Christine Rosen
Subject: Embracing Reality and NOT your Smartphone
Bio: Author
Reading: The Extinction of Experience is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Embracing Reality and NOT your Smartphone.
Our speaker is Christine Rosen who is the author of a new book entitled The Extinction of Experience. I want to discuss how our interaction with new technologies might be problematic to our mental health and wellbeing.
Christine Rosen:
The Extinction of Experience is a book about how technology has transformed our day-to-day lives. I took the title from an essay by a naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, who worried that each new generation of children was not getting hands-on experience in the natural world. They were not playing in the forest getting muddy, seeing animals and plants, and appreciating their ecosystem so that, if they found out something was going extinct, they would be indifferent because they had no experience with it. And that stayed with me as I noticed how our daily lives have been taken over by technology use. Not just the smartphone, but how much of what we do is mediated through a screen.
With the book, I look at face-to-face interaction, unmediated conversation, all the things that make us deeply human and understand each other. We have changed what we do with our hands with less handwriting and more touchscreen. We are no longer capable of dealing with boredom.
Public space has been transformed by technology. If you go to an art museum, a restaurant, or a concert so many participants hold up their smartphone and record it.
Mediation not only extends our powers with these new tools but helps with character formation and changes our point of view. I admire the work of technology critics who have written about the impact of social media and smartphones on teenagers’ mental health. But I wanted to go in a different direction and examine the choices that we make every day and think about how we should organize our lives.
Larry Bernstein:
Let me start with a question about handwriting. In college, I scribbled mostly illegible notes. Technology has radically improved. For example, this podcast is being recorded and I'm going to get a perfect AI transcription. Soon AI will provide a well-reasoned 10-minute summary of my podcast in either text or audio that is better than the transcript. Technology will change the educational process and how does handwriting improve the learning experience?
Christine Rosen:
AI can do plenty of things quickly with few errors. What concerns me when handwriting disappears is that your mind and body work together, which is called embodied cognition. We know from multiple studies how memory formation and recall work that if you go to a lecture and take notes by hand, you are going to remember better than if you type out notes on your computer. Now what we have not tested yet is what happens to memory formation if you let AI summarize it for you.
Lots of writers do drafts by hand in part because it forces them to slow down their thought process because the pace at which you can write by hand is slower than what you can do on a keyboard.
Many schools no longer teach cursive handwriting anymore. Kids are going to have different forms of working memory than previous generations. This might seem like a squishy thing, but because I was trained as a historian, it matters to me. Kids will be unable to read our founding documents written in cursive.
Larry Bernstein:
I used a blue book in college to take exams. Most students never picked them up, they just sat in a box.
There was a time difference between taking the exam and getting back the finished graded product. Oftentimes the teachers did not go through the answers and there was no learning feedback loop.
Technology can give immediate grading.
I did a podcast with my son to ask him how he was using AI in his college, and he said, he would ask AI for assistance with a homework assignment. He would then ask AI for a similar problem with a solution. Then another problem until he understood how to do it and then move on.
There is this give and take, and we can have more immediate feedback and learning loops. How do you think about learning as a process in combination with technology to get the best of both worlds?
Christine Rosen:
It depends on the age of the student and the context of what they are trying to learn. If you look at a higher order mathematics student at the college level who is trying to figure out methods to solve specific problems, then using AI tools is probably fine.
I would have a serious problem with a young person who is learning how to craft an essay or a creative work by using Chat GPT to make an opening draft. Students are doing this in most school settings. The technology writes, and then the human edits. We are teaching an entire generation of children how to be editors. That initial challenge of staring at a blank piece of paper to craft words that make sense, that process itself is valuable and you cannot replace it with technology without losing skills.
EdTech technologists love to experiment on kids. We give students free iPads to students. We should pump the brakes on that until we have some actual studies to see whether it improves educational outcomes. Because the idea that an AI tutor is the same thing as a human tutor strikes me as on its face completely ridiculous. That does not mean there is not a role for some tools in education, but what should have learned from our uncritical embrace of social media and smartphone use, particularly by the young, is that there is always a trade-off.
I talk with my hands; there are subtleties that we only understand by the art of practicing reading other people's faces and bodies that begins in childhood before we can even speak. We are learning how to understand and read our mother's facial expressions, to know whether someone is angry or perplexed. Now the more we spend time in a mediated space, we still might be able to see each other's faces, but those more subtle clues are not easily picked up on the screen. And there have been tons of social science research about how it is easier, for example, to lie to someone if you are talking to them with a screen versus face-to-face.
