Deep Dive: How Technology and Addiction to Phones Harms Real Life Interactions, with Christine Rosen | Ep. 879
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm Megyn Kelly. Technology has improved our lives in many ways, as you know, but it comes with some serious downsides. As we spend more of our lives online, are we trading our sense of self and even reality for convenience and a smiley face emoji? A new book tackles the ways in which we're losing some of our own humanity as part of our new way of life.

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary Magazine, and author of The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World. It's out September 10th, and you can pre-order it right now on Amazon.com.

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The pursuit to serve others is yours. Let it flourish. Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Private, Christian, affordable. Visit gcu.edu. Christine, welcome back to the show. Love your work on commentary, both online and on the pod with Mr. Pod himself, John Bedoretz, and others. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back. Yeah, congrats on the book. So explain to us what it's about in a nutshell.

Well, I was concerned while I watched each new generation coming of age, including my own kids, that there were a number of experiences that those of us who grew up pre-smartphone, pre-internet had had that were disappearing. Basic things like learning how to write by hand, but also broader skills like how to wait, how to be bored, etc.

How to daydream. The kinds of things that now, because we have these powerful new technologies, which are wonderful in many ways, they don't allow us to experience some of these things that actually do help us become better human beings. So that was the spark for thinking about all the ways in which we are mediating some of our human relationships and our human experiences in ways that might not be good for us long term.

I mean, I think about it like you and I grew up, I think we're around the same age at a time when, you know, all day long, mom, what can I do? Play outside, play outside. And that's what you would do, right? You'd ride your bike, you'd build a fort, you'd play a game with your friends. And now you look at these kids and they can be in the same room

playing video games against each other without looking at each other, without speaking to each other? Is this basically what you're trying to embody with the extinction of experience?

Yes, the title actually comes from a naturalist who was worried that kids growing up in a world where they didn't play outside and they didn't experience the natural world wouldn't understand what they'd lost if that world disappeared. And I feel like our real world, because of the power of our technologies, some of our real world experiences are disappearing because we outsource them to technology. Friends get together online, but

less so in face-to-face ways. Our public spaces, which used to be places you could bump into people, meet new people, have become just Wi-Fi hotspots where we can all be in our own little universe on our phones. And the way we treat each other is affected by that. We are less patient. If you look at rates of road rage and air rage, we are less likely to be able to get along, um,

And some of the things we do to each other when we have the safety of a screen between us and another human being aren't things we'd ever do if we were face to face. That's very true. You also write about how the ability to read another person's facial expressions is as an important and practiced art and that this younger generation is not developing it.

Yes, it's interesting. There's a lot of really interesting behavioral science research about how we've evolved to read each other's bodily signals, but especially to read facial expressions. And if you talk to people, as I did when I was doing research on this book, people who work in diplomacy or in business or in other public-facing jobs, they'll tell you,

People don't make eye contact. They don't know how to make small talk. They don't, they've lost some skills. Part of that's because we don't have to practice them. We can do a lot through the screen, which is easier. It's more efficient. It's easier to send an emoji than to learn as a child, whether someone's face is smiling because they're angry or because they're actually happy. But we're hardwired as human beings to read those signals. We just need to practice more. Yeah.

Yeah. You wrote about how like humans are uniquely designed to do that. Like we don't have, obviously some men have facial hair, but we don't have hair all over our faces. We have these faces that actually really are primed to show emotion. If only someone would look at them.

Right. We're outsourcing a lot of our expression of emotion to technologies. Those technologies in turn are reading us too, and not necessarily only to benefit us, to make money for the companies that create the platforms, obviously, but also it's a lot of information about ourselves that maybe we wouldn't want to share if we were asked straightforwardly, would you want someone to be able to read your attempt to

seem cheerful when in fact you're annoyed with them. Well, we have technology that will do that now. And I'm not sure we necessarily want to be revealing that much of ourselves in our use of these technologies either. So how are like all the memes and the emojis that are so popular with Gen Z playing into this? Are those a force for good or a force for evil?

