Has Tech Robbed Us of Our Sensory Lives?
There’s a genre of TikTok video that you might call analogcore. Not quite the calming, whispered monologues of A.S.M.R., this content instead soothes by showing off intricate physical handiwork. I have come across creators who repair traditional British thatched roofs, carve bowls out of tree trunks, or tile luxurious bathroom showers. For the viewer, the satisfaction comes through vicarious tactile sensation—witnessing how the thatch gets smacked in by a flat, hammerlike device, or the way a tile slots perfectly into a shelf niche. The way we consume such content, by swiping idly on a glass screen, stands in stark contrast with the content of the content, the skillful manipulation of resolutely tangible material. It’s ironic, and a bit dystopian, this disjuncture, but I’m entranced by the videos anyway. Ian Bogost, a professor, author, and columnist at The Atlantic, would say that, by watching these crafts, I’m looking for “gratification,” or “the lost joy of everyday interactions,” the subject of his new book, “The Small Stuff.”
Bogost argues that phones, apps, and other forms of digital mediation have removed us from the world of sensory delights that surrounds us, whether it’s the chunky mechanism of a car’s shift knob (which has been replaced by a Tesla-style touch screen) or the wet, sticky smoosh of masonry paint (which we might hire a TaskRabbit worker to apply to our walls instead of doing it ourselves). The author recommends the aforementioned masonry paint to a friend, and lavishes poetic description on it in order to pinpoint the gratification it offers: “The sonic delight of that squelchy sound, the tactile charm of feeling the brush produce it, the visual appeal of watching the red-brown bricks turn to snowy white.” Bogost’s joy is infectious. As I was reading his slim, efficient book, I was newly attuned to the sensory experiences in my own life, from the flicky, card-like thinness of tickets to a baseball game to the productive clatter of my refrigerator’s ice machine. The thrust of “The Small Stuff” is that, by focussing on these tiny, mundane pleasures, we can resist the encroachment of what Bogost calls “dematerialization”—the shallowness of automated interaction.
Bogost’s book taps into a familiar strain of digital exhaustion. Nearly two decades after the release of the first iPhone, always-online technology has become a scourge. It sucks, in a way, that this one device has taken over activities as varied as entering the subway, paying for things, navigating streets, and chatting with our loved ones. The phone’s frictionless services are phenomenally convenient and yet lacking in texture; they flatten experience because they all take place through the same smooth, rectangular portal. Embossed business cards, account ledgers, bins of bolts at the hardware store—all are pleasurable physical artifacts that have been more or less outmoded by technology. Bogost is adept at pinpointing the losses that come with the digital ease of Amazon, Uber Eats, and Netflix: “Home has become a prison of convenience that we need special help to escape.”
It’s easy to sympathize with Bogost’s affection for, say, rotary telephone dials, which were far more sensorily satisfying than our current touch-screen buttons. As a columnist, however, Bogost has often taken on the role of counterintuitive curmudgeon, arguing against whatever the dominant opinions of tech are; hence, his critiques in “The Small Stuff” sometimes ring hollow. In a memorable 2023 piece for The Atlantic, for instance, Bogost argued that the era before the internet and smartphones was its own kind of nightmare: “We did nothing, and it was horrible. Filling the nothingness with activity of any sort became a constant exercise.” He concluded: “So let us not lament or malign the time we waste on smartphones, at least not so much.” A reader of “The Small Stuff” might feel herself taking a similarly defensive position toward our modern gadgets: not all analog objects were a sensory thrill (remember groping for a lost MetroCard?), after all, and not every digital experience is devoid of it. A businessman in the nineteen-eighties would have lacked, say, the total immersion of binging a prestige-television miniseries on a handheld screen with noise-cancelling headphones, while waiting for a delayed flight—a true sensory pleasure of the twenty-first century.
Bemoaning the losses caused by new technology is a very old literary endeavor. My favorite example might be a 1933 essay by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, “In Praise of Shadows,” a lament for sensations that vanished as electric lighting and other “necessities of modern life” came to Japan from the West, including the glittering of a Buddha in a dark temple and the “silent music” of candlelight reflecting on lacquerware in a traditional restaurant. “Never has there been an age that people have been satisfied with. But in recent years the pace of progress has been so precipitous that conditions in our own country go somewhat beyond the ordinary,” Tanizaki wrote, in a line that could easily apply to our current moment. Tanizaki’s critique was, in part, a call for cultural preservation; aesthetic values with long histories risked falling by the wayside during a period of militarized globalization. The experiences that Bogost memorializes are more prosaic: fountain Diet Coke in a big plastic cup, slurped at one of the family-style fast-food restaurants of a bygone era. Much of “The Small Stuff” boils down to the idea that we should pay more attention to ordinary objects and encounters with the physical world, even as digital technology encourages us to ignore or avoid them. Bogost intentionally does not posit a larger purpose beyond cultivating “a more gratifying life,” as the book’s subtitle puts it. In that sense, it’s less radical than some of his previous works, such as “Alien Phenomenology,” from 2012, which helped popularize the contemporary philosophical field of object-oriented ontology, the study of nonhuman things as entities worth considering in and of themselves. While eminently practical in its prescriptions, “The Small Stuff” leaves the reader wanting bigger thinking about why sensation is so valuable, or what it leads to in the course of a human life.
Bogost lavishes praise on hobbies (fly-fishing), crafts (knitting), and trades (woodworking) as ways to dwell in sensory experience. But visual art goes almost entirely unmentioned. Perhaps it doesn’t fit with his stated subject of “ordinary pleasures,” given that art has a reputation for inaccessibility. Yet any visitor stepping foot in a museum will encounter a parade of sensation: the way paint swoops across a canvas, the perfected surface texture of a sculpture, or even the intricate sounds of an audio installation. The making of art for oneself—that is, the use of raw materials for self-expression and enjoyment, rather than for functional design or life-style optimization—also remains unexplored, though it may offer deeper gratifications than that which Bogost ascribes to rigging up a doorbell or installing a new faucet in his historic home in St. Louis. A recent vogue for community ceramics, pottery-painting, and figure-drawing classes suggests that many of us are desperate to use our hands again, for purposes beyond fixer-upper projects. ♦