The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World

by Christine Rosen

Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus.

Today, many of us choose to live in a form of pseudo-reality governed by algorithmically-enabled individual experiences. Much of what passes for authentic experience today is vicarious and virtual.

The human condition is embodied, recognizes its fragility, frequently toggles between the mediated and unmediated, requires private spaces, and is finite. By contrast, the User Experience is disembodied and digital, it is trackable and databased and usually always mediated. It lacks privacy and promises no limits—even after death, when, as several new technologies promise, our digital remnants can be gathered and engineered into posthumous chatbots to comfort our grieving family members.

Many of our current technologies seem to view people as the problem to which devices and platforms and algorithms provide a necessary solution. If earlier technologies were an extension of our senses, today’s technologies train us to mistrust our own senses and rely instead on technology.

And so this effort is not driven by perverse Luddism, but by the recognition that technology has altered and continues to re-form our understanding of many of the things we have in common as human beings. We don’t have to accept the replacement or end of these non-technological values and ways of knowing.

Behind the power we wield with our technologies is a timidity and aversion to risk.

What we reject, as we will see, are the inconveniences and small hazards of face-to-face communication, the laborious but necessary practice of doing things with our own hands, and the non-quantifiable experience of unmediated pleasure.

It is a plea to pause and consider what we are losing, as well as gaining, when we allow new technologies into our lives, and to question the motives of the companies so eager to have us “share” ourselves with them.

maintain we need to know what the real world looks like independent of Facebook (now Meta). And we need to be able to defend that world from technology when it threatens things that are better left alone.

It used to be that an experience was something—like a vacation—which you enjoyed (or not) in your own physical body, in a particular physical space at a particular time. You might re-experience it later by looking at pictures or by sharing stories about it with others. But your sensibility about an experience, particularly if it was dramatic or memorable and you were attempting to convey what it felt like to others, might be summed up by saying, “You had to be there.”

The extension of the virtual world into everyday life, whether on platforms that host Massive Multiplayer Online games or on Internet-enabled chatrooms and social media sites, has brought with it a new kind of anxiety over authenticity. We (rightly) worry about fake news, catfishing, and conspiracy theories, all of which flourish online, even while reassuring ourselves that we can still distinguish the true from the false.

More and more, we relate to our world through information about it rather than direct experience with it.

“Experience” has become to the twenty-first century what “lifestyle” was to the twentieth—a catchall term, quickly co-opted by marketers, that promises more than it can deliver. In 1997, business writers B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore described an emerging “experience economy” that offers customers not merely goods and services but “memorable” and “inherently personal” experiences.

Our technologies, which began as tools to enhance some functions—as eyeglasses correct weak eyesight—are moving more rapidly into the vision business, which is really the business of interpreting experience, not merely increasing our access to it. Given the brutally instrumental approach leaders of the technology industry take to human frailty, they might not be the best guides.

As sociologist Richard Sennett reminds us, humanism “requires the embrace of chance and rupture” by recognizing that these things are a necessary part of the human experience, not problems to be wished away by a new app or more sophisticated algorithm. The very things that many of our technologies want to make seamless and “frictionless,” as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is so fond of saying, such as the awkwardness of face-to-face conversations and the quirks of our physical bodies, are precisely the “ill-fitting pieces of experience” that, taken together, make us human.

If VR and wearable technologies continue to improve along the lines their creators envision, people won’t need to escape. They will replace their reality with one that is new and improved.

“The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience,” Richard Sennett wrote. “Looking always for an expression or reflection of himself in Experience, he devalues each particular interaction or scene.” Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has noted that “experience is the overcoming of perils” and that the word “experience” shares a common root with “experiment,” “expert,” and “perilous.” Experience, Tuan argues, is venturing into the unfamiliar and embracing uncertainty and potential peril.

Scientists such as Barbara Fredrickson have shown how the vagus nerve, which ties the brain to the heart, is implicated in our ability to read facial expressions and understand tone of voice. Increases in one’s “vagal tone,” which is measured by studying heart-rate variability, are related to one’s capacity for connection.

The vagal system is part of the biological system for human connection—evolution’s empathy engine, if you will.

Psychologists Gabriel Radvansky and Jeffrey Zacks have described the crucial role of “event boundaries” in memory formation and cognition. “Events are at the center of human experience, and event cognition is the study of how people perceive, conceive, talk about, and remember them,” Radvansky and Zacks write. But those events require clear demarcations to help us distinguish one from another and form permanent memories of our experiences.

