Whether it’s the monitor setup at a desk job, a laptop on the couch, or a flatscreen TV with the latest NFL game playing, more and more of our daily lives are being consumed by technologies that mediate the world for us.

One writer, the historian and social critic Christine Rosen, has asked the question bubbling beneath the surface of our mediated lives in her new book The Extinction of Experience: What do we lose when we offload our relationships, work, and skillsets to the screen?

Rosen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent think tank based in Washington, D.C., and is an editor for Commentary magazine. She also helped found The New Atlantis, a journal that explores technology and culture from a perspective that advocates for humanism.

Rosen has thought about modern technology’s impact on our lives for a long time. In 2008, she wrote an article called “People of the Screen” in which she discusses what we lose in the transition from paper to pixel regarding reading and attention spans. My copy of this essay is underlined, highlighted, and coffee-stained all over, so it was a delight for me to get her new book, a work that’s been years in the making, in my mailbox this past weekend.

What Do We Lose?

“What do we lose?” is perhaps the guiding question in Rosen’s new book. Oftentimes, tech developers and the millions who consume their products tend to ask the opposite question: “What do we gain?” Or “How will this make my life easier, faster, more efficient, more convenient.” Or, here’s my favorite one: “How will this product maximize my productivity?”

Rosen reminds us that technological progress isn’t always progress, and inevitably comes with tradeoffs. This has generally been true of new inventions, but in the age of digital mass media, the tradeoffs aren’t benign; we actually lose a number of essential parts of what makes for a flourishing human life. She writes in the book’s introduction,

Technological change of the sort we have experienced in the last twenty years has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution. In fact, many of our sophisticated technological inventions and platforms have been engineered to bring out the worst in human nature (p. 4).

Our desires are often hijacked, calculated, and manipulated by algorithmic design, and the more we interface with our virtual worlds, the less inclined we are to fully inhabit the real one. Jonathan Haidt makes a similar lamentation when he writes about the loss of normal childhood experiences in his 2024 book The Anxious Generation. “We need a new humanism,” Rosen writes,

“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 algorithms” (p. 21).

Returning to the Human

Rosen goes on to discuss how things like face-to-face communication, basic skills like handwriting, waiting in line at airports, and the array of human pleasures are all subject to the domination of the screen. I work part-time as a college professor, and am having my students in my composition class write a brief daily exercise by hand. I’m hoping this simple activity helps these students feel more connected with their thoughts, and slow down when they’re processing and putting words down on the page. The problem with only typing on a computer is, paradoxically, its ease and speed. Rosen notes how writing by hand strengthens the brain’s ability to recall information, and aids creativity, memory, and communication skills. As a college student, then, the best thing you can do is learn how to take notes by hand, review them, and then type them up later if you want the information to be clearer and more organized. Rosen also devotes a wonderful chapter to the lost art of waiting. Our impatience as a society, spurred in large part by our devices, is leading to a collective fog of anxiety, anger, and entitlement. Simply learning to wait, experience boredom, daydream, and invite silence into our lives can help us disentangle ourselves from the matrix of these digital invasions.

Rosen’s book is needed right now. As more of our daily experience goes mediated and buffered through screens, it’s important to wonder what we’re losing, and to return to a fundamental emphasis on visceral proximity and real-life connections with others.

Purchase Rosen’s book here.