So I spent some time in meme world. You know, I'm a Gen Xer and I'm old, so I still use emojis and badly, according to my children. But I found those really creative because they're quite evocative. They tend to be extremely sarcastic and some of them are just downright funny.

But the emotional impact is what I think that generation in particular is trying to express through a medium that isn't as expressive as their human body is. Right. So they're trying to get their friends to laugh at something that they find funny. But they're they're not in the presence of those friends as often as they used to be. And that's.

That's actually the problem is that they can be very creative in their use of this technology, but they are choosing the technology and the mediated relationships over being face to face with each other. And that's a more valuable connection in the long term for them. Yes, I learned over the past couple of years that, for example, one of the things

that we are not supposed to be doing as Gen Xers that we are doing is, for example, the, I guess you're not supposed to use it using emojis at all. I didn't know that, but like the one where the head is tilted and the tears are coming out as they're laughing, like crying, laughing. If you use that emoji, you're supposed to put at least three of them there. If you, if you want to stay somewhat cool, you can just using a single floating head is a hard no, but I didn't know this. We're not supposed to be using emojis at all. That's out now.

Yes. No, we're all very uncool. Although I do think, and I, if I could give a plug for our generation, because we're so underappreciated culturally and socially, we are the hybrid generation. We grew up without this stuff. We had to learn how to use it at a pretty formative time in our lives. And we've had, we,

we've maintained our sort of healthy skepticism and cynicism about it. I think the younger generations need to learn from our, our skepticism and have more of that themselves. And, uh, I think we all need to be more thoughtful about what we let into our lives and mediate, particularly in private, in our family lives, in our personal lives. Um,

And in the way that we do anything as human beings, listen to music, go to a concert, go to a museum, don't do everything through your screen. Put it away and actually experience something in real time, in real life and see the difference. You have a very interesting piece in here about

photographs on your phone. And I would love to talk to you about this. I mean, I remember Sirius XM sometimes sets up these private concerts and they invite their most loyal listeners to go. And it's actually really cool. And so I've gone to a couple of them and we went to one that where Green Day was playing. They were so good. It was great. And

And the guys said to the crowd, all of, you know, everybody had their phones up because you want to get your, your favorite song, you know, recorded. Why they could just press, you know, your Apple play, whatever, and listen to, you don't have to record them. Right. But we do. And they said, put down your phones, put down your phones. They want, they want the audience just experience it without this phone in between the musicians and the audience. And I was like,

That's so interesting that that's important to them, that they see that as like a piece of the experience. And you seem to be supportive of that idea based on what you said about the photographs on the phone. Can you talk about that?

Yes, it's interesting. People take a lot more pictures nowadays, and the pictures that we're able to take are far more sophisticated than in the days of early Polaroid or early cameras where you had to wait for film to be developed. And I think we all take pictures thinking, I'll have this memory, I've captured this moment in life that's important to me, and I'll go back and look at it later. But all the research shows that

Two things. One, the more pictures you take, the less you remember about the actual experience you're having. And second, you don't usually go back and look at those pictures in the same way that, again, to go old school, people used to sit down together and look at an old family photo album and turn the pages and see the pictures and talk about who was doing what when. We actually don't do that as often as we think we do when we take the picture.

But it's the memory formation that I'm really interested in because those memories are now owned by the platforms that you put the pictures on, not owned by you. They might disappear if the platform disappears. It's a lot more ephemeral of a capturing of memory. And I do think our artists in the world and our painters, our writers, our musicians, our comedians, they're ahead of the curve here.

Not only are they giving us warnings about how AI might transform art and literature, but they're reminding us that to have a true experience, to really be open to an experience that someone else is trying to show you, you have to not mediate it. You have to pay attention. So when artists and musicians say, put down your phone, that's really good advice. I would say we should do that a lot more times in our lives, not just concerts.

Well, I'm thinking about, you know, like your kids play, right? Like trust that the school is going to have a videotape of it. They always do. Right. And you just go and look at your child on the stage and experience what he's doing or in his own, you know, fifth grade concert or whatever it is.

