I was having breakfast at a café on a short visit to Paris one morning recently when I was overcome by the dreadful feeling that something was very, very wrong. Was it — I wondered as I dragged on my cigarette, a vice I permit myself only in this city that knows better than to desiccate our pleasures and decimate each one with the clinician’s cold stare — something I ate? It was not: The Œufs brouillés were exquisite, suggesting that whoever translated the name of this dish to “scrambled eggs” never really tasted it to begin with. Was it the weather? No. The day was an autumnal delight, which you could tell merely by looking at the elderly couple — he in light auburn jacket, she in red-and-white checkered dress — holding hands while trading each other sections of the morning paper at the nearby Place des Vosges. And then, surveying my fellow diners while sipping on my chocolat chaut, it hit me: No one at any other table was burying his or her face in a screen. In fact, there wasn’t even a smartphone to behold resting on any of the tables or peeking from any of the coat pockets or the bags. Table by table, they were talking to each other, touching each other lightly as they made poignant comments, laughing, making eye contact. They were, in other words, behaving like perfectly normal, embodied human beings, present in the here and the now.
No wonder I was feeling ill at ease: Such unmediated mornings, as Christine Rosen reminds us in her gorgeous new book, The Extinction of Experience, are becoming increasingly rare, everywhere replaced by the prevalence and prodding of machines. The way we communicate, the way we copulate, our ability to procrastinate and meditate — all are being radically transformed, sometimes without our paying much attention. And unless we act now, Rosen argues, much of what makes us human will wither and disappear.
These are fighting words, and she who utters them risks sounding like a scowling Cassandra, too virtuous and inconvenient to heed. An astute observer and elegant writer, Rosen knows the perils of her turf and recognizes both its vastness — technology, alas, now permeates every cranny of our lives, and nothing human is foreign to it — and its slipperiness, that oily sheen that has tempted so many bright thinkers to slip into portentous, unsupportable, and insufferable pronouncements. Instead of grim warnings, then, Rosen delivers finely hued observations, corresponding to broad ways of being in the world, such as the way we wait in line, say, or the way we act when we face another person IRL.
The book is thick with anecdotes, academic research, and other tastefully arranged morsels of useful data. We learn, for example, of two psychologists, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, who compared students who were taking notes by hand to their peers using laptop computers. The ones with the computers, the researchers found, were much faster — the average American can type 40 words per minute but is able to pen only 13 by hand — and delivered much more comprehensive transcripts of the lecture they had heard. They were also, alas, far less able to answer basic conceptual questions related to the material they had just learned. “Even when laptops are used solely to take notes,” Mueller and Oppenheimer concluded, “they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing.”
Or consider the following nugget, which Rosen plucked from everyone’s favorite page-turner, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: Readers were given a perfectly bland article dispassionately explaining the basic concepts of nanotechnology. Then, they were exposed to sharply worded, brash comments. “The results,” Rosen writes, “were startling. Rude comments didn’t merely polarize readers; they changed their perception of the story,” an impact the researchers labeled “the nasty effect” before concluding (spoiler alert) that jerks spewing hate anonymously online are terrible for democracy.
Given the superabundance of such troubling findings, you’d expect Rosen to either sink into technologically deterministic despair or rise to Luddite rage. The genre in which she works, after all, big idea books packed with social science research, tends to reward those able to condense the greatest volume of human knowledge into the smallest and most sparkling gem of applicable insight. But Rosen, hallelujah, is much smarter than that, and she knows that radical prescriptions are as impractical and impermanent as they are titillating. Instead of delivering some audacious attempt at a cure-all, like advising her readers to go full Amish and shun fancy things like electricity, she works, befittingly, on a more human scale, realizing, as she writes in the book’s deeply moving conclusion, that “accounting for what we have lost is also the beginning of the process of reclaiming it.”
A mere accounting, no doubt, would’ve been enough. But Rosen’s ambition is greater than her deceptively demure prose lets on. Here she is, for example, spending a week at the Abbey of Gethsemani, one hour south of Louisville and best known for its most celebrated past resident, the writer Thomas Merton. “I went to Gethsemani to gain a different understanding of time,” Rosen writes, “but I came away with a greater appreciation of patience.” After hearing her host, the wise Rev. Carlos, explain to her that our desire for convenience is the root of all sin, she gives us a glimpse into her, and the monks’, daily itinerary: “Vigils at 3:15 in the morning; 5:45 a.m. is Lauds, 6:15 a.m. Eucharist, 7:30 a.m. Terce, 12:15 p.m. Sext, and so on through 7:30 p.m. Compline.”
This rigorous routine, Rosen observes, “is precisely what protects the monks from the distractions, conveniences, and other entertaining escapes that surround the rest of us in everyday life.” While we, uncloistered wretches, can’t even withstand a red light or a short line at the supermarket without reaching for our phones, checking email, playing a game, and doing whatever we can to blast away any bout of boredom, no matter how brief, the monks have a different relationship with tedium. Mind-numbing, difficult routine, they realize, “forces you to confront yourself — your inner demons, restlessness, and wayward thoughts.” It also creates the space and the quiet necessary for anyone who truly wants to hear the voice of God or, at the very least, catch a glimpse of all those layers of truth and beauty glimmering right above our heads yet so often obscured by that unending parade of pop-ups, text messages, WhatsApp alerts, breaking news notifications, and so on that keep our eyes pinned not to the stars but on the screen.
We, Rosen knows, are made of softer stuff than the Trappist brothers in Kentucky. Threaten to break our Wordle streak and we’ll start heaving. But she gives us this glimpse of monkish life not as an admonition but as inspiration, a small but tremendously effective reminder that “despite what Silicon Valley marketing messages insist, history is not always a steady march toward progress, and not every new thing is an improvement on the old.”
Just ask the folks at Tamagoya, a family-run bento box business that, in an effort to modernize and offer their customers greater efficiency, ditched their decades-old custom of accepting lunch orders via fax and launched a snazzy online order form. “Sales plummeted,” Rosen reports, “so they switched back to fax machines to receive the ‘minutely detailed handwritten requests’ their patrons prefer to send in.”
And if one Japanese business found a way to merge the ancient, tactile practice of writing by hand with a newer technology, the fax machine, so can we. With some imagination, and a lot of mindful attention, we can keep our pleasures, our emotions, all that makes us terribly flawed and wonderfully interesting and perfectly human, from hardening into big data.
“If we are to reclaim human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from extinction,” Rosen writes in the book’s final paragraph, “we must be willing to place limits on the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our techno-enthusiasts, not as a means of stifling innovation but as a commitment to our shared humanity.” In her brilliant and beautiful book, Rosen has given us a reminder, never more sorely needed, of just what it is we share, what we stand to lose, and how we may yet go on to rage against the machines.
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Liel Leibovitz is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the editor at large for Tablet magazine.