But it is a useful prod to conscience.

From ‘The Extinction of Experience’ Review: Devices and Distraction by Meghan Cox Gurdon.  The subheading is There is an opportunity cost to picking up your smartphone. All sorts of activities, interactions and interests are diminished or lost.

Ms. Rosen, a historian and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has long worried about the social knock-on effects of technological advances. Here she warns of the risks of some of our choices and asks, as she goes, that we question the motives of companies “so eager to have us ‘share’ ourselves with them.” Above all, she implores readers to “consider what we are losing, as well as gaining, when we allow new technologies into our lives.”

Ms. Rosen is neither a Luddite nor a Cassandra; she doesn’t see only threat and misery in newfangled things. She acknowledges the efficiencies wrought by the internet, and she gives space to techno-optimists to express their delight at the benisons of the screen. The new ways, she concedes, “are compelling.” The problem, she writes, is that the old ways “are dying without even a brief eulogy—and without an accounting of what their disappearance heralds for what it means to be human.”

Being human has traditionally involved being a kinetic, tactile mortal who has evolved to read the faces and gestures of other mortals and to perform complex physical actions. In our embrace of streamlining technologies, we have adopted screen-based virtual realities that require little motion and that eliminate points of human contact. To open a letter, set an alarm, take a picture, make a date—any of these minor tasks would once have summoned different movements but can now be accomplished with the touch of a finger to a screen. And increasingly, of course, we needn’t deal with other people in the flesh.

[snip]

The paradoxical qualities of social media, which both alienate and connect, have been well-examined elsewhere. The accompanying phenomenon of mass loneliness, too. Ms. Rosen deserves praise for looking at areas of life that have been less frequently considered by those who ponder the disruptive effects of tech adaptations. The important things now vanishing, she notes, include spending unmediated time with others, stumbling upon serendipitous discoveries, drawing by hand, chatting with strangers and daydreaming.

[snip]

You needn’t wish to have boredom or handwriting put at the center of your life to see that Ms. Rosen has a point. The rush to adapt to personal technologies has changed the ways we behave, and it can’t be anything but wise to consider where we are as we brace for the coming transformations of artificial intelligence. “The Extinction of Experience” doesn’t provide solutions to modern moral complexities—there may be none, or none that wouldn’t require a major shift in sensibility—but it is a useful prod to conscience. It is also a thoughtful and timely reminder that it’s not too late to retrieve what we miss.