Keeping it Real

The Law & Liberty Podcast

Human beings are flawed, finite creatures. But they are not problems to be solved, argues AEI senior fellow Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience. In the technological age, we too often see basic human activities, from reading and writing, to shopping and conversing, as obstacles to efficiency that must be overcome, simplified, or replaced. And while digital technology has provided many benefits, it has also come with unintended consequences for our habits of mind and social interactions. Rosen argues that we need a “new humanism” that puts the human person front-and-center and encourages people to regularly “touch grass.”

Related Links:
The Extinction of Experience (Christine Rosen)
The Outrage Industry ( Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj
Irony and Outrage (Dannagal Goldthwaite Young)
“A Long View on Artificial Intelligence” (A Law & Liberty forum on artificial intellegence led by Rachel Lomasky)
“What the Smartphone Hath Wrought,” (A Law & Liberty review by Joseph Holmes of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation)

Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. The date is September 6th, 2024. Our guest today is Christine Rosen. She is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. Concurrently, she’s a columnist for the Commentary Magazine and is one of its co-hosts for their podcast. She is also a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture and a senior editor in an advisory position at the New Atlantis.

Her previous positions include editor of In Character, managing editor of the Weekly Standard, and distinguishing visiting scholar at the Library of Congress. She is also the author of several books, including My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of Divine Girlhood, and Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, which is a dynamite book, although it sounds like it would be very unpleasant to read. It’s actually dynamite. A prolific writer, Dr. Rosen is often published in the popular press.

She has a PhD in history with a major in American intellectual history from Emory University and a BA in history from the University of South Florida. Today, we’ll be talking about her new book, The Extinction of Experience, which comes out next Tuesday, September 10th, 2024. By the time this podcast comes out, however, it will already be for sale, and you will be buying it because we’ll persuade you to be interested in this if you’re not already by this podcast. So, Dr. Rosen, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Christine Rosen:

Thanks so much for having me, James. And please, no doctor, I cannot prescribe medication.

James Patterson:

That’s right, that’s right. Well, we’re going to prescribe something today.

Christine Rosen:

Sound advice.

James Patterson:

That’s right, that’s right. So obviously, the term “the extinction of experience” invites the question: What do you mean by experience, and how do things like digital media and social media threaten it with extinction?

Christine Rosen:

That’s a great, great question. The title of the book is actually a phrase that was originally used by a naturalist named Robert Michael Pyle. He was concerned that each new generation wasn’t actually having hands-on experiences in the natural world. And so if a species went extinct, they wouldn’t even register that because they had no real-world experience with it. And I had been reading something that talked through this idea and I thought, that’s actually a problem not just about the natural world, but about the way we talk to each other face-to-face. The fact that a lot of us can’t write by hand any longer and that we don’t teach children to write by hand, and the way we interact in public space. It just got me thinking about all of the human experiences that we now take for granted because we either outsource them to technology, assuming that’s a better and more convenient way to do it, or they’ve simply disappeared and been replaced by technology.

And so what I wanted to grapple with is, how many of those replacements were improvements? How many were not? And are some of the things that we’re unthinkingly embracing as good, in fact, undermining some deep and important truths about what it means to be human?

James Patterson:

Younger millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, these are the people that I’m teaching now. They’re growing up as what used to be called digital natives. These are kids who had digital devices thrust into their hands and grew up with them as kind of natural extensions of the world. How do they differ in their understanding of technology – their use of technology – from the very analog Gen X and baby boomers?

Christine Rosen:

Well, it’s interesting. So I’m Gen X—my kids are Gen Z. They’re 18 years old. They grew up with this stuff. I watched how much more saturated they were in a technological world, just simply by being the age and born at the time they were.

I think what has happened is that we’ve seen, particularly with millennials, that they were the first generation to really spend a good portion of their childhood/young adulthood with these tools. And we all wanted to believe it would be an improvement. Right? The digital natives would know how to search the internet. They would have access to so much information, they would be more knowledgeable. We all wanted to believe this. None of it was true. And we now are starting to see the fallout. In fact, information is not the same thing as knowledge. Those are two separate things. All of this mass of information, if it’s just thrown at you like a fire hose and you cannot curate the true from the false, the good from the bad, the reputable from the disreputable, you actually end up more confused and often more skeptical about everything than you do actually gaining knowledge and wisdom.

That said, the skills that I saw, the de-skilling, I should say, that I saw in younger generations that concerned me most were the human things. Can you look someone in the eye and carry on a conversation? Can you be bored without going slightly crazy? Can you daydream? Can you find ways to entertain yourselves and interact with others in your peer group that don’t have to mediate yourself or others through a screen, or doesn’t involve having to express emotion through emoticons or emojis or memes? And if we’re choosing more and more often to mediate our relationships, what happens when we’re stuck in a situation where you can’t mediate? Are we more impatient? Are we twitchy and can’t handle boredom?