Larry Bernstein:
If we wanted to do this podcast in person, it would be challenging, and we probably could not make that happen. But zoom, no problem.
Tell me about convenience, why we should be concerned about it. Sure, I will miss some cues during this interview, but I will not see you at all otherwise.
Christine Rosen:
I do not have a problem with technology creating opportunities that did not exist before because you're absolutely right for either of us to get on an airplane and meet in person, to record something for an hour is inefficient. But if we have been friends for 25 years, I would get on a plane and come see you.
There are trade-offs. Technology is not all good.
Larry Bernstein:
Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, was on the podcast to talk about women working from home. Women are responsible for the kids, and many women are willing to sacrifice aspects of work to spending more time with their kids. How should our society embrace flexible work?
Christine Rosen:
During the pandemic so many white-collar workers had the luxury of doing their jobs from home. They are anxious to retain that independence and flexibility. There are two things to consider. One is workplace culture. Editorial meetings and discussions of ideas are much more productive when everyone is in the same room. If you are on a zoom call, that quiet guy says nothing but in person you can call on him. Things get hammered out; people answer questions. It is much more effective.
I was grateful to have flexible working arrangements when my kids were in the house. They are now off at college. As someone who benefited from these arrangements, the flexibility particularly for women with young children is central and it should be used as an effective marketing tool by businesses who want to keep those employees. That said, it harms the young employees and mentoring is decimated by remote work.
I have research assistants and a lot of interns. They come in my office and go, “I have this problem, what do I do?” That conversation works easily when we are all in the same physical space. To schedule a zoom call makes it harder. If you are a young worker looking for mentors, it is extremely hard when everyone is remote and there's no way to develop a mentor and mentee relationship.
Federal worker requirements are a response to the tumbleweeds in Federal buildings. People stopped doing their jobs; they stopped coming in. There was not accountability. There will absolutely be a draconian overreach! But then they will strike a balance to keep the productive workers.
Larry Bernstein:
Intimacy is a challenge. I go to restaurants and see a couple on a date, and they are both looking at their cell phone instead of speaking with each other.
Christine Rosen:
It is incredibly sad. Mediated experiences in one's intimate relationships have made us even more risk averse. It is scary to sit down across the table from someone you do not know that well and try to understand them, whether it is on a date, whether it is a work colleague, you risk embarrassing yourself or them feeling embarrassed. What the smartphone has allowed us to avoid that risk taking and gives you a false sense that there is always something better around the corner.
If I am sitting across from someone on a date and I feel nervous, it is much easier to pick up my phone and check my messages than it is to be like, why do I feel nervous? What did this person do or say? Or what is it that triggered that feeling? And is it nerves, is it excitement or is it fear?
Identifying one's own emotional experiences trying to understand someone else's is crucial to human connection. We have raised an entire generation of people who do nothing but escape their own emotional experiences while failing to read people with them face to face. That leaves us stunted. It makes it difficult for people to connect. Rising levels of anxiety and depression and mental health crises we hear about are in part an expression of people's inability to sit and understand and process their own feelings.
Larry Bernstein:
People watch TikTok or play ridiculous games on their phone. That bothers me. How should we think about using your time constructively?
Christine Rosen:
Former US Representative Mike Gallagher called Tok-tok Digital Fentanyl. It has an addictive quality. These videos you can scroll endlessly who turn to them in moments of boredom. What they often say is they are not exactly seeking entertainment. They just want their brain to stop. They go into this void of repetitive watching. It is like watching people play the machine slot machines in Vegas where they keep hitting the button over and over. There is a hypnotic effect that they find pleasurable. The human mind has not evolved to manage all the stimulation it receives now.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell me about why self-soothing is important.
Christine Rosen:
People have always found ways to deal with anxiety and boredom. There are people that used to smoke, I have a friend who is constantly knitting, and it helps her.
The difference with the technological form of self-soothing is twofold. One, it is not a private activity. Everything you do is being tracked, surveyed, monitored. It creates information about you that perhaps you do not want people to know. And the other thing it does is habituate you to a level of engagement that makes everything in the real world seem dull and insignificant.