You've got how many kids you have, Christina? How old are they? I have two boys. They just started college. So. Oh, oh, wow. Congrats on that. That's also I mean, congrats. And also, I hope you're fine because apologies. I don't know. It's like, oh, I'm in denial. It's happening. But I hear they get less tolerable when they're in senior year or so. Maybe it's better anyway.

There's something to that. So you, the, the, the phone in between you is it's not great for the artist and it's not great for you. You're not going to remember it as well. And the actual photograph isn't going to bring back the same memories for you.

You also conform to the behavior that the machine wants you to, in a way, if that makes sense. You hold the phone between you and the experience to capture it, but that changes what you can even see in the frame. In the same way that watching something on a screen on television is...

affected by what's around your TV, like a pile of dirty laundry or maybe a plant. So we forget that these amazing tools actually do have a strong impact on how we behave, how we see the world. And they want

to frame how we see the world. And I think we often think they're neutral, but they're not. They're far more ambivalent, and particularly when it comes to the kind of information that technology companies would like to know about us, the kinds of sophisticated sensors that can be embedded in things like an employee ID badge or a phone these days. It's a lot more sophisticated than I think people realize, and it's gathering a lot more information than they might want others to have. I will say one thing on the phone.

obviously people are still going to take pictures with their phones. I recommend having done these big fun vacations with the family every June. If you just move all your, your favorites, if you click favorites from your trip, like on your airplane ride home, and then don't even think about it. Don't think about organizing them to just send it off to Shutterfly or one of the, whatever one you use. And they send you back a book. It's so simple. Then at least you have the actual hard copy. And we do look at that, but you're right. We

we never look at the ones on the phone. I mean, never. It's just like an insurance policy. Exactly. Well, but it's great because you've made an analog memorable object out of something that started in the digital world. And those kinds of choices are the ones I would like to see us making more often when it comes to these new technologies.

Something you can actually touch and feel. Again, the book is called The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen. You can get your advanced copy now, pre-order while you can. Can you explain what the bystander effect is and how this affects how we interact with one another?

Yes, this was a there were a number of stories in the last five to 10 years that really bothered me. Usually they were crime stories and they were images that people had taken video or pictures of people who were in peril. You know, maybe they were trying to jump off a bridge to commit suicide or they were being beaten up by an assailant.

And instead of doing one of two things, intervening or calling 911, instead they videotaped or took images of those people suffering. And that actually has become far more common. And in a way, having this technology in our hand makes us

automatically think, oh, I don't have to act. I am doing something. I'm filming it. I'm taking a picture. But in fact, as human beings, what we owe each other is to call 911, to intervene if that's something that we can safely do to help someone else. And I worry that the

The power the device gives us a lot gives us a kind of moral escape hatch from doing the right thing in some of these public settings. The same time that we're actually a lot more rude and impatient with each other in public settings, in part because we like to be able to do what we want when we want because we're used to doing that on our phones.

So as our obligation as citizens and just as human beings is to kind of look out for each other in public space. And I and I fear that because we're so in tune in our own little virtual realities we create with our phones that we fail in those obligations a lot of times. And that puts us all at risk long term. We want a society where people are looking out for each other.

You see it every time there's like a bully beat down. It'll show you the beat down and then you'll see some other students shot and it'll, all you'll see is students filming it. Just holding up their wall. There are whole sites devoted to this, uh, online. Actually, it's kind of horrifying. So the subtitle of the book is, well, it's the, the title is the extension of experience being human in a disembodied world. And I feel like that disembodied piece, uh,

speaks to one of the principles that you espouse in the book, which is we're losing our empathy. It's going and it's going fast and we really need our empathy now more than ever. So how is the tech and all of these problems that we're outlining here robbing us of our empathy?

Well, one of the ways I think it does that is that we sort of gradually, we assume the new thing is an improvement, right? We get a new technology. We're like, this is really cool. It can do all these great things. And often that's true. And we use it as a supplement for a while. But then it becomes a replacement. So here's an example. Nurses.

