discusses how waiting is and always has been an unequal and inequitable experience (the wealthy have always been able to circumvent all manner of waits and lines, for a price). The way we feel about having to wait is also deeply contextual and subjective. A five minute wait in one context might be of little consequence, whereas waiting even a fraction of a second in another can be absolutely rage-inducing. Among those varying experiences is the particularly dreaded one of boredom. Unsurprisingly, many of our technologies are overtly oriented toward eliminating the experience of waiting as much as possible. And, if waiting cannot be avoided, our technologies offer up an endless stream of diversions so that we can successfully vanquish the impending boredom.

Our ongoing campaign to minimize waiting and stave off boredom has yielded paradoxical results. When wait times become shorter, expectations change, and our experiences adjust with them. Rosen points to research on how tolerable we find loading times for internet applications. The short version: once you become accustomed to shorter waits, you become incredibly impatient. And across a range of situations, it does very much seem as if we are becoming increasingly impatient. Rather than cultivate a practice of patience, we have opted instead for technological “solutions.” Yet beyond even this erosion of patience, Rosen asks whether the experience of “idleness” might actually be desirable - or at least not wholly undesirable. Idleness can stimulate creativity and serendipity. Our quest to eliminate our idleness might not only be futile, but ill-advised on principle.

Rosen’s examination of waiting - as well as other aspects of the human experience - can be meandering at times. I actually found it rather challenging to write the preceding paragraphs because there are simply so many threads in the chapter on waiting that are not necessarily brought together in a neat and tidy way. The central thread of the book is always present, but some assembly is required on the part of the reader to bring together the various examples, digressions, and concepts. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, even though the overarching thesis of the book was very familiar, the close (and yes, at times, wandering) examinations of different aspects of the human experience were what made this book worthwhile.

Whenever we ask what we give up for the benefits of technology, there is always a danger of slipping into a wistful nostalgia, a risk that Rosen recognizes in various places in the book. Nevertheless, there were a few places where I found that her arguments veered in that direction. There isn’t nearly as much moral panic as you might see in say, Jonathan Haidt’s (2024) The Anxious Generation (though she does cite Haidt’s work), but there were points where I wanted to see more skepticism of the critique of technology. Nevertheless, those points of overreach were relatively rare. Broadly, I found her critiques to be well crafted and supported.

So, if we buy the argument that our human experiences are being eroded and diminished, what ought we do? The answer is not wholesale rejection but more cautious adoption. Rosen suggests that we could take some valuable cues from the Amish. We may not agree with all their decisions, but they ask the right questions when adopting new technologies. As for the technologies that we have already uncritically embraced, turning away from them might actually be the right choice. We have the power to opt for less mediated experiences, even if (maybe even especially if) those experiences are a little more difficult, unpleasant, and inefficient.

References

Borgmann, A. (1984). Technology and the character of contemporary life: A philosophical inquiry. University of Chicago Press.

Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin.

Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld: From garden to Earth. Indiana University Press.

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage Books.

Turkle, S. (2012). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.

Turkle, S. (2016). Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age. Penguin.

Wiezenbaum, J. (1976). Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation. W. H. Freeman & Company.