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On Mediating Technology

Picture of John Hyde   John Hyde  ·  2 minute read

In The Extinction of Experience, cultural critic and historian Christine Rosen draws a contrast between what she calls mediated and unmediated experience. As the book title suggests, these two types of experiences are zero sum. The former is displacing the latter. The birth and rise of the digital experience is driving the analog experience into extinction.

She writes: “Our experiences of pleasure, hands-on skills, self-reliance, relationships, and connection to nature are all threatened by mediating technology. Daily intimacy with the physical world recedes, little by little, while our attachment to the digital world grows.”

The term “mediating technology” is intentionally expansive. She discusses the keyboard, for example, and what is lost when we lose the ability to write (or read) handwritten cursive. I don’t disagree. But the defining mediating technology of our age is the smartphone. The smartphone has become this omnipresent omni-tool, always on, on all of us, its portal into the digital world pulling us out of the analog one. It's the smartphone that is eating our time.

As Rosen says in her introduction: “I struggle with how to strike the correct balance between mediated and unmediated experiences and reckon daily with how much time I spend staring at screens rather than into the eyes of other human beings.”

As do I. What is the correct balance? Ideally, how much of our lives should be analog, unmediated by smartphones?

And then there’s this question, also in her introduction, which I find both resonant and haunting: “What kind of person is formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world?”

My concerns about the answers to these questions have led me to the following conclusions: 

  • Unmediated, analog experiences are good for us. I’m not sure what the exact right balance is. But I’m pretty sure the more analog, the better.
  • Our mediating technologies – smartphones – need to be mediated. I find it hard to mediate my own use. I find it extremely hard to be the mediator of my kids’ smartphone use: it’s complex, requires a level of vigilance that’s hard to sustain, and is a constant source of conflict.  
These conclusions led me to build Analog. A simple technology that mediates the technologies that mediate our experiences. A bit meta, but the good kind of meta.

Back to Rosen: "We need to defend the sensory world and remind ourselves of the crucial importance of the physical body, the integrity of physical space, and the need for people to cultivate inner lives. From these flow things that cannot be made by machines: serendipity, intuition, community, spontaneity, and empathy. As the Trappist monk and theologian Thomas Merton observed, 'It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it.'"