by Barry Cooper
About a generation ago, Neil Postman, an American media analyst, worried that we were “amusing ourselves to death” by watching so much television. Around the same time George Grant, a Canadian philosopher, wrote about how convenient technologies also brought “intimations of deprival” as increasingly we lived within technologically mediated realities. Christine Rosen’s recent book, The Extinction of Experience, the topic of this post, provides an update on Postman and Grant. Her conclusions are more dire than theirs.
To begin on a personal note, the “deprivals” imposed by technology have become most evident to me from a course I teach on ideology, mostly to first-year students.
Historically, introductory courses such as this end with a sit-down three-hour-long final exam where students write their answers in nearly universally available “blue books.” I have had to change the format to a take-home exam where students submit their answers online as an email attachment. The reason for the change is that students’ writing, their orthography, has become unreadable. Before trying to grade their papers, I would have to spend several frustrating minutes trying to decipher their chicken-scratch. Often, I am sure my frustration was expressed in the grades awarded, which obviously was not fair to them.
I introduced a second change as well. Instead of writing a conventional term paper, students could choose to go without social media for a week. I asked them to take notes in a daily journal, reflect on what they had written down, and finally write up their interpretation of the experience. It looks easy, but it isn’t.
Some students found it impossible to undertake what they soon called a “media fast.” Others concluded they had become addicts and vowed to kick their habit. Several more were astonished to discover that there were “bunnies” on campus –more accurately, white-tailed jackrabbits. And birds as well! Who knew?
I also suggested they learn to take notes by hand. The average student can type 40 words a minute but write only 13 words a minute. If you learn to take written notes, you learn to slow down and determine when what is being said in a lecture is important. Writing also forges connections between mind and body, whereas typing produces a transcript much like a recording. About ten percent of the students were capable of taking notes by hand. My guess is that the rest can’t read their own handwriting.
The disappearance of handwriting among students results from a relatively trivial technological substitution. Nevertheless, it illustrated how pre-technological skills disappear, even if they are thousands of years old. Near the beginning of The Extinction of Experience, Rosen observed that Apple promises us a world that is “automatic, effortless, and seamless.” She raised the question: do we want to live in such a world? Her book, in other words, challenges the axiom that history is progressive and that progress is measured by technological innovation.
