I’ve been reading The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen. Well-written, disturbing, and something I know social scientists are beginning to think and warn about, but I’m afraid not enough of us are concerned enough about this topic. We’re all feeling it, to some extent, I think – this anxiety, loneliness, and loss of real community and connection with real, live, embodied people as our culture becomes more and more reliant on mediated communication and technology that is making our world more virtual and less “in real life” and “in person” than we’ve ever been.
For all the conveniences and good that we truly do see in
our smart phones and other technologies, I fear we are losing some things that
should not be lost. I think the problem lies in the fact that far too often we
move from using these technologies as a helpful tool to using them as a way of
life. There is the addictive quality of the online life that I’m finding
disturbing. The irony that I’m hashing out these thoughts and sharing them on
my social media platforms is not lost on me.
The problem I’m seeing is that these mediated ways of
staying in touch just don’t deliver what we hoped they would, but our addiction
to them and our alienation from each other continues to grow. Communicating via Zoom or screen or text just isn’t
the same and doesn’t fill us with joy the same as being there in the flesh over a
cup of coffee or around a meeting table or in a classroom or sitting in the church pew in person. We are losing the ability to
read other people’s emotions. The chapter in the book on that topic actually
scared me. The author talks about apps that are being developed that use AI to
determine how someone you’re interacting with is feeling based on what the AI
determines from all the aggregated data it mines about them, etc. She also
makes a compelling argument tying some of the trend we are seeing in an uptick
in aggressive, even deadly, road rage incidents, to a generalized loss of
ability to be patient combined with a loss of empathy in our culture. It is
complicated, but think about it. We spend so much time in our personalized
worlds, staring at our various screens, communicating in a mediated way through
our screens, with our apps and whatnots carefully mining our data and feeding
us what the AI determines we want based on our scrolling and too many other
data points to even go into, and we demand faster and faster responses and have
less and less patience with slow-loading webpages, and then when we venture out
into the real world, we want everything there to react the same way. We become
the center of our carefully mediated universes and we have little patience for
anyone who may inadvertently get in the way of our instant gratification and what we think we deserve. Somehow,
we are becoming more irritable and less able to assume the best of others. Not
to mention plain old distracted driving. Too many of us can’t exercise the
self-control to wait to look at our phones until we are no longer driving. We
can’t be alone with our thoughts even for the few minutes we may be stuck at a
traffic light.
The chapter on how we wait spoke to me as well. We aren’t
able to sit quietly and just think anymore.
Any empty space must be filled with distractions or we feel we are
wasting time. I recently complained about people who sit in a waiting room and rudely
listen to loud videos on their cell phones. We’re so self-focused we don’t even
care that there are people around us who may not want to hear our loud
conversation or video. Again, I think we’re becoming conditioned to live in a
little personalized bubble that caters to our every desire that our vision is
becoming more and more tunneled inward. How often do we look up and away from
our screens and truly interact with strangers in these situations anymore? Are
we losing the ability to talk to real people we encounter in daily life? How
often have you tried to talk to someone and they have one earbud in, even while
they sort of talk to you? How can you truly give attention to someone if you’re
only half listening? It’s rude, yet I see it all the time. So much of our creativity
comes when we are a little bit bored and allow our minds to wander and just sit
with our thoughts. But more and more, we spend less and less time doing that.
We almost fear boredom these days.
There is so much to think about after reading this book and
I have truly not done justice in my rambling here. I know this.
I’m not sure this post even makes much sense, but what I hope anyone who
has followed my rambling to this point takes away is – read this book. PLEASE.
I confess that as I was reading I felt discouraged because the thought
came to me, those who really need to read this, the people who are in danger of
being that impatient road rager, for example, will never read this book or even
think about what our distracted, virtual addictions are doing to us. Because
people don’t read anymore. It’s too long, takes up too much energy, doesn’t
feed the dopamine hit that the next round of the game on the phone or stupid video
or scroll through the social media feed delivers. But we really, truly need to
be thinking much harder about what this all is doing to us as human beings. We
really, truly need to think about how much we need real, face-to-face
friendships and fellowship.
