The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World
Christine Rosen
What changes when our experiences of play, sex, leisure, work, and relationships become mediated through a screen? What have we gained and what have ew lost as more and more of our life digitized? Rosen deftly addressed those massive questions in this warm and insightful book.
Technology companies treat our emotions like the law used to treat wives—as property, a kind of digital coverture. But the things technology encourages—efficiency, predictability, repeatability—are not the things we necessarily value in our emotional lives. Our technologies monitor our emotions, ostensibly to give us greater control over them, but this is part of a larger shift in the way we are choosing to see the world and live in it: more like machines. Your computer keyboard is a guide to this way of understanding our feelings. There is always a control button; we issue commands; we can delete what we no longer want; we escape when we mess up. We always have an option.