These are all questions that I think, these are qualitative questions. And I think a lot of our discussion in the last 10 to 20 years about technology is about the quantitative benefits and some of the quantitative harms. How many hours do you spend staring at a screen? How many minutes do you save efficiently searching something up on Google versus an encyclopedia? Those are important questions, but we’ve missed the qualitative questions, and I think those are the ones that really are impacting us now, in terms of how people understand themselves, how they talk to other people. Why are our political culture, for example, is so wildly polarized. I mean, there are a lot of strands here and they’re not all causal, but I think those qualitative human interactions are what I was most curious about exploring in the book.

James Patterson:

So in response to the problems that we see with digital media, especially social media, you affirm sort of towards the beginning of the book, we need a new humanism, one that can challenge the engineering driven scientism that has come to dominate culture. Humanism puts human beings and human experiences at its center, not engineering or machines or algorithms. This is a pretty forthright statement. I was actually pretty taken aback when looking at it, that this is the nature of the problem. What does this humanism look? What would it be? What did it look like, and how might it apply constraints to the way we interact with digital media?

Christine Rosen:

That’s a great question. So I think we are in an era, we’re entering an era and the artificial intelligence stuff coming quickly down the pipeline will only accelerate this. We’re in an era where we have to defend the human, because if you look at the way a lot of our social, cultural and political lives are structured, they are the mediation through platforms developed by engineers, are guiding a lot of our behavior in a way, even if we’re cognizant of it, where I don’t think we’re thinking through the long-term fallout from it. And by that I mean, I have lots of friends who work in Silicon Valley, they are good people. They are genuinely, many of them genuinely trying to improve human life, but they have the engineering mindset, which means they see human beings as a problem to be solved.

I do not see human; I see us in our messy, contradictory, self-delusional glory as not an engineering problem. We’re humans, we… All our quirks and our misconceptions are what make us unique to each other, and we should celebrate that fact. That doesn’t mean irrationality should rule, but I feel like we have tackled a lot of human by trying to impose engineering solutions to solve them. And some of our problems are unsolvable, and this is where I become, the conservative part of my sensibility emerges. We are finite, flawed creatures, and I think our understanding of that is something that the Silicon Valley engineering mindset is constantly battling with. But I feel like so far we’ve embraced the idea that we should be more like machines rather than that we should try to use and develop machines that encourage our humanness.

James Patterson:

Yeah, there’s a funny analog to political science where early in the use of statistical methods, a lot of statisticians became very frustrated that people they were pulling did not fit into the categories the statisticians imposed. This seems to be a regular problem with the application-

Christine Rosen:

Yes.

James Patterson:

… with the application of these empirical approaches. Where would this humanism come from? I was worried when I was reading this because I agree, but I’m not sure if there are institutions that would necessarily want to do this.

Christine Rosen:

So I think this is the place where the question is going to be answered somewhat differently depending on who you ask. So for some people, that new human focus is going to come from the family or the local community. For others it will come from their religious institutions, still others, perhaps their educational institutions. There is no perfect top-down solution or a succinct answer to that question.

And I say that with hesitation because books these days about technology, particularly books that are critical of the way we use technology, people always want an easy solution. And 10 years ago if you’d asked me that question, I would’ve said, “Take a digital Sabbath. Don’t allow phones in schools. Make sure you delay screen time for your kids as long as possible.” There were all of these practical answers and we have embraced some of those and that’s a good thing. But we are now at a point I think, where so much of our experience as individuals, as family members, as citizens, we mediate so many of them just out of habit because it’s so easy. It’s how things are done.

I mean, you check out of a local CVS in my hometown here in my town of DC, and you rarely see a person. You can go in, buy your stuff, use the self-check kiosk, out you go, and it seems fine, right? That’s so quick, I don’t have to wait in line. But it’s a different experience than even five years ago when you waited in line, maybe saw a neighbor and chatted and then said, “Hello, good morning,” to the person who was ringing up your sale. That’s a human interaction.

Now, not all human interactions are positive, but I think when we try to think about how do we restore some of those, I do think that we need to start with the family and the local community first. I think that’s where real change can happen, and that begins with each and every one of us sitting down and thinking critically, how do I use these tools, and am I using them too much for things that I should just do face-to-face with the other people in my life?

James Patterson:

You mentioned waiting and waiting actually makes up a central chapter of the book. And I remember joking with my wife back when people went to Chipotle because of their ample serving sizes, before everything got-

Christine Rosen:

Shrinkflation struck.

