Technological Mediation in a Disembodied World: A Review of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience 

The genre of cultural commentary on technology is booming. Works in this genre tend to fall into one of two camps representative of the “sides” in the “debate over technology” more generally.

On the one hand, there are optimistic and often utopian “techno-progressives” who advocate technology’s value and potential for improving human beings, culture, and society. The logically extreme—but empirically mainstream—version is transhumanism, the movement advocating the development and use of technology to “enhance” human beings so radically as ultimately to render us posthuman. Despite the optimism, the typical work in this camp will still include at least a token performance of responsible caution for the rhetorical purpose of persuasiveness.

On the other hand, there are pessimistic “techno-conservatives” who adopt a critical and cautious view of technology, which they assess according to a variety of normative frameworks. (Many in this camp ground their positions in a theory of “human nature,” with some interpreting this in a classical way, others in a Christian one, and still others in modern secular terms). The logical extreme, at the opposite pole from those who desire to “merge man and machine,” is populated by Luddites like Ted Kaczynski—but in contrast to the first camp, this theoretical extreme is now empirically nonexistent in mainstream public discourse. Despite the pessimism, the typical work from this camp will still include, and often conclude upon, a cautiously hopeful note.

Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, is the latest offering from the techno-conservatives. It is replete with facts and statistics expected to be concerning to the reader—as they were for me and doubtless will be for most—which Rosen uses as a basis for posing probing questions, drawing illuminating connections, and proposing, if not exactly “solutions,” then at least some recommendations.

Rosen’s focus is on the effects of the increasingly pervasive technological mediation of human existence. Rosen is a historian, and this is a largely descriptive work. Over the course of seven chapters loosely organized by theme, her approach is 1) to report on facts and statistics about new and increasing technological mediation and automation and their empirically measurable effects on things we care about, and 2) to analyze these phenomena with an eye to “what is lost” that cannot be quantified or so easily measured.

The various themes of the chapters are themselves united by the overarching theme of (dis)embodiment, as is evident from their titles: “You Had to Be There” (Chapter 1)—which centers on the differences between direct, physically present experience and various kinds of vicarious experience enabled by technology; “Facing One Another” (Chapter 2); “Hand to Mouse” (Chapter 3); “How We Wait” (Chapter 4); “The Sixth Sense” (Chapter 5)—which focuses on emotions, with the title referring to the role increasingly played by technology in mediating our emotions and emotional awareness; “Mediated Pleasures” (Chapter 6); and “Place, Space, and Serendipity” (Chapter 7).

Rosen focuses on (dis)embodiment because postmodern technologies primarily involve “‘virtual’ things”—“things not grounded in physical reality that we encounter while online or via mediating technologies”—rather than “‘real’ things embedded in physical space.” The idea is that technology does not merely present the real, like our bodily senses; instead, it re-presents, reproduces, copies, or simulates the real. This has concerned techno-conservatives for millennia, ever since Plato’s proposal in Republic to ban all “imitative arts” from his ideal city-state, and it is a concern naturally heightened in the era of AI deepfakes.

The point isn’t just that the distance between original and reproduction is the space required for possible error, distortion, or dissimulation—like the photoshopped portrait that airbrushes out all flaws of the original—but that all re-presentation necessarily involves interpretation (e.g., the photoshop user must interpret the meaning of “looking good” to implement it):

Real experiences and their digital equivalents are like the distinction between eyesight and vision. Eyesight refers to how well our eyes capture what we see. Vision allows us to use our eyesight intelligently by directing our perception. It is far more than functioning eyesight. Our technologies, which began as tools to enhance some functions—as eyeglasses correct weak eyesight—are moving more rapidly into the vision business, which is really the business of interpreting experience, not merely increasing our access to it. 

The techno-conservative philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed inquiry and interpretation were the activities essentially distinctive of human existence. What happens when we “outsource” these essential “existential” abilities to technology? Rosen asks us to “consider the Moodies app,” which continuously surveils users in various ways in order to “deliver a new emotional analysis right to [their] smartphone[s] every fifteen to twenty seconds,” or the potential for “apps that will scan and ‘read’ a friend’s face so that we can know immediately if she is happy or sad, truthful or deceitful.” Could outsourcing these interpretive activities to technology cause such existential abilities, such as our ability to “read one another” or indeed our own emotions, to “weaken as the machines’ ability to read us improves?”

Rosen provides empirical evidence that this is so. She also notes another important drawback inherent to technological “enhancement:” standardization or averaging. Humans’ individuality renders subjective experience richly variable; this doesn’t devolve into intersubjective chaos thanks to the “standards” for experience provided by the things experienced themselves. The amateur may see something as “a good hammer,” while the expert carpenter may see it as a mediocre hammer, but only the psychotic severed from shared reality sees it as a pink elephant.

When experience of something is technologically mediated, another layer of standardization is imposed on the subjective experience of the thing. For example, all viewers of a live event televised on a particular channel, like a football game, view the same aspects of the event from the same angles, have the same parts of the field in view at the same time, and so on. They can still look at different parts of the screen, focusing on things of personal salience like a particular player—but there is less “room” for this individual variation than for physical attendees. 

Nonetheless, the distinction between the “real” and the “virtual” has been increasingly challenged since the advent of postmodernity, as have related distinctions like those between the “natural” and the “artificial,” the “physical” and the “mental,” the “objective” and the “subjective,” and so on. The formerly prevailing Cartesian dualism positing a clear distinction and ontological separation between mind and body has been roundly rejected in the sciences as well as in philosophy, for example, and the deconstruction of the “nature/culture distinction” by postmodernist philosophers of science like Bruno Latour is “all the rage” nowadays (at least in the humanities and social sciences).

Rosen herself is sufficiently sensitive to these issues, as a historian, to declare there is no “use in drawing strict boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ any longer, since so many of us spend so much time living in both worlds.” Yet it is still the distinction upon which she founds her analysis. However, this was unavoidable, unless Rosen had set out to write a groundbreaking theoretical treatise for an academic audience instead of an “applied” book for general audiences. For it is simply a function of the current stagnation of the debate over technology more generally, in which one camp entrenches itself in various pre-postmodern metaphysics while the other entrenches itself in various postmodernist deconstructions of metaphysics, each ignoring the fundamental truths of the opposition. The upshot is the two typically end up talking past each other at a fundamental level. This can be predicted not to change, and the debate over technology not to make any essential progress, until an authentically “postmodern” philosophy becomes prominent, as opposed to both the “pre-postmodern” philosophy prevailing among today’s typical techno-conservatives and the “postmodernism” prevailing among today’s typical techno-progressives.

In her conclusion, Rosen sketches two techno-progressive visions of the future, both of which are ultimately predicated on the notion that “virtual” reality, whether created or simply thoroughly mediated by technology, is not essentially different from traditional conceptions of the real.

The first is a vision of “total immersion” in virtual reality for the majority of the populace who will lack “Reality Privilege,” as Rosen quotes software engineer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s description of the condition of having a physical lifeworld more worth inhabiting than a virtual one. The second is of an “Experience Pill” world, alluding to a 2018 study that staged philosopher Robert Nozick’s “Experience Machine” thought experiment, finding that, while most people would still “reject the Experience Machine because it offered pleasurable experiences that were not ‘in contact with reality,’” they were more likely to accept the proposition when “Nozick’s invasive machine [was replaced] with an Experience Pill that promised a lifetime of pleasurable experiences with no side-effects.” This would be a world “of sensors and ubiquitous computing and augmented reality technologies that track, measure, surveil, and nudge us in public and private space during most of our waking hours.”

“Extinction is not inevitable,” however, according to Rosen—rather, “it is a choice.” And there is “another path available to us if we choose to take it,” one leading to neither of these techno-progressive dystopias, both of which “bring moral hazards,” “pose threats to our mental and physical health,” and “are unfree.” Rosen thus sounds the note of “cautious optimism,” characteristic of techno-conservatives since Heidegger, as a lead-in to her recommendations. The latter begin with a more strident version of the Heideggerian dictum to be attentive to, thoughtful about, and responsible for how we relate to technology, to question both how we use it and how we are “used” or conditioned by it:

A decade ago, a book about how technology is changing us would offer solutions for a more balanced relationship with our devices, such as take a digital Sabbath, avoid multitasking, and put those phones away at the dinner table! These are no longer enough. We need to be more like the Amish in our approach to technology, cultivating a robust skepticism about each new device and app, even if most of us will not be as strict as the Amish in rejecting them. The Amish ask the right questions before embracing something new: How will this impact our community? Is it good for families? Does it support or undermine our values? When they decide against adopting something new, the community supports the decision as a group.

She continues with more specific recommendations, such as to “hold technology companies accountable for what their products do to their users” through regulatory legislation, “engage in more face-to-face interactions,” and “cultivate more smartphone-free spaces in public life.”

Rosen concludes the book by definitively aligning herself against techno-progressives, such as transhumanists pursuing technological immortality, closing with these final sentences: 

If we are to reclaim human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from extinction, 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. Only then can we live freely as the embodied, quirky, contradictory, resilient, creative human beings we are.

The Extinction of Experience is very well written, informative, and peppered with personal anecdotes, and Rosen’s evidently extensive erudition, on fine display here, makes the text engagingly educational rather than pedantic. I myself am an academic who professionally researches and teaches about technology, yet there was much new for me to learn in the pages of this book. Rosen’s book should prove both interesting and informative to both scholarly and general audiences concerned about the impact of new and future technologies on human existence and culture.

Image by  greenbutterfly and licensed via Adobe Stock.