Losing our senses & serendipity: Technology is dooming us to virtual unreality

Today, the line between the online and offline worlds is blurred, as phones and algorithms mediate more of our daily activities. Most of what passes for authentic experience is vicarious and virtual. The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by the philosopher Christine Rosen reminds us of the value of the physical reality we share.

It wasn’t always this way. Direct experience is our first teacher. A fighter’s scar, stretch marks from pregnancy, metaphors about a broken heart, or a nosy neighbour, these remind us that we experience things with our bodies. Face to face interaction is how we learn patience, and a sense of public space. It helps us conceptualise a shared reality.

But now, online communities tell us how the ‘real world’ works. Consensus reality seems insubstantial, as more of us mistrust our actual experience and live in these mental cocoons. Increasingly, young people prefer virtual interactions. To minimise awkward human contact, airports rely on kiosks to check-in and salespersons are replaced by iPads.

We’re meant to look at each other. Our intuition rests on the ability to read faces, physical signals, postures, micro-expressions. Encountering each other on screens, through texts and posts, deprives us of that ability. Children’s first experience of play, music, words, might now come from screens. Teachers struggle to hold their attention in real classrooms. Reading emotion and intent needs extended in-person contact, a capacity that children and teens are increasingly missing out on as physical playtime shrinks.

‘Veja du’ is what some technologists call this illusory reality: the sense of having done something virtually without having experienced it in real life. We consider ourselves familiar with famous destinations through VR, or imagine what we’ll look like when we age, or even simulate romantic relationships with fictional characters.

This means losing out on embodied cognition. We think with our bodies, by making things physically. Note-taking on a laptop means shallow processing. Architects who draft by hand know the connections between mind and body that they are trading off for the efficiency of computation.

We now perform our emotions, with memes, gifs and emojis. One study found that college kids score 40% lower on empathy than those from 30 years ago, and this decline coincides with smartphone adoption.

Tech is also racing to supply what we miss in terms of bodily cues. Sensors and gadgets to measure breathing, heart rates, autonomic nervous signals already exist, but could soon be a standard smartphone capability. Persuasive tech, armed with huge amounts of precise data, could manipulate us and subvert our intentions.

Even the mediated pleasures of online living – the capacity to experience travel, sex, food, art, music – are overstimulating, the book says. “Artificially strong explosions of strong synthetic experience” habituate us, weaken our ability to notice the less intense moments of real life, which are more like “fleeting whispers of pleasure”. As public places in cities – pavements, parks, cafes – became spaces where we are half in and half out, absorbed in our phones, we are robbed of serendipity and civic bonds.

While such panics have accompanied all new technologies from telegraph to television, the book warns that the digital takeover has had sudden and sweeping effects, and that it is important to recognise what we lose with every convenience we gain.