If you go into a hospital, some hospitals now, when it's time to check out from your stay in the hospital, you'll get a robot nurse. And it is a robot. And sometimes it has a human face on a screen. But often it's a kind of checking you out of the hospital robot. And it runs through a checklist and off you go. And it's great for the hospital. You don't have to pay that person's health care. It's a robot. It'll work nonstop, 24-7, doesn't need a break.

and it never gets cranky or impatient with patients. So it's a win-win for the hospital. But it strikes me that the more, the ease with which we were replacing these human relationships, particularly in old folks' homes or in the hospital, when we're very vulnerable, we shouldn't accept the substitute for the human, 'cause the human is what we need.

We'll all get old, we'll all get frail. We all will need that sort of human comfort. And we all have a finite lifespan. And I think a lot of the optimism of Silicon Valley, which is great for entrepreneurship and free enterprise,

forgets that to be human is to know one's limits, not just one's possibilities. And so those responsibilities we have to each other as humans, we don't want to use technology to replace the human. Like I don't think people who need therapy should rely on an AI chatbot for their therapist. They sometimes need a human being to look them in the eyes and really listen to them.

Yes. And show emotion. I mean, in a much lighter context, I would say, you know, you call good luck calling an airline to adjust your reservation or find your lost luggage. All you spend the whole day going representative, representative, human being, human being.

Exactly. So, so frustrating. It's just the small things. Like we ordered food. We ordered dinner in the other night and the, the place had a recording saying you can only do it online. You can't speak with anybody live. So we go online, but then there was no box to uncheck anything.

cheese. And my boys have convinced themselves that they don't like cheese, even though they do like cheese, they eat pizza, but we have to go along with this lie anyway. Um, so we were trying to get the, so you couldn't uncheck cheese. So now we've ordered them something that's cheesy. So then my husband was trying to call them back just to say, can I just say no cheese? Just like, didn't give us you eat like for 40 minutes, he was on hold trying to get through.

That's the kind of stuff that drives you nuts. And all you just need is like the appropriate human staffing so you can have a quick and probably fun human interaction with somebody. Right.

Well, and those replacements, I mean, again, like when they first went, when everyone first went online, it's like, it's going to make it so much easier. You don't have to deal with humans who make mistakes, but we get caught in these loops, right? These sort of these, these horrible purgatorial phone call, these phone trees, or when you're trying to order or correct something online. And, and we forget that we, we chose that right by, by embracing technology in that way. And I think

I don't, one thing that worries me is I don't want those, the human interactions to become a luxury good as it were. I mean, we should wanna help each other and we should be able to reach out. Businesses should be smart about realizing not everybody wants to be bothered or harassed when they're shopping, for example, but that doesn't mean that we don't ever wanna speak to a human being. So, you know, we have a lot of these self checkout kiosks, all these things that are supposed to make things easier on demand.

But we lose the human touch. And the human touch is what gives us, as you said earlier, empathy, thoughtfulness, comfort, feeling like we're kind of all in this together. And faith in your fellow human. You know, if you've ever gone to, let's say, a library or a store where you're looking for something, you need help, and you meet somebody who goes above and beyond to help you,

You can't believe it. You're so touched. It's like, oh my gosh, another human going above and beyond instead of bare minimum. It's wonderful. We've gotten so used to the opposite, starting with a robot and then moving on to an

apathetic, you know, staffer who doesn't want to help you at all. So yes, I completely agree. Now, all of this is well and good because we're talking about friendships and that's fine. But in the love department, it gets very serious. Like how is tech affecting our love relationships? Because as you know, and as has been in the news an awful lot lately, we do need to keep getting married and having children if we want like

like a human race to go on. Yes, that pesky thing, reproduction. I think this is actually where a lot of people's, particularly younger generation, their healthy skepticism starts to emerge. They're all on the dating apps. They're all meeting in this way. They're all having to perform themselves, you know, sort of advertise themselves like they're a product.

