The Times They Are a’Changing

Social psychologist Jon Haidt has amassed an impressive array of evidence, for instance, pointing toward the negative impact of the iPhone on the mental health of young girls. And the ubiquity of the personal computer has changed almost everything about how we conduct our lives over the last 40 years.

Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, explores the way that we are surrounded by “mediating technologies [that interpose themselves] between us and the world.” Instead of encountering the world through the immediate engagement of our senses, we do so through our screens and software. Ian Tuttle’s review of Rosen’s work draws on the insight of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Experience is the experience of human finitude.” Digital technologies, by contrast, are designed to negate the sense of limitation that is the core of all experience. Not by accident is Silicon Valley preoccupied with solving the problem of death, as if it were a defect of code.

Rosen’s concluding chapter recommends the Amish approach to technology, which consists of asking, “How will this impact our community? Is it good for our families? Does it support or undermine our values?”

Tuttle, however, points out that few people today live in communities with the stability and integrity of the Amish and capable of emulating the Amish decision-making process. The one community that does cultivate the Amish’s “robust skepticism about each new device and app” is the Torah community. And that is something of which we should be proud.