What if your phone is quietly changing your brain—and your relationships? The brilliant Christine Rosen explores how digital life is reshaping everything from childhood to public discourse, often in ways we barely notice. With insight and urgency, she challenges the assumptions driving our always-online world. This conversation will make you see your screen—and our society—differently.
Chapter 1: What are the new rules of human connection in the digital age?
Tech has made life much more comfortable and convenient. Everyone spends more time on their phones and their computers for work as well as for entertainment. But what is tech doing to us as individuals and more broadly to us as a society? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynne Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways.
On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I'm excited to be with Christine Rosen. Christine analyzes how technology alters human behavior.
She is co-founder of the journal The Atlantis and a frequent contributor to Commentary, National Review, and other news publications. She is also the author of the wonderful book, The Extinction of Experience. I'm looking forward to learning how technology is changing us. Welcome, Christine, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Thanks, Lynn. I'm very glad to be here.
I'm excited. Tech has made life so much more comfortable and convenient. Are we spending less time in person with other people?
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Chapter 2: How does technology affect face-to-face interactions?
We are, and this is a fairly new thing in that we have a choice about whether we can be with each other in physical presence, face-to-face, having those sorts of conversations, or doing the same thing but with a screen between us and another person. Given the convenience, the ease, the efficiency, our ability to maybe mute or turn off a conversation that we're not enjoying,
We're more and more often gravitating towards the mediated interaction with other people rather than the face to face. And I think over time, we develop habits and expectations of each other that are mediated through the technology. And that means when we are face to face and together in person again, we're not as good at what we used to do.
We've lost some of our skills and just interacting as human beings. Can you elaborate? What are we losing? One of the things that we're designed evolutionarily to do is to read each other's facial expressions. So we have all kinds of unspoken languages, as they say, with our gestures.
So the way we use our hands, if our eyebrows go up and from the very moment that you open your eyes and in fact, an infant's field of vision is when you're being held. If you're an infant, it can see the person's face. So it's a very short distance, but it's meant to just focus on the face. So from a very young age, we're reading faces even before we can speak or articulate our feelings.
Chapter 3: What are the implications of increased screen time for children?
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.
So interesting. Do our devices give us more power and control over our experiences? Yes.
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Chapter 4: Do our devices give us more power and control over our experiences?
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.
So interesting. And I suspect there are many people that spend more than seven hours a day on their devices. They may work all day or much of the day on their devices. And then when they go home, they may turn on a device for entertainment, whether that's Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or gaming or social media or dating apps. You said people become more impatient and more intolerant.
Does that mean that the physical world is going to feel less and less attractive to us?
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.
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Chapter 5: Why are we becoming more impatient in the digital age?
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.
So interesting. You talked about research you've done on people becoming more impatient. What does the data show?
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.
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Chapter 6: How does impatience manifest in our daily lives?
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.
It's that people expect to be able to go from point A to point B whenever they want to, as they want to, with no delay. So our inability to deal with delay, whether that's waiting in line at a shopping mall or waiting in line of cars to be able to go home, we are just less patient.
And we're expressing that through very unhealthy means in the case of road rage, where many people tragically have been killed in some of these altercations. But it also then means when there's something that you must wait for, like the birth of a child or waiting in a doctor's office or waiting to hear good or bad news from a doctor. You can't rush these things.
But just culturally, I think you can also see some evidence of our inability to wait when you think about instant solutions to very complicated political problems, right? Long-term thinking, long-term strategic planning, all of these things, and all of these have been studied in terms of the amounts of time and all the details. And But I think the overarching picture says we're just less patient.
We don't wait the same way we used to. We're not willing to wait.
We used to do things 100% on our own, based on our own instincts and serendipity. But we don't anymore. I think you have some wonderful examples, like restaurants or music. Can you talk about that?
Yes, I'm fascinated by the idea of serendipity. For years, after I had an interview with Eric Schmidt, who was still at Google at the time, who was at a panel discussion, he said, oh, well, we manufacture serendipity now. We can do that. And I thought, huh, I actually don't think you can do that. That's the whole point of something being serendipitous. It's not manufactured. It just happens.
And humans have this great desire for those sorts of chance experiences, for those unexpected things that could potentially encourage feelings like awe and amazement, the kind of stuff that I think we take for granted as being possible in the world because we're so focused on our screens.
So when you think about how algorithmically driven and managed so many of the ways we spend our time looking for something, whether it's a spouse or partner or a particular kind of book, everything pulls us into that web because it's convenient, it's seamless, it's efficient, all these words we hear from Silicon Valley.
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