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: