Christine Rosen
speaker
131 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 14 Jun
Christine Rosen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When we spend a lot of time being interacted with and talked to and gestured, we are absorbing a million different things about what it means to be a human and how to communicate.
But if you think about children today, if you put an iPad or a screen in front of their face from a very young age, maybe even before they're quite verbal and they're just staring transfixed at the screen, we've all seen this.
They're seeing a lot of things on the screen, but they're not interacting with a fellow human being and seeing all the nuances, these sort of unspoken bodily signals that we give as they get older. They are not as good at reading other people. And I spoke to some diplomats, for example, who said it's a real challenge. The new kids coming in are bright. They're super sharp. They're ready to go.
They lack basic social skills. They don't know how to look someone in the eye and sustain a conversation. They're very ferocious. physically awkward when they're all thrown into a room together. And obviously for diplomats, that is a huge part of their job is reading signals across a negotiation table, meeting new people in perhaps somewhat hostile situations.
So these are skills that are very qualitative. You know, it's difficult to quantify what they mean. But a lot of the people, particularly in the business world that I spoke to, said they notice a shift with each rising generation. The more time they've spent on screens, the more they have to do some basic people skill development of these teams when they come into the workplace.
They do, to some extent, I would argue. And in fact, too much power and too much control creates habits of mind that then perhaps make us less functional as people. And by that, I mean, it's great that I can call my grandma from anywhere in the world on my phone and check in on her and I can text my kids and see what's going on. All these things are good. I use them every day. I'm not a Luddite.
But when you spend most of your time having the ability on a phone to mute someone, to end a conversation, to swipe right because that person doesn't look nice to you, the sense of control and power means when you're in a situation where you don't have that control, say you're sitting dealing with a difficult bureaucrat at the DMV who can't figure out why all your paperwork isn't in order.
you suddenly realize that you're a lot less patient. And that's because you haven't had to practice being patient. You haven't actually had to deal with difficult things because you can get rid of them, mute them, cut them out of your life. And the technology habituates us to expect certain things. So in the sense that it gives us power and control and we use it wisely, that's all for the good.
But I think what we're realizing now with the extent of our use of this, most of us spend more than seven hours a day staring at some form of screen.
that that also creates new habits of mind, and it does make us less patient, less tolerant of other people, less willing to deal with difficult situations, and in some sense also less sophisticated about things like long-term planning, because we're used to on-demand instant gratification.
Yes, it's interesting. When you try to measure qualitative cultural change, for example, it's difficult to make a case in a world where everyone expects everything to be quantitative, right? Well, what are the statistics on that? And so when I was thinking about patients, do we actually have more or less patients? I had to look for other signs of whether we're patient.
So I studied how people stand in line and how lines have been redesigned. I went to amusement parks to see how those have changed over time to suit the, as it turns out, increasing impatience of a public that doesn't like to wait for anything. I looked at road rage rates, which are, I think, to me, a sign that our unwillingness to accept delay.
I looked at how engineers have managed to design websites and pages that load almost instantaneously and what was motivating them to do that because a fraction of a second was too long for people to wait. There are studies of all of this. So when I looked at all of those different threads and brought them all together, I think I can make a pretty strong case that yes, we are less patient.
We are less tolerant of delay. And again, I think it's because if you spend most of your time on a device that's constantly giving you everything you want when you want it, that's your expectation. So it's not just that we're spending all day at work staring at a screen. It's that then we come home, and our leisure time involves screens.
And so that then takes out of the realm of human interaction all kinds of sociable interactions that people used to share in third places like a coffee shop or a saloon or a bowling alley. And there have been studies over the 20th and early 21st century
about how those third places, those public spaces that aren't home, that aren't work, where people from all kinds of different backgrounds can come together and do stuff and have to tolerate each other, how those are actually really good for civic health, for people getting along, for encouraging toleration. And we're losing those. So now we can just be in our homes and we get whatever.
We can have our meals delivered. We can have our friends talk to us through the screen. We can play games with our friends while they sit in their house across town. All of this has led to an epidemic of self-isolation. And that is not what we're wired to do. We are wired to be with other people and to learn from other people and to interact with other people. This is something different.
And it's not that the experience doesn't feel real and give us an emotional burst of enthusiasm or any of those things. It is real, but it's qualitatively different than how we used to interact.
Measuring people's ability and desire to wait for things. Shopping websites are actually an interesting source of data for this because they can tell when a customer abandons a shopping cart or abandons a page, and it's based on how long it takes for that page to load or how quickly it processes their transaction. And so there's all kinds of interesting consumer research about that.
And that has been shrinking rapidly, like what people are willing to wait for from the early days of the Internet shopping boom to now, especially with mobile technology, how quickly they'll abandon something. And then again, like I said, with road rage, rates have skyrocketed. And that to me, it's not just because traffic has increased because it actually that's not the causal effect.
Showing 81–100 of 131 · page 5 of 7
← Previous
Next →