He added, “Kids have to learn about emotion, and the way they do that, really, is by paying attention to other people. They have to really look them in the eye.” FaceTime, Skype, and other video chatting services aren’t the same, he found, especially since kids often multitask while using the services and don’t give the person on the screen their full attention. “If you eschew face-to-face communication,” Nass warns, “you don’t learn critical things that you have to learn … You have to learn social skills. You have to learn about emotion.”

Our ability to detect emotions and intent on others’ faces will become even more important as technologies of manipulation multiply.

Our tools for instant, asynchronous communication have habituated us to the assumption that we can always tell one another how we’re feeling. As a result, we also assume that we don’t have to make the effort to ask.

Today we are at risk of embracing an experience compensation effect. As our face-to-face experiences become more hurried, less frequent, and less satisfying, we delve deeper into mediated experiences to compensate, in a cycle that endlessly repeats itself. And while our technological skills flourish, our primal skills of embodied interaction deteriorate.

This way of understanding through the use of our physical bodies is what philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, more recently, George Lakoff have called embodied cognition.

Theorists of embodied cognition argue that any way of being in the world involves understanding the links between one’s mind, one’s body, and physical experiences. They argue that we cannot separate our understanding of ourselves from bodily experience.

In some significant way, writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, primes the brain for learning to read.

Whichever man has the better of the argument about Maker culture (my money is on Morozov), both would agree that tinkering is a kind of play, one that encourages the development of both tactile and cognitive skills. And yet, like handwriting, drawing, and craftsmanship, virtual experiences and technological tools are replacing unmediated, unstructured opportunities for play and learning among the population most in need of it for their healthy development: children.

Ten years ago, brain science and child development scholar Dimitri Christakis told the New York Times that thanks to technology use, students were habituated to a “supernatural” level of stimulation in their daily lives that teachers found difficult to match. “Reality, by comparison, is uninteresting,” Christakis said.

Similarly, technology billionaires’ foundations and technology companies maintain power to set policy without responsibility for any of the long-term consequences.

The shift from embodied to screen-based learning has prevented the flourishing of something we know to be educationally and psychologically beneficial, especially for young children: unstructured physical play.

Some of this is a consequence of the relentless acceleration of everyday life. As our daily pace increases, our expectations for what we can and should wait for change.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls these “the ‘microflow’ activities that help us negotiate the doldrums of the day.”

Given the extent to which we mediate our everyday experience, it might be more apt (although less perky) to call our information age the “age of stimulus overinclusion.”

At the heart of these practices is the inculcation of patience and the creation of the habit of listening—whether it is for the voice of God or to the concerns of others in your community.

A society that cannot delay gratification or exercise the patience to plan will have very different approaches to the consumption of natural and human resources, to institutional and professional expertise, and to politics than one that does. On-demand works well for video, but not always for democracy.

Arriving at oneself, figuring out who you are, what you love, what you think about your world and the people in it—these are experiences that require time, patience, boredom, daydreaming, and anticipation to discover. Without those things, we’re just killing time.

Perhaps we should demand an emotional impact statement from designers of technologies such as affective computing, persuasive technologies, and sensor-based software applications, akin to the environmental impact statements developers must submit before they break ground on a new building. Then we might have a better grasp of how their encroachment will impact our emotional landscape.

What the clock did to time technologists hope to do to emotion—regulate and regiment it, measure and monitor it.

Feelings require a sense of identity or self. “Only with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them,” Damasio writes.

Contemporary technology provides countless, compelling opportunities for such emotional contagion, but on a vast and virtual landscape.

As one of the researchers noted, “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states.” Technology favors one velocity: now.

In a highly competitive and unstable economy, where workers feel pressure to squeeze productivity out of nearly every hour in the day, we begin to measure emotions in terms of their efficiency and usefulness.

Pleasure—our own and others’—has become a form of mass entertainment. It has also become a means to an end; the end is “sharing” with the platforms that sell our data to the highest bidder, which in turn becomes a marker for future assumptions about us that will be made and acted upon by businesses, advertisers, governments, researchers, and countless other data brokers.

Historically the control of pleasure was done (and still is) by religious institutions, the state, and the family, among others. Our pleasures are still monitored and controlled by these traditional regulators, but we have added digital platforms including Meta and Google.

But as Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has argued, “Unnaturally strong explosions of strong synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong desires of habituation.”

As Benjamin suggested, “the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”

In a much-debated opinion piece in the New York Times, writer Judith Dobrzynski argued that museums are making a mistake by emphasizing participatory art experiences rather than focusing on cultivating appreciation of art for its own sake.

Art demands something from us. Entertainment does not; we seek out entertainment to give something to us.

It’s not that these technologies live our lives for us, as Nozick feared. It’s that we are embracing a way of living in which there are increasingly few arenas where we don’t live our lives through these technologies and conform to the behaviors the technologies are designed to encourage.