Larry Bernstein:
There is this new experiential art concept in Chicago an event space that had Van Gogh.
Christine Rosen:
The immersive ones.
Larry Bernstein:
Sunflowers the size of a building. There are hundreds of people enjoying it in an event space. AI makes images in the style of Van Gogh. Then later that same week, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago. and they have real Van Gogh paintings, but no visitors were present. The real Van Gogh paintings were not generating the same excitement as the AI immersive Van Gogh paintings.
Christine Rosen:
I've been to the immersive Van Gogh in DC. In Washington I'm blessed to have a lot of free art museums. If you tell people that the immersive Van Gogh digital experience is as good or better than the real Van Gogh, rather than something inspired by a truly remarkable mind and creative genius, then you are selling them something that is wrong because there is no way the actual Van Gogh painting can compete. But it is a simulacrum of art.
It is not art. I would call it an immersive digital experience and should be treated as distinct from true art. The immersive experience is the opposite of true art which requires you to be humble before the creation by another human being that is remarkable and stood the test of time. You look at that painting and you're like, what was this artist trying to communicate with this work? The immersive art experience, it is simply to entertain. You are at the center. Your experience is the most important thing.
An art history professor at Harvard has transformed how she teaches art to younger generations. One of her first assignments is to pick one object of art and stare at it for like six hours total, not all in the same day, but you have to do that before you can try to understand it and write anything about it.
It sounds like a tedious assignment, but the students loved it, and it has led them to experience that humility and get into the mind of someone else. One of the ways that we become better people is to put ourselves in the shoes of others and try to understand how they feel and think and why they act the way they do.
Literature is another great example of how we do this. So, when we digitize stuff, we do not distill its essence. We just transform it into something else. Now that can be pleasurable. As you said, I enjoyed the time I spent in the immersive experience. It is cool, but it's not art.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's say your favorite band is going to perform at a venue and the acoustics are poor. The alternative is you can listen in your home, comfortable completely immersed in the music. It is a superior product than the live product with the artist. How should we think about it?
Christine Rosen:
I frequently go to live performances. Depending on your temperament, you are going to prefer one to the other, but they are not the same. They are qualitatively different experiences. I would say philosophically, the reality machine, Robert Nozick's experiment, where people were asked if you could have this perfect reality or perfect experience, but you knew you were plugged into a machine to have it, that it was a simulation, but you loved it just like it was real.
Would you value that the same? And most people used to say, no, that is terrible. I would not want to be plugged in like The Matrix. But they've repeated versions of that experiment over the years, and people are more amenable to the idea of the simulation if it does not require them to be hooked up to a machine, but they could take a pill instead. What that tells us about human nature is that the easier you make the replica, the more quickly we are willing to adopt it as plausible replacement of the original.
Larry Bernstein:
We have a mutual friend, Patrick Allitt. Patrick was your dissertation advisor at Emory University. I was introduced to Patrick by the Teaching Company. Patrick can distill information in a way that is fun and interesting, and he brings history alive.
Christine Rosen:
There is tremendous value to learning from Patrick in these new technological forms. I think it broadens our access to great teachers. What worries me is that generations raised with habits of mind will not have the patience to consume that content. They will get the AI summary of Patrick's lecture and then they will move on to the next thing. They will not have knowledge because knowledge takes time, takes questioning. It takes thinking to yourself, is he right about that? Let me look over here and read this book and that book and develop a curiosity about the world.
We are performing a mass social experiment right now with kids. I do see some worrisome signs about the way they want to consume information and their inability to distinguish between consuming information and seeking wisdom.
Larry Bernstein:
Christine, I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to technology?
Christine Rosen:
I am optimistic about the younger generation. They understand how attractive their smartphones are. Awareness gives me hope because they will ask tougher questions of these technologies and they will pick and choose where they want them to mediate their lives and where they think the human experience matters.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Christine for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, the topic was Gene Hackman: French Connection, Unforgiven, Hoosiers and Crimson Tide. Our speaker was The What Happens Next Culture Critic Darren Schwartz who evaluated Hackman’s performances in some of his most popular movies.
I would like to make a plug for our next podcast with Lindsey Burke who is the Director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. The topic will be what does it mean to abolish the Federal Department of Education.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Gene Hackman: The French Connection, Unforgiven, Hoosiers and Crimson Tide, here.
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