The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World
W.W. Norton & Co.,New York, NY. 2024
272 Pages,
ISBN: 978-0-393-24171-6 Paperback, $29.99
If you live in a large urban area with good public transportation, you’ve probably experienced the same thing I did this morning. I walked over to the subway – I live in Manhattan – and boarded a train going downtown. The car held a good number of passengers – children, teens, and a variety of ages older. Almost all of them were gazing at cell phones, children included, or, with headphones on, bobbing to music only they could hear. One young woman was reading a book.
There is nothing unusual in this unless you were born prior to the digital revolution and can recall when newspapers and magazines replaced cellphones and small portable radios replaced headphones; but then the radio was useless underground. And, of course, there was the quiet rustle of paper as passengers folded, tightly or loosely, the printed matter they were holding, along with its inky odor, the odd passenger reading another’s newspaper over his or her shoulder.
Does anything else distinguish these two scenes other than the variable states of alienation involved? That is the question that Christine Rosen has asked readers to consider in her meditation on what being human means in a world led by digital media and its mounting effects on individuals and groups, large and small. Her conclusions, while cautionary, are no longer startling; but par for the course. They begin with her title, and its implicit reference to current fears of species extinction prompted by news reports we have sadly come to expect. Except in this case, Rosen is concerned with us, and what being human means when experience, now so thoroughly seized by virtual analogs, grows ever more disembodied and monetized.
For Rosen, this involves not only practices that, across ages and cultures, formed us as individuals, groups and societies, but also what has taken their place in small or large measure. In effect, what has digital media given us and what has it suppressed? Rosen highlights a number of pivots in response: the physiological and psychological significance of face-to-face meetings and conversations, and what’s lost when we substitute them with disembodied two-dimensional screen-based gatherings; how social media has so much infected parental and children’s behaviors; what happens when we replace boredom with managed distraction and stimulation; how tourism has so much altered travel that an “adventure” is now a marketing brand for secure, comfortably planned encounters that attenuate the shock of surprise that chance can bring in a foreign country or environment; what instant porn on the web has done to our sexual tastes, and the emotional and physical complexities involved in two people having sex and what it can mean for them; how cyberspace, this undifferentiated, floating arena has too much replaced its humanized form, this or that specific place, which has the kind of physical definition and cultural meaning that our polyglot data clouds do not and cannot possess. Through it all is a refrain that Rosen refers to, and which I mentioned above: the trade-offs we’ve made with the conveniences and information now at our fingertips, and what’s to come.
Her seven chapter titles mark out her playing field, which I’ve only touched on in this brief review: you had to be there; facing one another; hand to mouse; how we wait; sixth sense; mediated pleasure; and place, space. With these signposts, Rosen walks us through the hyper capitalized world we live in where private matters no longer exist as such when we use digital media, tuned by sophisticated surveillance mechanisms to feed product marketing strategies. In this respect, as Rosen points out, even our sense of nature has altered requiring that we place the term in quotation marks informed by the technologies we experience nature with.
Most of us take photos with our cell phones whenever we wish. It’s easy – there’s no film to buy then load into a camera, no figuring distance, no adjustments to focus to make, and nothing to develop or have developed chemically. The photos look pretty darn good, too; if, that is, that “good is good enough. But what of the accumulation of photos we take casually and the common cliched physical responses of those photographed? How does this effect memory, for one, and how will it when these immaterial images -- of visits, trips, art, family gatherings, sports games, parties, etc. -- vanish for not paying a subscription, for forgetting to do something similar, or other corporate data meltdowns? Will we be able to remember what we want to? Or will our memory, vitiated by digital media, lack the acuity, depth and scope it once had and could have again?
Rosen’s concluding paragraph captures her point: “If we are to reclaim our human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from extinction [she means, of course, by the virtual world] we must be willing to place limits on the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our technoenthusiasts.” This last word, however characteristic of Rosen’s critique, troubles me. These “technoenthusiasts” have built, managed and controlled massive corporations internationally. No government, no political discourse, and no business can survive or flourish without them. The great majority of us can’t either.
The issues are clear. Rosen wants to know what we’ll do with them and how it can work out, so that we can “live freely as the embodied, quirky, contradictory, resilient creative human beings we are.”