James Patterson:

Shrinkflation, that’s right. It became easier to wait at Chipotle because people had phones that they could use to occupy their time, but this book is full of things that I had never thought about, and to sort of consolidate into a single set of arguments. And one of these is waiting and boredom. So how have firms tried to monetize these things? And if you could please especially talk about Disney, because that was definitely one of the best parts of the book.

Christine Rosen:

Yeah, so as a Florida native, we growing up in Florida in the ’70s and ’80s, if you were a Florida native with a Florida driver’s license, as my parents were, there were Disney days for Floridians. And so we would always go to those because it was discounted and it was the off-season, basically, not that Disney has an off season. And I remember, I’m one of three daughters and I remember fidgeting and standing in line and it was the broiling son of Florida in Orlando and the humidity and complaining and having one of my parents say, “You just have to wait,” and you had to accept that you had to wait. And so my mind would wander, I’d look around at the people, I’d sort of, I’d torment my little sister, whatever activity I chose, it was a self-motivated way to try to deal with boredom. And now, you don’t have to do that. First, because everyone assumes no one will wait. We’re much more impatient. We want things on-demand because we now have that expectation.

So Disney has even redesigned the way it does its lines. You can get the fast pass or whatever it’s called now, it’s got an even more high-tech name, and they entertain you along the way in line, which they never used to do. And then if you’re still bored, you’ve got your phone. And if you look at anyone waiting in line these days, whether it’s at Chipotle or Disney World or anywhere, they are all staring down at a screen. And so what that does is transform public space. It transforms as individuals our willingness to wait.

You see skyrocketing rates of road rage, now we have air rage, I’m sure train rage is coming. I mean, these are all expressions of cultural impatience that I think begin with the individual having an expectation, I shouldn’t have to wait. And that expectation has been met time and time again by these transformative devices and by the internet and on-demand culture. And again, I don’t say any of that saying we should take that all away and go back to the Stone Age and horse and buggy. I’m not a Luddite, but I do think we haven’t thought through the implications for habits of mind, worldview and virtues, really, is the word I would use. The virtue of patience, the virtue of delayed gratification. These are part of what make us functioning human beings, and I think we’ve lost sight of that.

James Patterson:

Earlier in the book, you mention being able to make and understand facial expressions is a kind of primal language, and you talk about the kind of curriculum based around smiling and frowning and having kids identify what each of these mean. Another one of these things I mentioned that it was something I’d noticed but never thought to put together in a book like this, really, really great. But what is it that digital media do to our ability to understand that language?

Christine Rosen:

So we are hardwired evolutionarily to read each other’s facial expressions, to decide if we can trust another person, to see if they’re angry, if they’re happy, if they’re sad, and then respond to that. The expression of our emotions on our faces is a very powerful form of communication. So what we’ve done by mediating that is dulled that, both the ability to express emotion and the ability to read it. And for a lot of people, I think that really struck home during the COVID pandemic when people were masked, and in particular when children looked into the faces of adults in their lives and couldn’t read their expressions. And there’s fallout from that. There’s fallout for language development, there’s fallout for emotional security. So the masking weirdly kind of cast into high relief a lot of the stuff I’d been reading for years about this.

What I’m concerned about is that we think that the screen is a reasonable substitute for the human face and it is not. And we now have a lot of fascinating research that shows, especially for children who are developing emotions and developing sense of themselves and in the world they’re in, having an adult, for example, read a story through a screen and the kid can see the adult reading them the story, is an entirely qualitatively different experience than someone sitting across from them reading a story or holding them and reading a story. And we know this intuitively, I think, I mean, if you’re a parent, you know this. But I don’t think that we took the time to think it through before we embraced screens in the classroom and in every home and giving every kid an iPad and thinking, this will make them smarter, because that’s what we were told it would do. We now know that that’s not the case, that there are other consequences, unintended consequences of some of these technologies.

So that’s where the human face is such a powerful tool, and I worry about younger generations who aren’t good about reading facial expressions. I have friends here in DC who work in diplomatic fields and they’ll tell you. When they get new recruits in, people they’re training to be diplomats and work in these very important high level jobs where they have to read other people, perhaps people who don’t speak the same language as they do. They find them struggling, harder to train, that they really, they won’t look people in the eye at the same way that older diplomats have just naturally done. So it has changed the way we interact. And I think some of those old, old evolutionary tools are, those are skills that are, again, it’s a kind of mass de-skilling of our ability to do something that brings us together as humans and allows us to build trust and to build communities with each other in a way that you just cannot do online.

