*Christine Rosen* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## 1 - You Had to Be There > “If the worry during the Enlightenment, as mathematician Isaac Milner wrote in 1794, was that “the great and high” have “forgotten that they have souls,” then today the worry is that many of us have forgotten that we have bodies. The opportunities to play out our sense of self at a remove from our physical limitations—online and through social media—and the many new ways we can track and quantify ourselves (I walked x number of steps today!) has given us the impression that we can somehow either ignore or control our bodies, or at least escape some of their quirks.” > “Writing about how the clock trained people to question their own experience of hunger in order to meet its dictates, for example, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum noted how timepieces created a new physical reality for their users. “The feeling of hunger was rejected as stimulus for eating,” he wrote, “instead, one ate when an abstract model had achieved a certain state, i.e., when the hands of a clock pointed to certain marks on the clock’s face,” such as noon.” > “It used to be that an experience was something—like a vacation—which you enjoyed (or not) in your own physical body, in a particular physical space at a particular time. You might re-experience it later by looking at pictures or by sharing stories about it with others. But your sensibility about an experience, particularly if it was dramatic or memorable and you were attempting to convey what it felt like to others, might be summed up by saying, “You had to be there.” The phrase rose steadily in popularity from the 1960s until the year 2012, when its use dropped precipitously, according to Google Ngram, which measures language use over time in a broad range of published material. The year 2012 also saw the fastest year-over-year increase in Americans’ smartphone use, which rose from 31 percent to 44 percent in just twelve months.” > “Instead of “you had to be there,” our current moment seems best suited to “véjà du,” or, as it is described by scientists in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, “the ability to see ourselves doing something [virtually] we have not done physically.” > “In 2010, in South Korea, a couple allowed their infant to starve to death while they raised a virtual child online in a popular game galled Prius.” > “In a speech about the environment given in the 1990s, the naturalist Robert Michael Pyle lamented the “extinction of experience.” Pyle and others worried that younger generations suffered from “nature deficit disorder”—being raised without the hands-on experience of mucking around outdoors, they argued, these children would grow up disaffected from nature and unlikely to embrace the role of environmental stewards as adults.” # Quotes # References