The Extinction of Experience Being Human in a Disembodied World

a recent book just published at the end of last year by Christine Rosen called The Extinction of Experience ...

I was concerned while I watched each new generation coming of age, including my own kids, that there were a number of experiences that those of us who grew up pre-smartphone, pre-internet had had that were disappearing.

Basic things like learning how to write by hand, but also broader skills like how to wait, how to be bored, how to daydream, the kinds of things that now because we have these powerful new technologies, which are wonderful in many ways, they don't allow us to experience some of these things that actually do help us become better human beings.

So I spent some time in meme world. I'm a Gen Xer and I'm old, so I still use emojis and badly according to my children, but I found those really creative because they're quite evocative.

They tend to be extremely sarcastic and some of them are just downright funny, but the emotional impact is what I think that generation in particular is trying to express through a medium that isn't as expressive as their human body is.

The more pictures you take, the less you remember about the actual experience you're having. And second, you don't usually go back and look at those pictures in the same way that again to go old school people used to sit down together and look at an old family photo album and turn the pages and see the pictures and talk about who was doing what when.

I was concerned while I watched each new generation coming of age, including my own kids, that there were a number of experiences that those of us who grew up pre-smartphone, pre-internet had had that were disappearing.

Friends get together online, but less so in face-to-face ways. Our public spaces, which used to be places you could bump into people, meet new people, have become just Wi-Fi hotspots where we can all be in our own little universe on our phones.

And I feel like our real world, because of the power of our technologies, some of our real world experiences are disappearing because we outsource them to technology.

The title actually comes from a naturalist who was worried that kids growing up in a world where they didn't play outside and they didn't experience the natural world wouldn't understand what they'd lost if that world disappeared.

So I spent some time in meme world. I'm a Gen Xer and I'm old, so I still use emojis and badly according to my children, but I found those really creative because they're quite evocative.

I was concerned while I watched each new generation coming of age, including my own kids, that there were a number of experiences that those of us who grew up pre-smartphone, pre-internet had had that were disappearing.

The title actually comes from a naturalist who was worried that kids growing up in a world where they didn't play outside and they didn't experience the natural world wouldn't understand what they'd lost if that world disappeared.

And I feel like our real world, because of the power of our technologies, some of our real world experiences are disappearing because we outsource them to technology.

Friends get together online, but less so in face-to-face ways. Our public spaces, which used to be places you could bump into people, meet new people, have become just Wi-Fi hotspots where we can all be in our own little universe on our phones.

The book is called The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen.

I was concerned while I watched each new generation coming of age, including my own kids, that there were a number of experiences that those of us who grew up pre-smartphone, pre-internet had had that were disappearing.

The title actually comes from a naturalist who was worried that kids growing up in a world where they didn't play outside and they didn't experience the natural world wouldn't understand what they'd lost if that world disappeared.

And I feel like our real world, because of the power of our technologies, some of our real world experiences are disappearing because we outsource them to technology.

Friends get together online, but less so in face-to-face ways. Our public spaces, which used to be places you could bump into people, meet new people, have become just Wi-Fi hotspots where we can all be in our own little universe on our phones.

And the way we treat each other is affected by that. We are less patient if you look at rates of road rage and air rage, and we are less likely to be able to get along.