James Patterson:

Yeah, another part to that de-skilling I found in the book that did not occur to me. I should mention that we’re kind of your typical Ave Maria, South Florida homeschooling family. So I get to kind of stand outside a little bit of this stuff. So when I see you describe it, it sort of horrifies me. It’s that there’s a decrease in the amount of writing and drawing and this very funny account of you learning the bassoon.

Christine Rosen:

Yes.

James Patterson:

If you could explain the arrangement of the bassoon for your tiny hands, that would be great. But what are they learning now if not these things? And how are they learning it?

Christine Rosen:

Well, so this fascinated me because like the human face, evolutionarily we’re designed to use our hands to understand the world around us by touching things, manipulating objects, building tools, all of these things that we use and communicate with our hands. And we all remember learning to write by hand, block letters, and then for those of us who are of a certain age, myself included, we learned to write cursive. And cursive was this crossing the rubicon moment where you’re like, it’s very frustrating and very challenging. And I always thought, why do I need to learn how to do this? I just have to know how to sign my name. But I was forced to do that, just like I was forced to diagram sentences. I am extremely grateful to all of my wonderful teachers who made me do that now, but at the time it seemed useless.

And I think as a culture, we now have this idea that because so much can be done on a keyboard or on a touchscreen, that handwriting is no longer important. But we know, and again, there’s this fascinating literature of people who study how we learn to read, how we learn to write. And what they’re finding is that children in particular who do not learn to write, later have struggled with certain aspects of complex literacy, understanding the written word, because there is some brain-body connection that goes on when you have to take an object in your hand and try to make words and learn how to discipline your body and your mind at the same time. And this is for anybody who’s learned a sport or who as I did when I was eight years old, for some unknown reason, took up the bassoon. There’s something really foreign and alien at first, and you can struggle with, where do I put my fingers and how do I hold this and do that? But as you practice and as you learn, those skills aren’t just physical, they’re also mental.

And in the case of if you’re a musician or an artist or an athlete, they can be emotional too. You feel connected to your own body and able to do things that you couldn’t do before. We are missing out on that when kids spend most of their time in free play, looking at a screen and swiping. Swiping a screen and tapping the screen, those are very rudimentary, limited technical skills. Handwriting is much harder, and cursive handwriting, the other thing I’ve noted recently. You remember the, you know the Coca-Cola label, logo, which is written in script?

James Patterson:

Yes.

Christine Rosen:

And other things like say for example, the Declaration of Independence, things like that, that are written in cursive. Kids today can’t read that. They cannot read the cursive, they cannot read our founding documents, and that scares me. And a lot of companies are changing their logos if they’re script, because they want to make sure younger people can actually read and they put it in block letters. That worries me, that is a skill we are running away from thinking we’re improving. But how is it improvement if people can no longer sign their names in cursive? I just feel like this is, again, this is a skillset that speaks not just to something we used to do, but can’t now, but also to literacy and to our ability to be sophisticated, thoughtful readers.

James Patterson:

Yeah, it’s impossible to do archival work without being able to read script.

Christine Rosen:

Exactly. Yes, exactly.

James Patterson:

And the idea that they would not know how to do that and they would have to take, at 25, they’re doing their dissertation to go do script courses.

Christine Rosen:

Do you know what was the funniest little anecdote I stumbled across in a news story when I was researching that chapter, was bakers at, like you go to Publix or you go to Winn-Dixie or something, you want to get a birthday cake for someone? They were having trouble finding workers who could write happy birthday in script.

James Patterson:

Oh, my goodness.

Christine Rosen:

They couldn’t do it, so everything was written in block letters. And if you’re a fan of the book, the Cake Wrecks book, which I personally am, they’re hilarious. I was like, oh my God, we’re all cake wrecks now. Nobody can write happy birthday in icing. This just for some reason really is chilling to me-

James Patterson:

That’s right.

Christine Rosen:

… because I like Publix cake, but okay.

James Patterson:

So it’s carving out a niche to be the last script cake decorator.

Christine Rosen:

Exactly.

James Patterson:

He’s going to charge astronomical rates.

So there’s kind of a zen cone of media theory that comes from Marshall McLuhan, and that’s the medium is the message. It means that the medium itself structures the messages we send, what we think of when we want to send messages and how receivers interpret them. So what is it about social media that makes us want to respond and post and have all of this anger and hatred? Is this what makes them successful? Is that part of the business model?

Christine Rosen:

It’s certainly, it’s designed to garner reaction and to keep you on the platform. It cares not a bit, the engineers who designed it don’t care at all if that reaction is fear, anger, anxiety and hostility, or if it’s smiles and laughter and happiness, it doesn’t matter. And as we know, if you study human nature and human behavior, as many of the people who work at these companies and design these platforms have, you know that fear, that the top emotions that are going to get the most aggressive response are fear and anger. Anxiety is pretty high up there too. So they know that, they design a platform that will just keep you coming back, giving you an intermittent reward system. You never know when you’re going to get that little dopamine hit, and that’s what it is, your brain’s getting a dopamine hit. And everything, they’re designed that way.