A few small things I’m thinking about changing in response
to reading this book are, for one thing, I’ve decided the leave my earphones at
home when I go out for a walk. I did that today and it was a vastly different
experience, one I quite enjoyed. Listening to the birds, hearing the oh-so-satisfying
crunch of the acorns as I felt them under my shoes, even hearing my shoes on
the pavement as I walked and enjoyed the peace of the quiet around me was
profoundly satisfying in a way my walks haven’t been when I’ve taken them
plugged up with my podcasts. I enjoy
those podcasts, but I’m changing up how I listen to them. I need more quiet and
undistracted time built into my day. I’m also setting aside time to work again
on memorizing scripture. Taking the time
to burrow down and really focus on it. And I’m also making a point to handwrite
in my journal – spending the time it takes to get into the flow of writing. That
was another insight the author shared – how writing with our hands is a
different kind of processing than typing, and it’s another thing we’re losing
as a culture – and she’s right.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post in this
space, and this one has ended up being longer than I intended. It’s a little
rambly, but it’s all things I wanted to say. I’m a bit rusty, though, and I think
my thoughts probably aren’t as fleshed out and clear as I would like them to
be. Maybe I need to start blogging again and sharpen up those thinking skills.
Before I go, though this post is already too impossibly long, I wanted to share something that came to mind while reading this book. There is a song that has become popular in the marching band world, and rightly so because it’s a beautiful piece of music. I was reminded of it while reading because the lyrics deal with our discomfort and yet also our eerie draw to the lure of the ubiquitous nature of our virtual technology and datamining social media. The song is “The Hymn of Acxiom” by Vienna Teng.
To get the full picture I want to share, listen to this adaptation first, which is the marching band version of just the music.
Now, read the lyrics by Vienna Teng:
somebody hears you. you know that. you know that.
somebody hears you. you know that inside.
someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to
(say just the right thing and) show that you’re understood.
here you’re known.
leave your life open. you don’t have. you don’t have to.
leave your life open. you don’t have to hide.
someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these
(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.
keep them all.
let our formulas find your soul.
we’ll divine your artesian source (in your mind),
marshal feed and force (our machines will)
to design you a perfect love—
or (better still) a perfect lust.
o how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born.
now we possess you. you’ll own that. you’ll own that.
now we possess you. you’ll own that in time.
now we will build you an endlessly upward world,
(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you’re worth.
is that wrong?
isn’t this what you want?
amen
Now listen and watch this video of it being sung:
I think this song brilliantly captures how conflicted I feel
about smart technology and social media and how dependent we are on it now. There
is the beauty of how useful our media is as a tool for keeping in touch with people,
sharing and finding information quickly, yet there are also quite disturbing
costs we are only beginning to scratch the surface of coming to terms with, the disturbing ways it is actually changing us and our culture. I
hope you can see a bit of the horror I’m beginning to feel with how commodified
we, ourselves are becoming. You know the saying – nothing is free. If what they’re
offering is free, if there is no “product,” YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. Every smart
device we use, every webpage we visit, every social media post we make, every
game we play, every video we watch, we are giving them more of ourselves to
market and buy. We’ve opened a kind of Pandora’s box, and I don’t think we can
go back, but I do hope we can be much, much more mindful and careful and aware
of how much it could control us and become a dangerous idol to us. Let’s start
thinking about using what good we can as a tool, but dropping it as a way of
life. Look up, look out, engage with other embodied human beings face-to-face,
with phones put away. Spend time touching grass and taking in all the sensory
experiences of touch, sight, smell – see the beauty through your eyes apart from
the mediation of a screen. Enjoy something beautiful for the sake of the beautiful,
not for the sake of the social media post you could make. Try enjoying a fun
experience without posting about it, at least some of the time, let your memory
of an event be just that, a beautiful memory without a social media post to go
with it.
Think about it. And
go read Christine Rosen’s book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in
a Disembodied World. My thoughts about it may have rambled too much in this
post, hers do not. She brings clarity and a needed warning I hope more people will
hear.
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