When I was fourteen, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. I have always been allergic to the idea of going somewhere for the explicit purpose of “having a good time.” But that’s exactly what a cruise—at least this particular kind of cruise—is: a never-ending parade of convenient entertainment and diversion. Gorge yourself at breakfast; use the coupon in your welcome bag for a mid-morning massage; have lunch brought to your table at the pool; shop luxury brands on the promenade in the afternoon; go to a fancy dinner and a comedy show and max out that bar access card. On the days you actually alight on land, you’re met with a theme park version of Cozumel or San Juan, rigorously patrolled tourist markets selling souvenirs or even the cruise line’s private island devoted entirely to passengers’ seamless pleasure. (Royal Caribbean’s is called Perfect Day at CocoCay. To me, that feels like a threat—have a perfect day, or else.)
It’s all too easy, I remember thinking as I downed yet one more Shirley Temple. I couldn’t define it at the time, but I had the persistent feeling that I was being lied to. Surely such a quantity and variety of food doesn’t materialize from nothing; it’s prepared and served by people whose labor is carefully hidden from me, presumably because it would bum me out if it weren’t. One day, we disembarked in Mexico and saw police officers with machine guns guarding the limits of the tourist area. Something was being kept out—or in.
I was brought back to that week as I read Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, which evaluates the effects that apps, algorithms, social media, devices and other technologies have had on the way we encounter the world and relate to each other. Rosen claims that we have replaced true experiences—real encounters with the world—with simulations and cheap imitations (which I’ll refer to here as “experiences” for ease). Experiences are encounters with reality that lead us, as Rosen puts it, to become acquainted with the world as it is. The most fundamental of these—making friends, enjoying art, eating, having sex—characterize our way of being in the world and make us who we are.
“Experiences,” on the other hand, are false, controlled encounters with a pseudo-reality, which Rosen blames mostly on digital technology. More and more, Rosen writes, our “mediating technologies” are in the business not of enhancing our own senses to encounter the world better, but in replacing authentic experience with “experiences.” Take the Google Art Project, which offers tours of major museums with the ability to save, catalog and zoom in on art on the other side of the world, as well as to “build your own personalized gallery” and “share” it with friends. Google touts its ability to make art more accessible to people who can’t travel to the Uffizi or the Met, but Rosen argues that this technology imparts a subtler message: that “this way of experiencing art is better than the alternatives.” Google even brags about its “incredible zoom levels” that enable “the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond what is possible with the naked eye.” And while the cruise I took had nothing to do with “mediating technology,” I would categorize it as an “experience” too—an alternate reality designed by someone else to keep me entertained while denying me access to reality, with the goal of extracting something from me.
I picked up Rosen’s book hoping to learn more about what a true experience, rather than an “experience,” really is, but I found less clarity in The Extinction of Experience than I had hoped. Most of us would likely recognize Rosen’s description of what certain technologies do to our encounters with reality. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so eager to condemn “mediating technologies” as destroyers and distorters of experience, or so willing to limit our understanding of “experience” to only those encounters that tech enables. First, we might ask ourselves: When can mediation be a good thing? Why have we taken to adopting certain technologies and conveniences in the first place?
Should we prefer experience over “experience”? Rosen assumes so, but why that is the case is not at all obvious. Without an argument as to why reality is actually good and worth fighting to encounter—why it’s worth having “real” encounters with the world—it’s hard to defend our time against pressures to make our lives more efficient, databased or simulated.
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Rather than helping humans do their work or leisure better, Rosen argues, “mediating technologies” make us passive consumers of other people’s experiences. We watch someone skillfully craft a five-course meal on a cooking show while we sit at home shoveling cheap takeout into our mouths. Or we scroll through other people’s homesteading fantasies rather than learning how to garden. We are looking for “a brief glimpse of an authentic experience,” as she puts it, but we use technology to avoid all the hassle it would take to produce it ourselves.
This is, of course, an oversimplification. We also have to think about why so many of us prefer to order takeout than cook a meal, zoom in on art instead of going to the museum or take a cruise rather than a backpacking trip. One of those things is time. Pulling up a high-res version of an artwork is certainly more convenient than, say, flying to Florence or even driving across town. For a variety of reasons, we Americans lack leisure time compared to other wealthy countries, and that’s what’s needed to have real experiences—whether that’s appreciating or creating art, cooking a healthy meal for your loved ones or exploring the world. At the end of a long day of grinding away at work or taking care of kids or elderly parents, all we can often manage is that “brief glimpse” that our screens can provide us. In the moment, the choice is not between that and an authentic experience; it is between that and nothing.
The blame does not lie with those who engage in such “mediated” activities, as Rosen takes it, but rather those who are motivated to profit from people’s exhaustion and dulled curiosity. I know well the unnerving feeling she describes: that our technology has made reality too digestible—that feeling of being lied to. That food you just ordered on DoorDash, Uber Eats or, indeed, Seamless doesn’t emerge from the ether. All of the scaffolding of the app, your linked credit card and your delivery person’s anonymity trick you into thinking that the food that sustains you really was just that easy to grow, harvest, prepare and transport. We know it wasn’t, but the “experience” of ordering food insulates us from engaging with those realities.
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