Virtual reality will never match the real thing
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What exactly are we missing out on when we only experience something online rather than IRL? Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for Commentary magazine, senior editor at the New Atlantis and fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the lure of the digital world, with its ease and convenience, and the physical and personal connections we leave behind when we choose a contactless experience. Her book is “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Remember at the start of the pandemic, the new buzzword and retail transactions was contactless. |
| 0:16.1 | Work meetings went virtual delivery people, dropped food orders on our doorsteps and took off immediately |
| 0:21.7 | rather than handing our purchase directly to us and exchanging a few pleasantries. |
| 0:26.7 | We stayed off public transit, we stopped attending community events. |
| 0:30.7 | The thing is, while we are no longer being advised to avoid most human contact, large |
| 0:36.1 | numbers of us actually prefer it this way. From KERA in Dallas, |
| 0:41.5 | this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. It is true. We can now do everything from grocery shopping to modified |
| 0:47.1 | visits to interesting places by moving our cursors on a screen rather than our bodies through |
| 0:52.2 | physical space. It is also true that interactions with other people can be frustrating or annoying or time-consuming. |
| 0:59.0 | But while my guest is no Luddite, she does think we should all be paying attention to what we might be sacrificing |
| 1:06.0 | as we prioritize the ease and convenience of the digital universe over the serendipities of the physical one. |
| 1:12.5 | Christine Rosen is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for commentary magazine, |
| 1:19.2 | senior editor at the New Atlantis, and fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. |
| 1:26.2 | Her book is called The Extinction of Experience, |
| 1:29.0 | Being Human in a Disembodied World. Christine, welcome to think. |
| 1:33.7 | Thanks for having me. Of course, humans evolved for face-to-face interactions, |
| 1:39.2 | and they help us, you explain, to form a shared reality as human beings. Why do human beings benefit from a shared |
| 1:47.2 | reality? Well, I think one of the ways we're starting to appreciate how our face-to-face |
| 1:53.0 | in-person reality differs from the reality that we all experience online is just by comparing |
| 2:00.0 | the experience. So when you're online, you can connect to lots of |
| 2:03.5 | people. We're having this conversation thanks to this incredible tool. Many, many connections are |
| 2:08.6 | made. But there are a certain kind of connection, qualitatively different from the sort of connection |
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