I would say the difference between when Marshall McLuhan and others were first critiquing our different media, particularly television and even early computer screens. The difference now with platforms like social media and TikTok and all of these other places that are very visually driven, is that they are much more sophisticated and seamless about hiding the structure of motivational behavior techniques they’re using. So you don’t feel like you’re being manipulated. You actually feel like you’re behaving in a very autonomous way but at each way, each point along your interaction with these platforms, you are being guided in a kind of hidden hand sort of way.

And I teach some undergraduates in technology and ethics and technology and democracy, and I’ll often call up an Instagram menu and I’ll say, “So, what do you see when you see this?” They’re like, “Look at all the choices. I can do this filter. I can set it to private. It gives me a world of choice.” And so the next question I ask them is, “What’s not on this menu? What can’t you do? From the moment you go to these platforms, what are you already barred from doing?” That’s a design choice. You can’t turn it right off. It makes it difficult to do certain things. It does everything to keep you on the platform. So, trying to think about all of the ways our choices are being nudged and how opaque it is to those of us who use these platforms, that’s the intention. But I think the effect, as we know, particularly with social media use, is a lot more polarization, a lot more anxiety, not necessarily the happy feelings.

James Patterson:

Yeah, and this ties into that discussion of waiting and boredom, and that people can have more money if they’re fortunate, they can prolong their lives to some degree, but it’s very difficult for them to have more time. And so there is a kind of fixed amount of time that a person can have claimed on an app or some kind of social media site. And so a lot of what they use to measure success is engagement, right?

Christine Rosen:

Yes.

James Patterson:

Like the time on app, that’s really the metric.

Christine Rosen:

Yes, exactly. Well, and that’s and for any… And again, to the notion of finite time, there’s a reason a lot of Silicon Valley types are very heavily invested and enthusiastic about life extension technologies. They want to extend time, many of them believe they can. But every time you are mediating an interaction with someone on a screen, there’s an opportunity cost. You could be doing something outside, touching grass, as the kids say, in the real world, or you could be talking to someone face-to-face. Now look, for all of us we do that with our work, but the design choices make it harder and harder for us to step away from those screens.

James Patterson:

So of the things that make people stay on sites like X or Facebook, are things like anger and hatred, but we’ve also seen a very strange resurgence of conspiracy theories. The most recent example of this was that Winston Churchill is really the one responsible for the second World War. What is it about social media that does this, that makes us think in conspiratorial terms or makes those more attractive?

Christine Rosen:

Well, I think two things. One, the attractiveness of it is that it gives people… And we do know by the way, that Americans are reporting higher levels of loneliness and isolation. I mean, I joke, but only sort of, that in America, a lot of people know more about reality stars and Instagram influencers than they do the names of their next door neighbors. This feeling of isolation and loneliness is a genuine thing.

So I think when people go online and they read something and they’re like, well, that seems startling, that can’t be true. Then they go into a chat room and there’s lots of other people who are interested in this too, and they can talk to each other in real time and they can exchange information and they can say, “Well, I researched this and did you know about that?” They become engaged in a world that’s completely online, but that gives them a sense of belonging to a group in the real world. And then we do, unfortunately for the more violent and extremist conspiracy theories, we see people taking those theories from the screen out into the real world and doing all kinds of things that they shouldn’t or that break the law or that are danger to others.

And it’s interesting because I think there’s a tendency in mainstream culture to just shake your head and dismiss it and go, [inaudible 00:28:40], those are crazy people. Actually have a lot of, I think we should try to understand what motivates people, and in follow-up interviews with people who’ve participated in QAnon-style rallies or violence or anything like that where they were motivated to do so after really living in these online communities that promoted these ideas. They sound lost in a way that it’s not mental illness. It’s, I really believe this stuff and I really thought I was doing something important, and they don’t have a sense of reality. And I do feel like our culture’s understanding of a shared reality has been seriously fragmented and undermined because we do mediate so many of our experiences.

James Patterson:

So there’s a really great book, and I’m trying to find it while talking to you. I found the second one that’s sort of a response to the first, it’s called Irony and Outrage, and it’s called the Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear and Laughter, not that we’re promoting Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s book. This is a book for Christine Rosen’s, The Extinction of Experience. But the thing about the book is that, all these books really, is that it’s very hard to keep them fresh. Right? So I’ve taught a course on media and politics, and so already this book, which didn’t come out that long ago, is referring to things that have kind of passed on.

