{"id":550,"date":"2026-06-17T10:39:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T10:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=550"},"modified":"2026-06-17T10:39:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T10:39:13","slug":"has-tech-robbed-us-of-our-sensory-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=550","title":{"rendered":"Has Tech Robbed Us of Our Sensory Lives?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading Infinite Scroll<\/strong>, Kyle Chayka\u2019s weekly column on how technology shapes culture.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

There\u2019s 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\u2014witnessing 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<\/em> of the content, the skillful manipulation of resolutely tangible material. It\u2019s ironic, and a bit dystopian, this disjuncture, but I\u2019m entranced by the videos anyway. Ian Bogost, a professor, author, and columnist at The Atlantic<\/em>, would say that, by watching these crafts, I\u2019m looking for \u201cgratification,\u201d or \u201cthe lost joy of everyday interactions,\u201d the subject of his new book, \u201cThe Small Stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more How to Canoe to the World Cup in New Jersey<\/a><\/p>\n

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of sensory delights that surrounds us, whether it\u2019s the chunky mechanism of a car\u2019s shift knob (which has been replaced by a Tesla-style touch screen) or the wet, sticky smoosh of masonry paint (which we might hire a TaskRabbit worker to apply to our walls instead of doing it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: \u201cThe 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.\u201d Bogost\u2019s 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\u2019s ice machine. The thrust of \u201cThe Small Stuff\u201d is that, by focussing on these tiny, mundane pleasures, we can resist the encroachment of what Bogost calls \u201cdematerialization\u201d\u2014the shallowness of automated interaction.<\/p>\n

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Bogost\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014all 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: \u201cHome has become a prison of convenience that we need special help to escape.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to sympathize with Bogost\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Small Stuff\u201d sometimes ring hollow. In a memorable 2023 piece for The Atlantic<\/em>, for instance, Bogost argued that the era before the internet and smartphones was its own kind of nightmare: \u201cWe did nothing, and it was horrible. Filling the nothingness with activity of any sort became a constant exercise.\u201d He concluded: \u201cSo let us not lament or malign the time we waste on smartphones, at least not so much.\u201d A reader of \u201cThe Small Stuff\u201d might feel herself taking a similarly defensive position toward our modern gadgets: not all<\/em> 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\u2014a true sensory pleasure of the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

Read more David Hockney\u2019s Hidden Depths<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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, \u201cIn Praise of Shadows,\u201d a lament for sensations that vanished as electric lighting and other \u201cnecessities of modern life\u201d came to Japan from the West, including the glittering of a Buddha in a dark temple and the \u201csilent music\u201d of candlelight reflecting on lacquerware in a traditional restaurant. \u201cNever 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,\u201d Tanizaki wrote, in a line that could easily apply to our current moment. Tanizaki\u2019s 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 \u201cThe Small Stuff\u201d 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 \u201ca more gratifying life,\u201d as the book\u2019s subtitle puts it. In that sense, it\u2019s less radical than some of his previous works, such as \u201cAlien Phenomenology,\u201d 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, \u201cThe Small Stuff\u201d leaves the reader wanting bigger thinking about why<\/em> sensation is so valuable, or what it leads to in the course of a human life.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t fit with his stated subject of \u201cordinary pleasures,\u201d 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\u2014that is, the use of raw materials for self-expression and enjoyment, rather than for functional design or life-style optimization\u2014also 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.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more I Am Your Dad\u2019s Nest Camera and I Am Ready for Shit to Go Down<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kyle Chayka on Ian Bogost\u2019s book \u201cThe Small Stuff,\u201d in which the author argues that reclaiming the tiny, mundane pleasures of the physical world can help us offset the encroachment of screens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-infinite-scroll"],"yoast_head":"\nHas Tech Robbed Us of Our Sensory Lives? - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=550\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Has Tech Robbed Us of Our Sensory Lives? 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