Are Humans Abandoning the Physical World in Favor of Smartphones?

The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen, W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99

Human beings are not brains in vats. We are not computer code. We are sensory, social creatures whose minds are inextricable from our bodies. Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World proceeds from this truth to a sweeping condemnation of digital technologies.

We have sacrificed essential human qualities, Rosen believes, for the seductive convenience of clicks, swipes, and ever-present smartphones. As a result, she argues, “Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus.”

Her book aims to shake readers into recognizing the technological danger to our humanity. “Social critics of technology are often accused of inciting a misguided moral panic,” she writes. “When it comes to our understanding of experience, however, we could use a great deal more moral panic—if moral is understood as reminding us of our obligations to one another.”

Unfortunately, the book fails to meet an author’s obligations to the audience. It is riddled with contradictions, cherry-picked examples, and question begging. It is bereft of historical context. And contrary to the promise of the subtitle, it never reveals how Rosen imagines “being human.” That ideal seems to involve writing handwritten letters to distant loved ones—but not texts! never texts!—and embracing the boredom of long lines at Disney World.

Rosen gives some of her most promising evidence short shrift. She accords pandemic Zoom classes about a page. She doesn’t explore why online schooling is ineffective, nor does she consider when instructional videos—such as the how-to’s found on YouTube—do work. Letting the abysmal effects of Zoom schooling stand in for all online instruction, she simply ignores the value of digital convenience for teaching such real-world skills as making a sewing pattern, fixing a garbage disposal, improving your passing game, or tying a tie. Perhaps she simply doesn’t know that how-to videos are common on YouTube. (Khan Academy also gets no mention either.) From Rosen’s viewpoint, if something is online it has nothing to do with the real world except to undermine it.

In keeping with her lack of nuanced curiosity, her defense of boredom conflates it with idleness. She doesn’t explore why—as she acknowledges, citing worry beads and smoking—we are less bored when our bodies are engaged in some activity, whether her example of walking between terminals or my hobby of catching monsters in Pokémon Go. True boredom is not idleness. It is not the “interstitial time” that fosters creative daydreaming.

Boredom occurs when you have nothing to do but sit or stand, often while trying to pay attention to something that doesn’t engage your mind. That’s why so many kids find school boring, all the more so if they’re staring at a screen without the stimulation of looking around the class. Satisfied with blaming technological distraction for eroding empathy, Rosen misses the opportunity to delve into the relation between boredom and the body.

Nor does she consider some of the real-world activities that bored people, especially young men, have historically gotten up to. Better to stay home playing video games, whatever their limitations, than to go looking for gays to beat up, women to assault, or terrorist cells to join.

Rosen’s strongest chapter is on the importance of face-to-face interaction. “I am a partisan for the face-to-face,” she writes, effectively deploying scholarship on the human knack for reading faces and body language. “We are meant to look at one another, and doing so triggers a host of physiological responses,” she writes, citing a scientist’s conviction that the way human brains developed “must have been designed primarily for face-to-face communication.” She declares, “Facial expression is our primal language.” To understand ourselves in the world, we need to meet other people in person.

But the very strength of that chapter reveals contradictions elsewhere. Why in the next chapter does she complain that “instead of begging a celebrity for an autograph, we request a selfie”? A visual record of a face-to-face encounter is surely closer to that embodied experience than a scrawled bit of code that could have been done at a distance (or even, as she notes in the same chapter, by autopen).

Or consider the book’s most telling double standard: its nonchalance about traditional phone calls. Rosen cites with concern a writer’s “gradual estrangement from talking to people on the phone” in favor of texts and emails. But communicating by disembodied voice is extremely weird. It takes practice to get used to. The ringing phone demands immediate attention, privileging the absent caller over present company. John Perry Barlow defined cyberspace—a word Rosen employs without acknowledging its slightly archaic, turn-of-the-century resonance—as “where you are when you’re on the telephone.” By Rosen’s standards, voice calls disordered our everyday experience. Yet she treats them as the humane norm.

A video call, by contrast, restores face-to-face communication, even if it’s not as good as being together in person. It allows us to read expressions and body language and to see the cues that inform the give and take of conversation. And unlike the traditional ringing phone, it is likely scheduled in advance rather than rudely interrupting the recipient.

As her criticism of texting suggests, many of the faults Rosen finds in digital interactions are actually products of a much older technology, the one she herself is employing: literacy. Literacy allows us to communicate without meeting in person. It permits escape from one’s immediate surroundings, potentially into a vastly different environment. It offers an alternative to enduring empty time. As evidenced by the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, widespread literacy also undermines consensus reality. As Madame Bovary warns, it presents dangers to the weak mind.

The Extinction of Experience contains truths, of course. Virtual communication is not as valuable as meeting in person. (Trade shows and conferences continue for a reason.) Students who take notes by hand do tend to learn more than those who type. Physical play is essential to human development and flourishing, especially for children. So is letting your mind wander.

But nearly every page screams for serious critique. “Isn’t something wrong when 53 percent of sixteen- to twenty-two-year-olds around the world say they would rather lose their sense of smell than their favorite personal technology?” This rhetorical question exemplifies the book’s problems. The statistic comes from a 2011 Time report based on a press release from the branding agency McCann Worldgroup. It is 13 years old, it is ahistorical, and it substitutes attitude for analysis. Forced to choose between your sense of smell and the ability to read and write, which would you relinquish? How about your sense of smell and the old-fashioned telephone? Postal service? Transportation faster than walking? Indoor plumbing? Antibiotics? Smallpox vaccines? We could play this game all day.

In my reality, the streets are lined with storefronts offering manicures, haircuts, tattoos, massages, and every imaginable kind of physical workout, from yoga and pilates to powerlifting and boxing. Outdoor recreation is a powerful social norm. Reading books may be in decline, but outdoor activities including hiking, biking, camping, running, and fishing are at record levels. Pro-Palestine protesters aren’t holding encampments on Zoom. They’re occupying universities’ shared physical spaces. People may stare at their phones a lot, but they haven’t forgotten they have bodies.

The best that can be said for books like The Extinction of Experience is that they are part of the open-ended process of innovation, criticism, and corrective innovation. Heavily reliant on sources going back a decade or more, the book feels dated. Schools have begun banning cellphones. Yearning for direct experience, Americans are taking up physical crafts as diverse as blacksmithing, miniature making, visible garment mending, and woodworking—often inspired by Instagram posts or tutored by YouTube videos. Mark Zuckerberg is not the only unlikely American practicing mixed martial arts.

Rosen is right that human beings have bodies and that digital technologies can’t satisfy some of our deepest needs. But the case she wants to make deserves a better presentation.

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