No moment unmediated

Twenty-five years ago, books critiquing the internet were rare. I had written The Soul in Cyberspace in 1997 to warn about the internet’s downsides and dangers, but because so much was so new and so promising, most other books on the topic heralded new possibilities the internet could achieve for evangelism, education, and business. In the last 15 years, however, our immersion in online life has sparked several trenchant critiques, such as Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2011), which demonstrated that too much screen time reconfigures our brains, making us intellectually impatient.

Now Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has given us The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (W.W. Norton, 272 pp.). The book offers a keen analysis premised on the claim that our technologies often impoverish our lives without our noticing it. She warns that “we are embracing a way of living in which there are increasingly few areas where we don’t live our lives through these technologies and conform to the behaviors the technologies are designed to encourage.” We become habituated to lives mediated by screens and algorithms and fail to notice their effects on our very humanity.

For example, the uniquely human endeavor of handwriting a card, note, or letter has been replaced by texting, which is impersonal and usually perfunctory. A handwritten card or note expresses the writer’s unique penmanship and choice of ink and stationery; it occupies physical space as a discrete object and is mailed from one place to another. Unlike emails and texts, a handwritten card or letter is easily kept as a memento. I write at least one or two cards a week on carefully chosen cards that feature artwork I appreciate. My goal is that the recipients will keep my cards and hark back to them as something worth remembering.

Laptops allow students to take voluminous notes (when they aren’t succumbing to online distractions), but several studies indicate that old-school note-taking by hand is better for deeper learning. The students are more likely to look at the teacher and other students and to attend to their words. Although Rosen does not write much about it, putting education online, either in real time (synchronously) or in a prerecorded form (asynchronously), removes the face-to-face element so central to teaching and learning. Instead of humans being together in a room dedicated to learning, education is largely reduced to distributing information, and is thereby impoverished.

Rosen is secular and only glancingly addresses the extinction of experience for the Church, but we can apply her concerns to online church services or to churches that broadcast sermons from one location to other locations or sites. Of course, it is impossible to have Communion or practice baptism online, and removing the preacher from the physical congregation (as with multisite churches) diminishes the pastoral presence.

Rosen notes that the cell phone’s ability to photograph our experiences removes us from experiencing where we are. Many who attend art museums are more concerned to photograph the paintings and quickly move on than to behold them without mediation and at leisure. Communication technologies are always entertaining us so that the reception of art as art becomes difficult. Rosen writes: “Art demands something from us. Entertainment does not; we seek out entertainment to give something to us.” Our technologies make it difficult for us to enjoy worthwhile artistic experiences.

Worse yet, the desire to capture images on cell phones to post online has caused people to withhold help from those in dire conditions, resulting in their deaths. And how many car accidents are caused by drivers texting while driving?

Rosen does not mention it, but another technology cheapens our experience of literature. Anthony Lane’s May New Yorker piece, “Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?” critiques a popular app called Blinklist that summarizes books through an algorithm. Instead of laboring through a long and challenging book, you can pay to have it digested into a fraction of its size. But what is lost?

These insights are marred, however, by Rosen’s Darwinitus (to use Raymond Tallis’ term). She repeatedly appeals to evolutionary history to ground her critique, but this worldview yields no intrinsic value for human beings nor can it provide any models for virtue, since nature without God is but an impersonal and materialistic system with no purpose or design. Still, Rosen prizes our distinctively human experiences (except worship) and offers tools to detect how technology can undermine them.