Christine Rosen was with us a few months back to discuss the media and the Biden administration.

She is a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, media columnist for Commentary Magazine, and author of a few books already, a historical study of eugenics, and a memoir of her fundamentalist upbringing.

Her new book is The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World.

That's our topic today.

Welcome, Christine. We go by first

names when we do podcast number two. So welcome, Christine. Thank you, Mark. We jump right into the book

here. At the beginning, you use a term that I'll ask you to define mediating technologies. What are

they? What is being mediated? Well, by mediating technologies. What are they? What is being mediated?

Well, by mediating technologies, I'm basically casting a wide net, and I mean anything that we use and place between ourselves and the real world and other human beings.

So that could be your smartphone, that could be a computer screen. That could, if're very cutting edge be the new sort of wearable technologies with screens on them in the form of glasses or virtual reality goggles.

And it also includes in the course of the analysis in the book any of the platforms that mediate your relationships with other people, social media platforms, internet websites, email,

anything we put between ourselves and other human beings?

That really is the key here that people understand these technologies as intermediaries.

They are bringing things together that actually might have been gone together just

fine on their own before these technologies came along. That really is the purpose of the book

to explain these things, many of which sort of go under the radar. They come into our lives,

their experiences, and they're so normal, so ordinary, so every day,

that they might be changing things sometimes without us even realizing it. And that leads to

another term that I will ask you to define. You actually say personal reality. Isn't reality,

just reality? 15? It used to be. It used to be. I like the setup for this question.

We used to have a shared reality, a notion of what was real, what was false, you go to the movies,

you know it's not real, you walk around outside, you're dealing with human beings. And the reason

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