For my husband’s birthday, I got him two fine pieces of clothing: a pair of soft terry pants in limoncello yellow, and an off-white buttonless polo shirt—bought online. I was quite proud of the choice—Italian-designed, fine fabrics—but, alas, not only I but hubby have gained a few pounds here and there in the 17 years we’ve been together, so I had to return and exchange the items. That was not easy—customer service has been dumped for AI bots that cannot process the most basic requests. Whether by phone, e-mail, or even WhatsApp: I was engulfed in AI messaging that did not seem to understand what the problem was.
The impossibility of speaking to a real person made me think not just of how much more inconvenient the world has become where the human component is withdrawn from relatively simple concerns, but also what kind of experience one faces in “conversations” devoid of humans.
What kind of experience does one face in conversations devoid of humans?
Take your everyday solitary social media scrolling—after two consecutive hours on Instagram or Twitter, you have on average heard/watched/read 2,500-3,000 posts, each of them dumber than the next, and still (indeed perhaps for this reason) successfully competing for your attention. Consuming so much “content” at once is anything but constitutive of an experience. Experience in the true sense of the term requires an individual’s own sensual activity to be reflected on: the ability to say “I” (what Heidegger called Jemeinigkeit), followed by the recognition of the individual’s distinct object or content. It requires one to individually acknowledge the impact or significance of something seen, heard, felt etc. None of us can have an experience in place of anyone else. Experience is the content of an individual mind. Parents who tell their kids to get off the phone are right: the time spent on social media is equivalent to being in a coma (“which is precisely why it’s great after school”, says my 13- year-old, and so it goes).
The complaint is well-known: we have begun to adjust ourselves to the machines, not the other way around, and thus have become more machine-like. Our language has become “simplified”, our thinking dumbed down. This may be true—Jonathan Haidt-style concerns about kids’ lack of real life-experience have been widely discussed, so much so that millions of social media accounts, ironically enough, tell people to “touch grass”. But I would like to ask a different question:
Is one still able to make an experience at all in a world mediated by posts, shorts, reels, and status updates?
And if not, why should we even care?
Perhaps the first question is easier to answer:
