Summary: The digital age is creating a “bottleneck” that threatens traditional cultures, art forms, and even human reproduction. As people become distracted by virtual experiences, they may lose touch with real-life connections and skills. To survive this crisis, we must intentionally engage in the things we love and resist the pull of the virtual world.
The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete. (View Highlight)
Even when the new forms are inferior to the older ones, they are more addictive, more immediate, easier to access — and they feel lower-risk, as well. (View Highlight)
even though people ultimately get less out of the virtual substitutes, they still tend to come back to them and eventually depend on them. (View Highlight)
even though reality is in fact more real than the virtual world, people may still feel disappointed when they re-enter the everyday after marinating in the digital — the potential mates are less beautiful than the Instagram models, the stakes of a local mayor’s race less significant than whatever Donald Trump is doing now. (View Highlight)