My favorite academic journal—in fact, my only academic journal, in terms of regular readership—is The Hedgehog Review, each issue of which devotes a substantial center section to a single matter of sociocultural concern. In the current issue (Spring, 2018) the matter is called “The Human and the Digital,” comprising four ponderable, well-documented essays. All of them reward attention. One, Christine Rosen’s “Expose Thyself!/On the Digitally Revealed Life,” confronts the question of the effects on emotional capacities of what is now frequently called the “digital dispensation.”  (I have upped the ante to “Digital Covenant” to suggest the quasi-religious, this-life-for-an-uncertain-fate nature of the pact we’ve entered into.) As one who is by luck of endowment technologically challenged and by natural-born temperament technologically resistant, I am always grateful for the thinking of those who are neither, yet willing to acknowledge, as Rosen does, that “technology just doesn’t do things for us . . . it does things to us.” She engages with some of the same aspects of the Covenant I’ve noted in passing—its mandatory Nowness, for instance. Noting that “What the clock did to time, technologists hope to do to emotion,” she terms this tyranny of the moment “The Virtual Velocity of Now,” which captures nicely the Covenant’s insistence on unbroken involvement with an emotional life that is not visceral, but virtual—or, as one of the studies she cites has it, is not grounded in ” . . . the feeling of our own body as a platform for knowing how to respond to other people’s social and psychological situations.” Rosen writes: “Our bodies process different emotions at different speeds, while technology favors one velocity: now,” with little time left either for reflecting on our own feelings or registering others’, and no room for envisioning a future or contemplating the past.

In a section entitled “Click-Here Empathy,” Rosen draws on a 2011 research study that finds college students ” . . . about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts 20 or 30 years ago,” and attributes at least part of the decline to ” . . . the rise of technologically mediated relationships.” ^(I) She refers to evidence of declines among children in creativity; in the ability to see something from another’s P.O.V.; and in the kind of thoughtfulness that takes into consideration the impact of one’s actions on another person. In all these, the Digital Covenant, especially as seen in the proliferation of social media, is implicated, either directly or by strongly suggestive synchronicity, as a significant contributing factor. There’s a great deal more in Rosen’s essay, much of which tumbles straight into the Confirmation of Darkest Suspicions bin—it’s right in line with expectation, for instance (but still depressing), that Disneyland employees really do get smiley-face training as part of their indoctrination. Still, some of her examples step easily over that threshold. I was extremely sorry to learn, under the heading of “Outsourcing Emotional Behavior,” of the Facebook-transmitted hugging vest; or under that of “Algorithmic Reassurance,” of the Moodies app, which uses “emotional analytics” to update you on the state of your own feelings—all the while building your emotional profile for the presumed gainful use of someone, somewhere, sometime. I should, I suppose, grant that it at least does this mainly by gathering unto itself the moment-to-moment variations in your inflections of voice and other sounds (of your breathing, for instance). That does take it one tiny step away from visual/virtual territory into the little corner where the vocal/virtual is allowed to stand, now that the feeble, but exclusively voice/ear, usages of the telephone have been largely displaced by the eye-habits of email, text, and tweet.