But one of the recurring themes that’s in your book, that’s in this book, and the one that I’m trying to find and failing, is this sense of enclosure where there’s a desire to find on social media these kinds of almost like adopted families of common opinion. And this was mocking, these were mocked rather, for being what are called safe spaces. But that’s really a part of the structure of social media. Right? The algorithm delivers to you the safe space, it’s not exclusive to the left in any sense.

Christine Rosen:

No, that’s true. And I think what’s important to remember about that is that the thing that social media does that doesn’t happen in the real world is that there is no barrier to entry to these communities. So if you think about what a community is, there are obviously great benefits to being part of a community, but there are a huge number of responsibilities too. So if you join a community, say you volunteer with a local charitable organization, you have to show up, you have to do your part, you have to pitch in, and you have to support the work of the organization in lots of different ways. So that requires something of you.

So for a lot of these communities, especially for people who are already living either lonely or isolated lives, and who maybe aren’t super politically active, but they’re also maybe not active in a religious organization, they feel a little adrift. All they have to do is log on, and instantly they have thousands of friends, and these friends are enthusiastic and responding to them and talking to them, and they don’t feel lonely anymore. And the barrier to entry is basically turning on the internet, and the responsibility is just to keep reaffirming and sharing information with other people who already agree with you about the bigger picture of what the world, what’s happening in the world. So that’s extremely intoxicating because again, we’re wired to want to bond with our fellow human beings. But this way of bonding, which is for too many people, replacing the old way of bonding, which was in face-to-face interactions, that’s causing all kinds of unintended consequences and harms.

And the reason it’s such a conundrum is that there are plenty of these spaces that are doing all kinds of great work in bringing together people, organizing them, and then doing positive things in the real world with that organizational skill. So that’s why you can’t just dismiss it out of hand, but I worry about, because it’s linked to this rise in loneliness and isolation and people feeling much more polarized and divided and pessimistic about the future of the country in particular, I think that’s where these tools start to become things that exacerbate existing problems, rather than solving problems.

James Patterson:

That’s great. And I found the other book, it’s The Outrage Industry by Berry and Sobieraj.

Christine Rosen:

Yes, I have heard of, yes. That’s a good book.

James Patterson:

And what you just described is very familiar, but also in terms of what people experience in the loneliness, but what they’re focused on, and to some degree young are focused on are all these, on being on the receiving end of messages from televised figures. And that what you described as almost like a kind of democratization here means that it’s more decentralized and it’s also harder to turn off.

Christine Rosen:

Yes, exactly. Well, it’s there all the time and you will, the way that notifications on any, if you allow any notifications on any platform you regularly use, you’ll know. It’s constantly reminding you stuff is happening and you’re not involved. Don’t you want to jump back in? You might be missing something. I mean, the old phrase was fear of missing out, but actually, and it’s prompted, what I’ve heard people lately say is the joy of missing out. I don’t want to know, there’s so much coming at me, I just want to turn off my phone. But there are real, again, this is how we are wired, we are wired to be alert to new information all the time because that’s how we survived before technology. And now that part of our humanness is in a weird way working against us with some of these tools.

James Patterson:

I had someone message me the other day saying, “If you haven’t already, please don’t log on. Today we’re doing Hitler discourse.

Christine Rosen:

No.

James Patterson:

And it turns out that there was that Tucker interview, and but of course I hadn’t logged on because I was teaching all day. I was actually doing that thing you were saying we need to do, which was in person.

Christine Rosen:

That’s good.

James Patterson:

Educating.

Christine Rosen:

That’s very important. And there’s a reason that one of the early jokes about the internet age was the rule that by the third or fourth comment on any article, someone would call someone else a Nazi.

James Patterson:

That’s right.

Christine Rosen:

Again, there’s something about our anonymity and the fact that we do not have to look someone in the eye when we say and do the things we do online, that there’s actually a term for it, the online dis-inhibition effect. So that is rampant, and particularly in our political conversations these days.

James Patterson:

So I’m firmly middle-aged now, and so when I went to live musical events, I went to shows. If you held anything up at a show, it was a lighter, and it was usually ironically because no… And the other thing is everyone smoked, but now people hold up phones. And as you point out in the book, not only do people constantly take pictures and recordings, but they don’t actually look at them. No one looks at them.

Christine Rosen:

No, this was really fascinating to me because everyone I talked to who when I would ask them, “Why do you take pictures of this or that? Why do you record? When you go to the museum, why are you taking a picture of the painting? Why?” And they all said the same thing, and I think they were being honest. This is how they actually felt. They’re like, “Well, I want to remember it. I want this to be a memory.” Turns out though, the way our quirky little human brains work, the more time you spend taking pictures during an experience, the less likely you are to remember them because there’s something that tells your brain, “Oh, you know what? You’ve outsourced this. You’re going to have a picture of it.”

