“My experience is what I agree,” wrote William James in 1890. The philosopher, also nicknamed the “father of American psychology”, sought to answer the question: what shapes our spirit?
But what could that mean in our 21st century technological world, in which reality and unreality are so often vague? This is a very anxious subject of debate – and many books. Two new notable additions to this constant expansion barrel, The Sirens Call by journalist Chris Hayes, and The extinction of experience By the reflection group Christine Rosen, suggest that attention and experience, these essential components of the human being, are threatened.
The story that the authors tells is largely familiar. The speed, scale and scope of technological innovation in the last two or three decades mean that the quality of our daily life is being modified – and not for the best. We could obviously raise an eyebrow of this story, but we are all taken there. The first utopian days of the Internet gave way to fear and disgust, and yet we cannot detach ourselves from our screens. There is a lot of criticism offered by Hayes and Rosen. If not, why my friends who work in Silicon Valley insist that their children read real books and would they play board games, with a strictly limited screen time?
For Rosen, principal researcher at the American Enterprise Institute whose previous books have addressed subjects such as pop culture and religious fundamentalism, too much time means that our experience is more and more mediated. Technology encourages an “absent presence”. It is the photo, published on social networks, of our meal or our travels that counts, not our experience of food or the place. We find it difficult to read people’s faces and body language when we communicate the screen on the screen. Even the turn of handwriting to the shot means that we lose vital ties between the brain and the body that help us learn.
As Hayes, host of a MSNBC News popular MSNBC television program and author of a book on meritocracy in America, notes: our experience is hardly ours. “Exist online now, which is, for most people, to exist at all, is to be, at each moment of standby, to see you through the eyes of others,” he wrote in The Sirens Call.
Rosen deplores the decline of civility and all the human interaction it supposes. She suggests that the speed of the Internet, allowing us to discover almost anything in a few seconds, has led to greater impatience and the resulting rudeness. Walking along the street with our heads buried in our phones means that we no longer notice or no longer make room for other pedestrians; Public spaces have lost the carefree feeling of people who have fun.
The extinction of experience focuses on daily life and remains largely in personal and social spheres. Rosen offers an occasional jibe among technological entrepreneurs, like the co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, who, in his story, offers increasingly dystopian plans to make all our experiences virtual, which, he says, is better than the reality of most people.
“The defense of reality is not a privilege; It is crucial to ensure a flourishing human future, ”writes Rosen. However, it does not offer any criticism of economic structures which can only allow Andreessen to afford and take advantage of any experience of beautiful reality that they want.
Hayes offers a clearer and more acute analysis of the problem. We live in what he calls “the age of attention” and, with an infinite flow of information, everyone claims to attract our attention. The more information there is, the less we can pay attention to all of this. “Public speech is now a war of everyone for everyone for attention”, and that makes us “fight”.
With so much information on the internet now monetized, attention is the kingdom’s medal. Technological companies, marketing specialists, advertisers, influencers – they all want our time every second. In short, they fracture our minds. You can draw people’s attention – Elon Musk spent $ 44 billion by buying Twitter (now X) to do so – but the more you try to capture it, the more it is eaten as a commodity.
It is the argument of Hayes on the effect on the policy of this war for the attention that I found most at the arrest. He returned to America in 1858 and a crucial debate of electoral campaign in Illinois on slavery between Republican Abraham Lincoln and Democrat Stephen a Douglas. Citing pieces of the dense prose of their speeches, each lasts at least an hour and repeated to the crowds through Illinois, Hayes suggests that no one could hold this kind of attention now. We have created an audience that has trouble maintaining any type of concentration, completely the opposite of the initial hope for the Internet that the wisdom of the crowd would radically demolish global conversations. Instead, the old way of political debate, which involved attracting people’s attention, then persuading them of the correctness of your policies and ideas, through the back and forth, collapsed.
If the “attention regime” (rules and standards) of persuasion and debate, the backbone of democracy, Hayes suggests that the success of President Donald Trump in politics lies in his ability to seek the attention. It is tirelessly, “realize the improbable trade in persuasion for attention, sympathy for salience”, in particular thanks to its current use of social media.
