The Extinction of Experience cover art

The Extinction of Experience

Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pre-order: Try for £0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Extinction of Experience

By: Christine Rosen
Narrated by: Suzie Althens
Pre-order: Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £12.99

Pre-order Now for £12.99

Confirm Pre-order
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Drawing on decades of research,
The Extinction of Experience is a philosophical defence of what makes us human – and a powerful, urgent call to reclaim ourselves in a digital world.

Human experiences are disappearing.

Social media, gaming and dating apps have usurped in-person interaction; handwriting is no longer prioritised in schools; and emotion is sooner expressed through likes and emojis than face-to-face conversations. With headphones in and eyes trained on our phones, even boredom has been obliterated. But, as Christine Rosen expertly shows, when we embrace this mediated life and conform to the demands of the machine, we risk becoming more disconnected and machine-like ourselves.

There is another way. For too long, under the influence of corporate giants and tech enthusiasts, we’ve accepted the idea that change always means better. But rapidly developing technology isn’t neutral – it’s ambivalent, and capable of enormous harm. To improve our well-being, help future generations flourish and recover our shared humanity, we must become more critical, mindful users of technology, and more discerning of how it uses us.

From TikTok challenges and algorithms to surveillance devices and conspiracy culture, The Extinction of Experience reveals the human crisis of our digital age – and urges us to return to the real world, while we still can.

**A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year**

'Essential reading in a dislocated world' KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering

'A beautifully expressed ode to the vanishing components of life that remain unplanned, unresearched and unrecorded ... Excellent' ADAM ALTER, author of Irresistible

©2025 Christine Rosen (P)2025 Penguin Audio
History & Culture Society Sociology Technology & Society Surveillance
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

Technology is having pervasive effects on us all, effects which are hard to put into words. Christine Rosen finds the words I've longed for. The Extinction of Experience is an extremely important book, and its message all the more urgent as AI threatens to make everything effortless, frictionless, and disembodied (Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation)
A fascinating and timely book about the essential real-world experiences we're watching vanish before our screen-addled eyes. Resisting the lure of nostalgia, but rejecting the glib assumption that more technology is always better, Christine Rosen makes a passionate case for the face-to-face, embodied, analogue, unpredictable, unmediated life, and its centrality to a vibrant and truly meaningful human existence (Oliver Burkeman, author of Meditations for Mortals)
Rosen has written a passionate anatomy of what we lose when we relinquish real life to machine-mediated activity. More than a eulogy, it is an urgent reminder to value and defend real life, with all its riskiness and rough edges, against the safe, smooth, screen-filtered reverie that promises so much more than it can encompass (Timandra Harkness, author of Technology is Not the Problem)

What listeners say about The Extinction of Experience

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.