Now look, we all want pictures. I’ve got tons of pictures of my kids. Everybody shouldn’t stop taking pictures. But because of the ease and the sophistication and the ubiquity of the photos we take, we also don’t kind of go back and revisit them and sort of curate them. And the old physical photo album isn’t the way most people re-experience those previous experiences that they tried to record.

And I will say for live music and live entertainment in particular, I love to see, I was at a comedy show not long ago, and they had us all put phones in the bags and you had to check your phone in and you get it back later but they didn’t want any of us to record the comedian who was working on new stuff. But it also was, it was wonderful because people, strangers talked to each other, people turned and… It was a much more community convivial experience than I had had at concerts where everybody’s holding up their phone.

So, the look up experience is something I think we all need to have more of, not looking down. We look down all the time at our screens or at our laptops and whatnot. In the real world, when you’re experiencing something pleasurable or entertaining, look up. Don’t put that screen between your face and what you’re trying to experience, because at the end of the day, you’ll have a firmer… We know this from research. Your memory of that experience will be deeper and richer and more detailed than if you’re just filming it. It just will.

James Patterson:

Yeah, and at the shows I was going to, you might also get hit by a flying person.

Christine Rosen:

Yes, exactly. What show? Were you in mosh pits? Okay, that’s another conversation. It’s an off the record conversation, that’s great.

James Patterson:

That’s right, that’s later. So I’m going to hit you with something that’s a little out there, but I know you’re a veteran of the podcasting world, so.

Christine Rosen:

Go for it.

James Patterson:

You’re not going to have a problem with this. There’s this place in a Nevada called Goodsprings, and it’s a small town most Americans had never heard of until a game that came out in 2010 called Fallout New Vegas. And it’s about sort of post-apocalyptic epic over two factions fighting over the Hoover Dam. And what’s crazy is that this game was so popular that people started to go to Goodsprings in real life, IRL, for New Vegas Day.

Christine Rosen:

Oh, wow.

James Patterson:

And now the fans go there and they have a kind of regular pilgrimage site for all of the different businesses. And this really is what came to mind when I was looking at the blending of place, which is the physical embodiment where we have experience, in space, which are these mediated experiences you were describing before. Is this what you had in mind? Is this kind of like the way you kept back from mediated experiences?

Christine Rosen:

No, it’s actually, it makes me happy to hear this story because yes, if… They all met in cyberspace, right?

James Patterson:

Right.

Christine Rosen:

But they all ended up, or the ones who chose to go to this place, ended up in physical place, which means they did have to interact with each other. And I would be curious to know how awkward some of those initial interactions might’ve been, right? Because everyone has in their mind’s eyes some idea of someone they’re talking to before they meet them. And then when you see them, it’s often a little jarring. It can be very, it could be, oh my goodness, what an attractive person. Or it could be, oh no, if you talk to… I interviewed a lot of people who use dating apps. It can be, oh, but that, you’re not six feet tall, you’re really not. I’m looking at you in the eye and I’m five-two, so there are…

But that actually is a positive story because what that shows is the deeply, a deep human need to connect in person, in face-to-face to actually bond. That kind of bonding cannot be whatever you’re told by Silicon Valley who wants to give you an avatar or create a chatbot that uses your voice and is just like you. All of these things are no replacement for being in each other’s company, face-to-face in person. And so that’s a great story. It also, I mean, great business for the… Good for that town, for seizing on it and going with it. That’s fantastic. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. And I would say that’s the hybrid reality we want.

Now, the question would be to ask someone who goes to that event, how many hours they spend online versus how many hours they spend in person at the event. And I would bet it would still be a lot more online. And so that means that although they’re having these in-person connections with people they met online, there probably the opportunity cost is when they go back home, are they spending a lot of time on the screen and not around the people in their local community? So that’s another trade-off to consider.

James Patterson:

Yeah, they probably have like 1,000 hours in the game.

Christine Rosen:

Right, right, right.

James Patterson:

So, that’s just not a good trade-off. So there’s, just what is, is there a policy program that you have in mind, some kind of legislation or regulation of online content? A common one that you see as a simple solution would be getting rid of the infinite scroll, where you actually have to move on to the next page by pressing something.

Christine Rosen:

Right. Well, so I mean, this is where I become more free-market conservative. First of all, I don’t think there are top-down policy solutions to a lot of these challenges because these have to do with character and virtue and what kind of people we want to be.

