The first time I heard a critique of mediated experience, the critic was my dad. He was an avid photographer who, during our family’s year in India, when I was a young child, used his 35mm Exacta to capture thousands of photos that became carousels of color slides we viewed for many years thereafter. It was a remarkable documentary effort that solidified our memories of that year. But dad was aware of the tradeoff. A favorite joke became: “Q: How was your trip?” “A: I won’t know until the film is developed!” He realized that interposing a camera between himself and the people he encountered had altered the direct experience he and they would otherwise have had.
This weekend I heard Christine Rosen’s modern version of that critique in a discussion of her new book The extinction of experience: Being human in a disembodied world. I listened to the podcast on a hike, my noise-canceling Airpods insulating me from the sounds of the creek trail and from the people walking along it.
It’s complicated. When hiking alone I greatly value the ability to listen to interesting people and ideas while exercising, breathing fresh air, and moving through the natural world. The experience is embodied in one sense, disembodied in another. Reading the same material while lying on the couch would be a different, and arguably more extreme, form of disembodiment. But when I passed a family of four, all walking along looking at their phones, that felt wrong. When people are together they should actually be together, right? You’ve doubtless felt the same when seeing people in this together-but-not-together state.
Lately Pete Buttigieg has been urging us to spend less time online, more time IRL having face-to-face conversations. I think that’s right. There’s no doubt that the decline of social capital described in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone has accelerated in the 30 years since he wrote that book. America’s tragic polarization is a predictable outcome. Without the institutions and cultural traditions that once brought us together, face-to-face, in non-political ways, we’re all too vulnerable to being herded into competing online echo chambers that magnify our differences and erase our common humanity.
I won’t be abandoning my mediated and disembodied life online, but I do need to participate in it less and more critically, and prioritize my unmediated and embodied life IRL. The pendulum has swung too far away from the direct experience of shared reality, and that hasn’t been good for me nor for my country,
Years ago I was in a cafe in England where they played audio books instead of music. You could see people pause occasionally to listen to a passage, then return to their own conversations.
Do you remember Neal Stephen’s essay on mediated experiences, In the beginning was the command line, and especially the section The Interface Culture? It begins:
> I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.
> And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.
I recommend it!
* https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt#:~:text=THE%20INTERFACE%20CULTURE