How many times a day do you interact with devices?

If you’re anything like me, it’s impossible to count. You’re reading this article on a phone or a tablet or a laptop. Maybe you used the alarm on your Apple Watch to wake up. Maybe you listened to a podcast while you brushed your teeth. Maybe you used an app to check the bus schedule or find a parking spot. Maybe you scrolled Instagram in the back of the Uber ride to work.

You get the point: Our lives have become increasingly — and perhaps irreversibly — mediated through our devices. Everywhere you look, there are screens between us and the world. This is a monumental change in the human condition, and it’s hard to appreciate just how significant it is when we’re all living through it.

There are clearly trade-offs with every technology. The only sensible question we can ever ask is: Are the trade-offs in each case truly worth it? What are they adding to our lives and, more importantly, what are they taking away?

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book called The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Rosen’s book is a meditation on what it means to be a fulfilled human being in a world defined by technology. She does a very good job of drawing our attention to the experiences we’re losing and making the case that we should resist these losses.

I invited Rosen on The Gray Area to talk about what’s really changed in human life and if all the concern about the scope of these changes is justified. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

The book is about the disappearance of certain kinds of fundamental human experiences. So what do you think we’re losing?

Christine Rosen

The one that I think is the most important is face-to-face interaction. We’re living in a world where we can actively choose not to look each other in the eye on a regular basis, not communicate with each other physically in person, in the same physical space. When we are forced into physical space, say waiting for the bus or walking around your neighborhood or town, you can tune everyone out by having earbuds in and paying attention to the screen that’s in your hand. You can actively dissociate from social physical spaces. And we all do it all the time. We do it in interstitial moments of time when we should maybe just let our minds wander. We do it when we interact in a consumer setting.

If you think about someone who works behind a cash register, and I interviewed and talked to a lot of people who do, they will say people aren’t very nice to each other anymore. The pleasantries that we think are expendable, inefficient, meaningless, they actually grease the wheels of our social interaction in a way that makes us able to all get along even with strangers in public space. And many of us are starting to develop habits of mind and behaviors that cultivate a preference for not being face-to-face, in each other’s presence. And that has serious long-term consequences for how we interact.

Sean Illing

What sort of consequences?

Christine Rosen

We’re hardwired evolutionarily to understand each other by reading each other’s physical cues: facial expressions first and foremost, but also hand gestures and tone of voice. Even just the way you position your body in space in relation to other people sends signals: I am not a threat. I am a threat. I want to belong. I want to........

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