Latest news with #ChristineRosen
CBC
20-07-2025
- Business
- CBC
Digital contracts are the norm today. Is there still power in a written signature?
Some of the most powerful people in the world can be recognized by their signatures. Prime Minister Mark Carney's signature adorns Canadian currency, from his time as head of the Bank of Canada. And U.S. President Donald Trump regularly displays his oversized, sloping signature for the cameras with each new executive order. But these days, it's far more common for most of us to sign our names on a touch screen, or to simply click a box on an online form, than to sign your name with a pen on paper. Author Christine Rosen isn't happy about it. "We're actively choosing to go back to a way of life where a mark is the same as a signature. So it's a devolution in terms of our skills as human beings," she told The Sunday Magazine's Peter Mitton. Rosen's book The Extinction of Experience looks at how the onslaught of digital life is hollowing out real-life experiences, like the act of physically signing your name. "I fear that our willingness to suspend that small, everyday action is sort of symbolic of some of the other important things we've discarded in our haste to embrace digitally mediated forms of communication," she said. Despite their relative rarity in most people's lives today — and the legal ambiguity that came with the introduction of electronic signatures — written signatures still carry power as a personal artistic expression, whether you've carefully designed your own or paid a professional to do it for you. E-signatures around for decades E-signatures are just over 25 years old in the U.S. In June 2000, then-U.S. president Bill Clinton signed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act into law. The act allowed for electronic records, including digital versions of a signature, to be used for business transactions that earlier required a person's written signature for validation. In Canada, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which became law in April 2000, outlines the use of e-signatures. Provinces and territories have followed suit with similar legislation. John Gregory, a retired lawyer in Toronto, says when Clinton signed that bill, some worried that the signature's "ceremonial function" might lose some of its power. "It makes you take it seriously. Oh, jeez, I'm signing this. This is important. I should know what I'm doing. Do I really agree to this?" said Gregory, who previously worked in the U.S. on developing government policies around what happens legally when paper trails become increasingly digital. While personal opinions on an e-signature's weight may vary, the law has since moved on. Gregory pointed to a 2017 case in Saskatchewan where a man who injured himself in a go-kart crash said a digital waiver he signed by checking a box shouldn't absolve the company who owned the track of any liability. The court ruled that, in fact, that check was as valid as a pen-and-paper signature. And, in 2024, Saskatchewan's Court of King's Bench upheld a decision that a thumbs-up emoji was confirmation of a contract between two agricultural companies. One of the companies involved asked the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on that decision; it's unclear if the Court will do so. Do young people care about signatures? Filomena Cozzolino, 27, styled her signature after her paternal grandmother, with whom she shares her name. "When I was maybe 12 or 13, I found one of her IDs and I wanted to try to copy her signature," said the publishing and creative writing student at Sheridan College in Mississauga, Ont. "Not only do we share a name, but we can share our signatures, since she's no longer here to share hers anymore." Some of her classmates had a more business-like approach to them. "I have very messy handwriting, actually, because I'm left-handed. So everything smudges and ... once I learned cursive, just went with the flow," said Mikayla Nicholls, 28. Zainab Bakjsh, 24, writes her signature in Arabic, which she says looks better and is easier to write than when she does it in English. But beyond that, she's not given it much thought. "It's just a signature. When I need to do something at the bank, or like renewing my health card, is probably the only time that I sign," she said. Boutique signature craft While the age of correspondence via fountain pen on parchment may be long gone, there's still a niche of people interested in using signatures as a personal flourish — and even a market if you're looking for a professional to craft one for you. "I believe that your signature is literally your face. I mean, regardless of your profession, you can impress people around you with this beautiful signature," said Elena Jovanovic, head calligrapher at Florida-based MySign Studio. The business crafts custom signatures for patrons, offering options in multiple script styles. Their calligraphers will then teach you how to draw them on your own. But it'll cost you, with services ranging from $100 to $200 US. "Many people around the world create their first signature during their teenage years and continue to use it throughout their lives. Typically, these signatures lack creativity and elegance," Jovanovic said. Sometimes patrons request certain artistic effects, such as adding a lion or butterfly to the signature. Other requests are more esoteric. Jovanovic recalled one customer who asked that they customize his signature by introducing a four-letter profanity into his surname — presumably only for the signature, and not as part of a legal name change. "And I was like, why not?" she said.
