Book number 52 of 2024
This book makes a good trilogy with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy. Like them, it documents the alarming effects social media and other technologies have on our society. As Rosen writes in the introduction,
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. (p.2)
Like the late Neil Postman, author of Technopoly, who foresaw many of the problems technology would bring us, Rosen calls us to be aware of the biases each and every technology includes. Technology can provide wonderful benefits, but they always come at a cost.
Chapter 1, You Had To Be There, takes its title from the old cliché people used when lamely trying to recount some funny or dramatic experience. According to Google Ngram, the use of that phrase steadily rose in popularity from the 1960s to 2012, when it dropped precipitously. 2012 is also the year smartphone ownership saw its largest growth. Thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, et al., you don’t have to be there – vicariously watching a video is a good enough substitute, apparently.
Every day our experiences are guided by what we say and do online. Anyone with an Internet connection can see more vicarious experiences in one day than previous generations witnessed in a lifetime, and on a scale far greater than television or film provided. Is it any surprise that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t, both online and IRL [In Real Life]? For an increasing number of us many of our memories are now of experiences that occurred online. (page 24)
Chapter 2 is titled Facing One Another. In it, Rosen argues for the importance of face-to-face communication. Humans have evolved into incredibly sensitive readers of small visual clues. If person-to-person communication is mediated by a technology, we lose those clues. For people who might be motivated to deceive others, that can be an advantage! For the rest of us, interacting with someone virtually makes it hard to measure the trustworthiness of him or her.
However, there seems to be a growing trend of people preferring less human contact. From self-checkout at the grocery store (I’m guilty of preferring this) to ordering from iPads at a restaurant to computerized hospital discharging, more and more tasks are being automated.
The flip side of this is the fact that companies are realizing that incidental in-person interaction is both cost-saving and productive. The exchange of ideas during a casual conversation can not be replicated in a videoconference.
Chapter 3, Hand To Mouse, is about the importance of authentic handwriting.
But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills (as we will see), and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead. (page 58-59)
Interestingly, young children who learn and master handwriting become better readers. Once students are older, handwriting notes leads to better retention of content than typing them. As adults lose the ability to write in cursive, they may lose valuable cognitive skills.
Likewise, working with your hands is important.
The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. (page 69)
I agree with this from personal experience. I have been designing and putting together stained glass windows for almost thirty years now, and when I get into “the flow” of a project, times passes without my having any sense of it.
Chapter 4 is How We Wait, and it is about how impatient we have become when faced with a line or a wait. Companies measure how long it takes their websites to load, down to the millisecond, because an extra three or four milliseconds mean lost sales and customers.
Rosen posits that filling every waking moment with distraction and entertainment via our devices robs us of valuable downtime that used to lead to daydreaming and free association.
Coping with boredom involves self-regulation. We must decide what to do with the feeling, so we counter desultory everyday experiences by reaching for technologies with assiduous abilities to distract us – so many distractions, each one a siren’s island where attention might founder. In effect, our devices eliminate boredom not by teaching us how to cope with it but by outsourcing our attention so we don’t have to cope with it. (page 95)
I found this chapter relatable – whenever I am in a situation where I am asked to wait, such as a doctor’s waiting area, I resist the temptation to pull out my phone. Instead, I use the time to collect my thoughts, focus on my surroundings and the people around me, and just relax. I am usually the only person not looking at a screen.
Chapter 5 is The Sixth Sense. This refers to our perception of our own and others’ emotions. In other words, our empathy. Unfortunately, most social media platforms amplify negative emotions like anger and hate, because they garner the most engagement. Meanwhile, researchers are developing ways of monitoring our emotional states, so that we can be more productive employees or more easily manipulated consumers.
What kind of world will this be once we have outsourced the job of emotional reflection? Pentland [MIT researcher] says this will be a “sensible” society where “everything is arranged for your convenience.” No need for inefficiencies or embarrassments of a bad second date. One day soon, perhaps, with sensors embedded on our bodies or phones, they will signal us within moments whether our affection is likely to be returned or not, and we can move on. As a representative from Google told a reporter, “We like to say a phone has eyes, ears, skin, and a sense of location…It’s always with you in your pocket or purse. It’s next to you when you’re sleeping. We really want to leverage that.” Eventually the sensors will take on the work of emotional awareness for us, if we let them. (page 131)
What is looming on the horizon are apps that can “read” your emotional state, as well as the state of the person you’re interacting with. Do we want to know if someone doesn’t like talking to us, while we’re talking with them? Do we want others to know our true feelings for them, 24/7?
Chapter 6 is Mediated Pleasures. First, the pleasure of travel is being transformed by technology. Instead of leaving home behind for a new, albeit temporary, adventure, we stay connected to our family and friends, sharing every stage of the journey. Travel is now tourism, which is very different. People are so busy trying to document their trips that they never truly experience them.
According to Rosen, other pleasures that technology has disrupted/corrupted include viewing fine art, sex (of course), games, and even food. In our enjoyment of all these things, the mediation of technology robs us of the visceral sensations we experience when we partake of them in real life. People take more pictures than ever of their experiences, yet they remember less and less of them. I know that one of the most annoying things about going to a concert these days are all the audience members who insist on recording the entire show on their phones. They can’t possibly be enjoying the actual performance, and I can’t imagine them taking the time to watch the concert again on a small screen.
The seventh and final chapter is Place, Space, and Serendipity. In it, Rosen is careful to distinguish between place and space. A place is somewhere people can gather and socialize face-to-face – where serendipitous encounters can take place, like in a neighborhood pub or restaurant. A space is an engineered area that can be real or virtual, but it is not conducive to relaxed and spontaneous interaction.
We are in the process of trading the spatial and social cues that once defined a particular place – a public square, for example, or a local meeting spot – for a more seamless and less physically bounded experience of space engineered by technology companies. The promise is a more efficient delivery of “engineered serendipity”, but the reality may end up being a more predictable homogeneity. (page 186)
I wish that I could say Rosen has suggestions for how to counter the deleterious effects of al this technological mediation, but she really doesn’t, other than going Amish and eschewing technology altogether. Her book is an important one, in that it is a clear-eyed warning of the path down which our society is headed. I’m nearing retirement age; the near future won’t affect me that much. I do worry about the world people under the age of 25 will have to navigate, though.
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