That said, there are some things I do think where policy has a role, anything regarding platforms or technologies that harm children. I think we have to have, and we are having those conversations now. I’d say they’re 10 years too late, but holding these companies accountable for not enforcing the age limitations that we have. These are platforms designed for adults. They’re being used by eight and nine year olds sometimes, and I don’t worry as much about the predator stuff, although that exists online. I worry more about the habits of mind and behaviors that these platforms are encouraging in children for whom the platform was not designed. So I think enforcing age limits, which we already have on the books, we don’t have to pass a new law for that, but we do need to start enforcing that, and we need to make the companies responsible for their product, so that’s one thing with social media in particular.

When it comes to the design choices, in Europe, they are actually passing policies to try to encourage more thoughtful design choices. So that yes, like infinite scroll or the next episode, all the stuff, that’s where I don’t think regulation would help. These are private companies, they’re allowed to design their product, but they should have a higher ethical bar to leap over if their products are marketed to children. And they should disclose what is the information they’re gathering on you, in a way that isn’t a 500-page terms and conditions, just check this box and don’t bother to read it, approach. So I think they should adopt some industry standards about transparency, and codes of ethics.

This is probably pie in the sky on my part, even hoping for this. There is no competitive advantage for them to do this. Instead, we get these very gauzy Instagram ads about, we have new parental controls and we’re going to do this and that. And if you talk to their lobbyists though, and say, “Well, why don’t you put something on there that gives you a prompt, would you like to close the app? You’ve been on this app for two hours.” They’re like, well, we think people should be on the app all the time. So it’s that tension again, it comes down to us. We need to inculcate again, better habits of mind, better habits in general, and more skepticism about not just the tech companies, but about our own self-delusion when it comes to how much time we’re spending using these tools.

James Patterson:

Just as a final question, you mentioned dating apps, and while you were just talking, it reminded me, they’re not doing well.

Christine Rosen:

No, yeah.

James Patterson:

And I’m now teaching students who are younger than Facebook.

Christine Rosen:

That’s horrifying. Oh, we’re so old.

James Patterson:

Yeah, oh, I know. So there’s a not too distant future, we may not be doing this anymore. Do you think that’s true, or what do you think?

Christine Rosen:

Let me say, I wish it were true. Now, the dating apps not doing well, I have been reading about this and it’s quite true, in part because they’ve just become kind of like romance junkyards. There’s so many fake profiles and the male to female ratio is such a mess, and the matches aren’t good.

Here’s my concern, though. If you read what the Silicon Valley folks are trying to patent and what they’re really excited about in the relationship space, as they say, it’s making more efficient the act of even getting to know someone. So they want to create chatbots. And some of these are actually already in use experimentally on some platforms, where your chatbot interacts with the chatbot of the person whose profile was matched on the dating site. And the bots go through all these questions you might not have time to answer because you have 60 different people you’re chatting with on a dating app. And it makes it very efficient and it knocks people out who the bot has determined because of all of your browsing habits you wouldn’t like and all of your state of preferences.

So that by the time you actually meet another human being in the real world, not only have you had to promote yourself and turn yourself into this marketable product with listing all your likes and dislikes, but your bot and that bot have both had a conversation where they know a lot more about you than maybe you even wanted them to know, so-

James Patterson:

I know.

Christine Rosen:

That’s the direction Silicon Valley, the engineers want us to head, right? Let’s make all of this more efficient. I would argue, you know what? Everybody jokes about, oh, it’s so hard to meet people in a bar or at a restaurant. No, you know what? It should be hard to meet other people. That’s the barrier to entry. It’s difficult to find someone with whom you can trust and love enough to marry and raise a family with that. That, it should be hard, because that’s a built-in way of making sure you make better choices. So I do think it’s much more, the barrier to entry for meeting people in the real world causes a lot more anxiety now, particularly for younger generations. But that’s good. The anxiety is a good thing. It should be a little nerve-wracking because it’s a challenging thing to embark on finding another person with whom you want to share your life.

James Patterson:

This wonderful story you have in there about this man who’s met someone he’s been friends with on Facebook for years and does not recognize why he’s hot and shaking and all that. And it only just later occurred to him that he’s attracted to her.

Christine Rosen:

He’s like, wow, I really think I liked her. I was like, you think? Yeah, I think that might’ve been it. It was very sweet. What a, he was such a nice kid.

James Patterson:

Yeah, you could feel him re-embodying experience.

Christine Rosen:

Exactly, exactly. Well, he learned to understand the signals his own body was giving him because he hadn’t had to do that enough. So, yeah.

James Patterson:

The book is The Extinction of Experience, the author, the wonderful and charismatic, Christine Rosen. Thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Christine Rosen:

Thanks so much for having me, it was really fun.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.