Arab News
23-06-2025
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Extinction of Experience'
'The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World' by Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, discusses how humans are relying heavily on technology and digital interactions in modern times. Rosen argues in her 2024 book that this reliance has made people dependent on them for almost everything. Digital experiences, according to the author, are replacing real-world experiences and, with time, this will push people even further from genuine contact and physical presence. According to Rosen, this could potentially reduce people's understanding of empathy and connection, or even memory. She stresses the importance of utilizing technology wisely and calls for a critical and mindful approach to it. She also emphasizes the need to bring back genuine experiences through physical interaction so they can be treasured. One of the strong points of the book is the author's writing style and how she narrows down and simplifies the issue of technology dependency for readers. On the other hand, its weaknesses — that have been highlighted by readers — are that some of its chapters lack a realistic view of the world we live in, and keep repeating issues and complaining about current problems without providing solutions. Rosen is also the author of 'My Fundamentalist Education' and 'Preaching Eugenics.'
Spectator
19-06-2025
- General
- Spectator
My campaign to bring back real life
A new book by an American writer, Christine Rosen, details the way in which we are losing touch with the real world: the one we evolved in, as opposed to the virtual one. All the scrolling and texting means we're forgetting the look and feel of life unmediated by screens. The book is called The Extinction of Experience, and if we get more anxious year by year, then it's not just wars or the cost of living, Rosen suggests, but because we're grieving for the real world, whether we know it or not. I definitely know it. I'm Gen X, so I grew up without the internet, yet like other members of my generation now find myself caught in the smartphone itrap, dependent and resentful. It's a proof of Rosen's point that my friends and I increasingly find ourselves reminiscing about our pre-smartphone reality-based childhoods, like refugees remembering a country left long ago. We recall the endless waiting with no way of knowing how long the wait would be, and the various means we used to pass the endless time. We became extremely involved with the very near environment. We examined paving stones. We peered into cracks and picked satisfying paint flakes from walls. In the car, we misted the glass with our germy breath and raced the raindrops. We chewed paper; bit our own forearms, inspecting the little dented marks; spent hours face-down on lawns, studying grass. If you'd asked us back then, which no-body did, we'd have said we were bored to death and that the extinction of this sort of experience could only be a blessing. But we lived in constant communion not with a touchscreen but with the close-up real world, and in retrospect it was sort of wonderful. There's been a lot written about the disastrous effect of smartphones on our private lives, what you miss when you chat, even date, via a screen. But just as disturbing, says Rosen, is the extinction of experience from public life: the lack of acknowledgement that we're all here in the same space. I'm a slack parent in most ways, but a fanatical enforcer of that little wave of gratitude a pedestrian gives a car which stops for them at a zebra crossing. This gesture is the bedrock of civilisation, I reckon, and there's hell to pay when my son forgets. But it's a dying convention. Barely one in five passers-by now gives the wave. And almost no one on the street looks at each other any more. 'Civil inattention,' Rosen calls it. I've been trying, just for fun, to make eye contact with the twentysomething baristas in the cafés round my way – the very serious purveyors of impeccable flat whites. They hate it. Their eyeballs slide sideways and widen with terror. Smartphone-induced, contact-avoidant anxiety. Or could be that they just think I'm dangerously insane? What happens to public life, and what happens to civilisation, when we've sunk so deep into our separate, virtual worlds that we feel no sense of comradeship with the humans right next to us? Rosen thinks there's a terrible price to be paid. 'Our use of technology has fundamentally changed not just our awareness in public spaces but our sense of duty to others,' she writes. 'Engaged with the glowing screens in front of us rather than with the people around us, we often don't notice what is going on.' Worse: we don't care. In 2019 a man violently attacked a 78-year-old woman on the New York subway. No one intervened, but all manner of people whipped out their phones, filmed the fun event and shared it online, where it was viewed more than ten million times. 'It was not long ago that witnessing the death by suicide of another human being would have registered as a traumatic event,' says Rosen. 'But now we read stories about a woman in New York who purposely used a suicidal man on the bridge as a backdrop for a selfie.' Police in America and the UK have had to issue statements begging people who witness an assault to call for help before they start to record it. If I could, I'd like to get a copy of Rosen's book to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, proud father to ChatGPT, and one of the leaders in the great global AI race. Last week Altman addressed the world on the subject of the coming AI apocalypse, the point at which computers overtake us in intelligence and the world is forever transformed. 'In still very important ways, the 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before,' he wrote. 'We are building a brain for the world… We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out.' Altman sought to reassure us normies that human life will remain sacrosanct and special, even when the virtual world dominates the real. 'People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games and swim in lakes.' Swim in lakes? I could spend a while pondering the insight this gives into Altman's mind. How many people does he think live near lakes? But the most interesting part was the Panglossian conclusion: 'There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand… people have a long-term important and curious advantage over AI: we are hard-wired to care about other people and what they think and do, and we don't care very much about machines.' Altman stands to gain unimaginable power if his company dominates the field. He knows that the rise of AI will submerge us all even further in virtual reality and that the joyful, messy, real-life experiences we crave will be ever more elusive. I wonder if he's considered, though, that his 'world brain' might spell the end of the very quality he thinks makes us most human.