And they've gotten used to this and they think, well, everybody does. It's just the way things are. I would say it doesn't have to be that way, because when you're used to these mediated encounters and when you meet someone for the first time in person and you already know huge amounts about them from their profile, assuming their profile is being honest, which in many cases it's not.

then it actually makes that initial assessment of each other more awkward, more challenging in a lot of ways. And I think it leads to what we're seeing, which is a lot of people delaying trying to find relationships, delaying marriage, delaying having children, in part out of fear and anxiety. So again, these tools that we're supposed to make meeting people easier because of their design choice, because of the way they make people advertise themselves,

has actually made it more challenging for a lot of people. And they feel more comfortable than just hiding out, hanging at home, texting their friends via the screen. And when you interview younger generations, they often don't even recognize the signs of their own attraction to another person when they experience it. They're like, I got really sweaty and nervous. I'm like, well, because you like her. And he's like, oh, I guess that's true. Like they don't even read their own body signals in the way that I think a lot of us who are older take for granted. Yeah.

Wow. That's sad, but yes, sounds real. So what, what is the solution to all of this? You know, the latest thing is to say like touch grass if you've gotten too crazy online and I get it. It's short form, right? But what is the solution?

Well, I mean, this is going to sound silly, but we have to be more Amish. And by that, I mean, don't get rid of your zippers and get a horse and buggy. But think about every technology and platform that you choose to use before you embrace it fully. And that means if you're a parent, think about the stuff you're bringing into your home for your kids to use, what they're seeing and doing on their phones. And then change.

choose to actually, you have to choose the human these days. I guess that's the message. You actually have to go out of your way and reintroduce friction into your life. That means, okay, you know what? I'm going to have to deal with talking to this stranger and that's awkward, but I also might make a new friend or meet an interesting person. I have to go into public space without the, without the comfort object of my phone to look at and instead look around me, see, see what's going on in the world around me. All of these things are,

are uncomfortable. And so I would say we should be a little more uncomfortable. It's what makes us human. We should reintroduce friction so we can relearn patience. We should daydream. We should not fill every single free moment by checking our email or texting someone or looking at our phones. There's a lot going on in the world around us if we choose to pay attention. So I think

I would I would like to see more of that. And I would like to see more thoughtful skepticism about all the new stuff that we're promised will change our lives, but often has unintended consequences.

The phones, of course, are made to be addictive and they are. So it is harder than you'd think to put it down, not take it with you when you go to a restaurant with your family, when you go on a walk. And I would say in certain professions, including ours, it's even tougher because you have an excuse of, well, I need to be up. What if something breaks? Like I need to be up in the latest development. But you can still, even as a journalist, put your phone down and take some time

off unless you work on the staff of the Megyn Kelly show, in which case you must have never put your phone at all time. That's right. No, but we do we do habituate. And again, like our kids watch us, right? They see us unable to put the phone down. And there's been some wonderful stuff being done about, you know, banning cell phones in schools. I think that's great. I think schools should absolutely take the lead on a lot of this stuff. And what they find in a lot of these situations is

The teachers love it. The kids actually are relieved not to have their phones constantly distracting them. But the parents, the parents want to track the kids all day. So they actually have to deal with the parents too. And again, these are like little digital slot machines giving us our dopamine hits. And it's very hard to put it down. But modeling that behavior for the next generation and for ourselves, setting them aside when we can, it's really important not just for our own attention,

but for how we interact with each other and how we see each other and see everyone around us in public space. We need to change how we behave in public space.

Christine, I love listening to you on the commentary podcast. And I know that among your other duties, you are a media critic and you pay close attention to our profession and how sad it's gotten. And I just thought I couldn't let you leave without asking you about the return of Brian Stelter to CNN. Are you heaving a huge sigh of relief at his return? I just, I...

I feel like it's the network's cry for help. I really, I don't understand it. You know, the Reliable Sources newsletter, I think, became sort of a parody, both because of its title and its activity. Nobody believes the fact checkers actually have anything other than a partisan interest because they only fact check one side. And social media has actually undermined the power they used to have because we can fact check in real time with community notes and other tools. So I am not

quite sure. I know Mr. Stelter has enthusiastically said he's a changed man. It's like he's the guy who went off and meditated on a Nash Ram for a year. He comes back and he's like, I'm all new. I doubt it because the incentives of that network to continue to do what they've always done are still quite high. So I call me highly skeptical that we're going to see a new Brian Stelter out there.

