2025년 7월 16일

이번 선정 도서는 "경험의 멸종" 입니다.

아이들은 자연을 경험하는 대신 태블릿 화면을 손가락으로 먼저 민다.

저자가 경고하는 건 이런 경험의 약화 혹은 나아가 멸종이 '인간다움'을 없앤다는 것이다. 대표적인 것이 대면 의사소통 능력의 퇴화다. 우리는 문자메시지, 이메일, 소셜미디어 속 '좋아요'가 우리 감정의 솔직한 표현을 대신해 주길 바란다. 그러나 저자는 최근에야 겨우 발달한 디지털 기호가 결코 인간의 얼굴과 몸을 대신할 수 없을 거라 본다. 인간은 서로 마주 보며 이야기할 때 다양한 생리적 반응을 얻도록 설계돼 있다는 것. 강렬한 눈 맞춤은 심박수를 높이고, 인간의 중추신경계에 신경전달물질이 분비되게 하며, 기분과 스트레스 조절에 관여하는 유기 화합물의 분비를 촉진한다.

'인내의 미학'도 디지털 시대 대표적으로 실종된 분야다. 기다림은 언제나 삶의 중요한 일부였지만, 이제는 기다리는 거의 모든 순간을 스마트폰에 양도한다. 현대인은 점점 더 조급하고, 성마르다. 지금 같은 환경이라면 '네가 오기로 한 그 자리에/내가 미리 가 너를 기다리는 동안/다가오는 모든 발자국은/내 가슴에 쿵쿵거린다'(황지우 '너를 기다리는 동안)고 노래한 시인의 시는 이해받을 수 없을지도 모른다.

[남정미 기자, ”경험의 멸종“ 서평]

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경험의 멸종

The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World

Book by Christine Rosen

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모임날짜: 08/11/2025 (월)

모임시간: 8:00 - 10:00PM EST

모임장소: Zoom Meeting

+ 참석을 원하는 분들은 오픈톡에서 RSVP를 부탁드립니다.

+ 온라인모임입니다. 당일 오전에 카카오톡을 통해 개인별로 초대장이 발송되니, 운영자 "재호"와 1:1 대화기록이 없는 분들은, DMV북클럽 오픈챗방에서 아이디 "재호"를 찾아 1:1 Open Chat을 통해 Zoom 링크를 요청해주세요.

+ 자유롭게 대화하는 편안한 형태의 모임입니다. 반대와 찬성을 가르는 논제식 토론이 아니라 소감과 의견을 공유하고 공감하며 열린분들과 책에 대한 인사이트를 나눕니다. 부담없이 참여 부탁드립니다.

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Consider the steady curtailment of face-to-face gatherings and one-on-one meetups. Shakespeare aficionados may once have gathered monthly to cold read the Bard’s words, or perhaps a roomful of folks sat in silent Zen meditation. Now they meet on Zoom. We exercise “together” via laptops or TVs, those with bifocals straining to see screens from floor mats at home. We “attend” livestreamed funerals and weddings. Sometimes such access offers value to those situated far away from the action. But more frequently, we may find ourselves wondering: how does online participation alter how we relate to these occasions?

Rosen writes, “This book is a modest effort to encourage us to cultivate and, in some cases, recover ways of thinking, knowing, and being in the world that we are losing or have lost through our embrace of mediating technologies.”

“Might boredom have a purpose?” Rosen wonders.

She explains how Disney applied the initial ideas of queue psychology to his first theme park in 1955 by “crafting lines that would transform the experience of those waiting in them by making time seem to pass more quickly.” Then, in 1999, Disney initiated the FastPass system in which visitors with an appointment “stroll right in” to the more popular rides, thus “avoiding the crowds and the hours-long wait.”

Our increasing inability to handle tedium without reaching for our screens illustrates lost opportunities to develop ideas. She writes, “A culture without boredom undermines the act of daydreaming, something interstitial time used to be given over to. Daydreaming seems a fusty term in an age when productivity and usefulness are prized. But as psychologists and neurologists have found, a wandering mind, often the first signal of impending boredom, is also a creative mind.”

Several other culture critics are also commenting on the repercussions of the inability to manage ennui. Author and music historian Ted Gioia, in an interview with David Parell, says, “… people are addicted to distraction.”

부분 발췌: Lanie Tankard (2024.11.14) "on The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen, reviewed by Lanie Tankard", 원본링크

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Social media is bad because it “gives everyone the opportunity to promote themselves,” while digital communication is bad because it prevents us from registering one another’s facial expressions, thereby abolishing what anthropologist Edward T. Hall called “the silent language” of physical communication. Surveillance technologies are bad because they allow employers to monitor employees. Looking at screens is bad because it leads us to ignore the people in need of help around us.

“The Extinction of Experience” is best read as a compendium of engrossingly dystopian cautionary tales.

Rosen reminds us, for instance, of the conspiracy-addled vigilante who showed up at the D.C. pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong with a rifle in 2016, because online paranoiacs had convinced him there was a pedophile ring operating out of the basement. (Reader, there is no basement, but the pizza is very good.) Rosen also treats us to other horrors: She informs us that “in 2010, in South Korea, a couple allowed their infant to starve to death while they raised a virtual child online in a game called Prius,” and that there is a railway station in Japan where an app called SmileScan checks whether employees are making appropriately friendly expressions.

By the end of the book — and, in truth, before I even started it — I was sympathetic to Rosen’s orientation. I believe in my marrow that there is something uniquely demoralizing about emerging glassy-eyed from hours of YouTube videos or tweets. I desperately want to understand what, if anything, differentiates the evident cesspool of X (formerly Twitter) from earlier communication technologies, which is why I was disappointed to find Rosen’s account so imprecise.

For instance: She posits that online exchanges inhibit our ability to read each other’s “microexpressions,” but haven’t epistolary relationships predating the internet by centuries always offered an alternative to physical interaction? She worries that “reality has competition, from both augmented and alternative forms.” But hasn’t art always offered alternatives to reality? And besides, when in human history has reality ever been unaugmented?

Here are the germs of a counterproposal regarding what is so distinctly crushing about life online. The problem with the internet is not that it augments reality, as do St. Peter’s Basilica and the Ninth Symphony and every other piece of gorgeous artifice we’ve ever been gifted enough to dream up, but that it so often denies us the lush joys (and titillating debasements) of physicality — biting into the luscious velvet of a peach, blinking at the golden glint of waning daylight, flinching from the sharp slap of an unexpectedly cold day.

Blaringly, this idea is present in Rosen’s subtitle, and to her credit, she does include a few obligatory nods to the pleasures of carnality. It is good, she writes generically and unconvincingly, “to live in the real world, with all its messy physical realities.” (Such as?) Dutifully, she ticks off the many delights she believes are under threat — travel, sex, eating, looking long and hard at a painting in a museum — but absent from her book is any substantive, extended celebration of sensory pleasure, or any language that might evoke the tang of tactility.

After all, being online is a physical experience, too. Clicking and scrolling are motions we perform with our bodies, but they are arguably the least inspired choreography of which we are capable.

부분 발췌: Becca Rothfeld (2024.09.27) "Is digital technology leading us to the ‘extinction of experience’?", 원본링크