The context is online platforms that regulate attention for the sole purpose of maximizing its monetization by advertising. There is no other goal than that – certainly not the vigorous debate we need for democratic decision -making. This has deep implications for our civic health.
What is the solution? If Rosen or Hayes had the answer to the miracle solution, they would have cracked one of the major problems of our time. The two offer suggestions. Rosen wants to promote the rebirth of human experience, whether through handwritten art or writing coaches or revive public spaces, and pushes consumers to make technological companies more responsible. Hayes invites us to calm us down and recover our minds, so that we can flash the beam of thought where we want it to go, focusing on what matters to us.
Maybe the answer lies in a different way of being. For a complete counterpoint to the story that Rosen and Hayes tell, I urge everyone to read the beautifully written meditative book by Pico Iyer, Learn from silence (Published under Putting on: learning silence in the United States). While I turned to this, I felt my blood pressure reduce and I started reading in a different, slower and more concentrated way.
For more than 30 years, Iyer, essayist, travel writer and novelist, has launched himself in a Roman Catholic monastery in Big on the coast of California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There, seated in silence, he wrote thousands of pages; This book is a distillation of all these pages.
Iyer is not a believer. What led him to the monastery at the start was not the omnipresence of technology – which, refreshing, barely deserves a mention here – but Forest Firects in California. When his house was burned in ashes 34 years ago – forest fires in Californian hills reproduce throughout the book, reminding us how persistent this danger has been in recent decades – a friend suggested to go to the new Camaldoli Hermitage, to the contemplative Benedictine tradition. For $ 30 per night, he would have a room for him with an office, a bed, a rocking chair, meals and extraordinary views on the ocean.
Iyer’s preconceived ideas on monastic life were quickly revised. Silence was not that of a deep forest, but it was rather active and beaten, reminding her that this place was not outside the world but in the heart of it.
There, in Big sur, looking at the ocean blue, he likes singing silence and learns that the point of being there is not to do, but only to see what could be worth it. Contemplation consists in returning to your senses, getting out of your head – not so much to close your eyes that open them. “The world is not deleted here,” he wrote, “did not come back to its proportions.”
Over the years, Iyer learns the monks, especially the Cyprien “with burning eyes”, who likes to play music. When Ier’s partner finally visits the hermitage with him, she said: “For thirty years, I thought you were a only child. Now I see that you have all these brothers!
It may seem strange that Iyer found the experience in person of new friendships, a new family, in a silent monastery. Indeed, spending time in a religious community is not for everyone. But what Iyer shows is to have this kind of authentic experience – that that Hayes and Rosen aspire, in our digital time – you must develop an intentional and sustained practice.
Rosen and Hayes focus on the staging of threats to our humanity which are generated by technology, and their analysis is important, but their solutions are somewhat fragmentary. It is Iyer who offers a vision of what it means to participate in the world in such a way that we pay particular attention, in nature and something bigger than us that eliminates us and our self-absorption, So so that we can live life more fully.
At the heart of Iyer’s book are beauty and silence. Thinking about the way in which all this time has changed in silence has changed it, he says that now he is looking for the corner in the sun, the silent part of the airport on a trip; He listens to Bach in the evening shadows of his house in Japan when he waits for his partner to come back from work. It is not that everything is resolved, or that anxiety has completely disappeared from his life, but it is now impossible for him to take if the ego as the breaths and the puffs.
The call of sirens: how attention has become the most threatened resource in the world by Chris Hayes, Penguin Press, $ 32 / scribe, £ 20, 336 pages
The extinction of experience: recover our humanity in a digital world by Christine Rosen, Bodley Head, £ 22 / WW Norton, $ 29.99, 272 pages
Learn silence: lessons of more than 100 pensions By Pico Iyer, Cornerstone Press, £ 16.99 / Riverhead Books, $ 30, 240 pages
Jane Shaw is a professor of the history of religion at the University of Oxford and co-author of “Gen Z, explained: the art of living in the digital age”
Join our online books online on Facebook in Ft Books Coffee And follow the FT weekend on Instagram And X