He's a farmer now, Christine. He's a farmer. He moved near a horse farm. So he understands the right. You see, that's how it works. All right. Now I should end it on that joyful note, but I've got, I've got to ask you a more serious question before we go. And we don't do a ton of, uh, you know, overseas reporting on this show. I know you guys do a lot of it.

But what happened in Israel, what happened in Gaza and Rafah this week was just absolutely horrific. I know you guys covered it at length and the death of not just this American hostage, but all six of them has been absolutely horrific. Can you help our audience understand? Because what we've seen from the left wing press is this is all about Bibi Netanyahu. It's his fault. It's Hamas's fault, of course, but it's also his fault. And yes, kind of making it political against him and conservatives.

And I think a lot of people don't know what to think about Hamas's actions and its barbarity in this particular instance and what they should be taking away from it. What are your thoughts?

Well, it's a very, it's a very good question. And obviously our hearts go out to the families of the hostages who were killed and the remaining hostages. Part of the problem is that our mainstream media has spent, uh, since October 7th has not actually covered what's going on over there in a way that could be even conceivably thought of as objective. Um, they are the, the, there's a lot of moral equivalence going on between, uh, Israel, which was attacked and whose innocent, uh,

Men, women and children were slaughtered. And Hamas, an avowed terrorist organization. There's this sense of, well, we have to make a deal, a hostage deal, hostage deal. At every point in this hostage negotiation deal that Tony Blinken and other members of the Biden administration have participated in, Israel has said, OK, we'll do that. We'll do that. We want it. We want to get our people back alive. At every single point, Hamas has said no.

They are the ones who are preventing a deal. But what you'll hear if you read The New York Times or watch mainstream television news is Israel somehow brought this on themselves. They need to they need to give give more and more and more to Hamas. And then there then the hostages will be released. But as we saw tragically last

last week. That's not the case. They were actually on their way to rescue those hostages and Hamas killed them. Hamas should not be, it should always be held responsible for what happens to those people. And the idea that Netanyahu, you can criticize his policies, you can criticize his politics. He's a very complicated man. But the fact that our government

we're an ally. We're supposed to behave like an ally. And it points along the way, both Biden and to a greater extent, Harris have always stopped short of actually condemning Hamas for what they had done. Harris did make a very strong statement after the hostages were killed. But when she was pressed,

she kind of backed away a little bit and she's very inconsistent when she chooses to even announce a policy. We rarely actually get her committing to that policy for long. So my concern is that we've had a very slanted media narrative for people who only watch mainstream media. When it comes to Israel, we've seen the horrible things that have been going on on American campuses, American flags, we're in a very anti-American, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic sentiment that's being, um, allowed to flourish on college campuses. Uh,

This is a this should have been a wake up call to all those people who believed what they were being spoon fed in the media about Israel. Tragically, I think it won't be. But I do want to hear, particularly from the Harris campaign, maybe it'll happen at the debate next week. I want to hear a pretty strong statement of support for our ally Israel and the Jewish people.

It was just so heartbreaking hearing Hersh Goldberg, Poland's mom, at the funeral. I mean, as a mother, you could just, your heart breaks for her. They were shot execution style as they understood that the Israelis were coming to rescue them. There was just, they were not going to let these hostages be rescued. They were not going to let them die.

have freedom again after nearly a year in captivity is just, I mean, their barbarism was already known, but if you needed a reminder, it was there, a stark reminder this past weekend.

Anyway, thank you for letting me go there to some darkness and some light. I see the light as Brian Stelter. I know you do too. And if you want more from Christine, as you should, the book is called The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World. It's great to talk to you. Thank you for being here and good luck with the book. You too. Thanks so much for having me.

All right. And it's out again next week, available for pre-order right now. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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