The number of books, essays, seminars, conferences, and government and foundation grants exploring, and deploring, the ways our screens affect us does not equal the number of American screens. Yet. Technology saves time that people can devote to worrying about technology’s consequences.

Historian Daniel J. Boorstin glimpsed the future in 1962. Forty-five years before the iPhone arrived, his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America” included a joke: A woman exclaims to a mother pushing a pram, “My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there!” The mother replies, “Oh, that’s nothing — you should see his photograph.”

In 1962, television represented the graphic revolution that had begun with photography and continued with movies. The anxiety was that people would prefer the artificial to the real. In 1960, a telegenic president (John F. Kennedy) had been elected, intensifying worries that the graphic revolution would manipulate us. Today, Christine Rosen worries that we are manipulating, and diminishing, ourselves.

With smartphones ubiquitous, Rosen, of the American Enterprise Institute, wonders what becomes of us when we prefer our relationship to reality to be “mediated” by technology. In “The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World,” she paints, with illuminating anecdotes, a pointillist picture — often amusing, sometimes ominous — of an era when a museumgoer expresses “disappointment that the Van Gogh he sees hanging on the wall is nowhere near as vibrant as one on his coffee mug.”

Rosen has elegant, well-bred regrets about, inter alia, the slow disappearance of handwriting. Today, hands are trained for swift keystrokes rather than the skillful application of ink to paper. An intimacy is lost when texting supplants cursive.

But, then, as Virginia Postrel, author of “The Future and Its Enemies” (1998), says when reviewing Rosen’s book for Reason: Before ink, paper and knowledge of the alphabet became abundant, all communications had to have the intimacy of face-to-face exchanges. How far back should regrets go?

In 2013, the Golden Gate Bridge’s toll collectors were replaced by technology, depriving commuters, Rosen says, of “a smile or a hello.” But is life diminished by trading fleeting encounters with cheery toll collectors for quicker commutes?

GPS, she says, is more precise than paper maps but makes its users spectators rather than navigators. What if, however, one simply wants to arrive, without the stimulus of navigating?

“We are awash in social media but our social skills — common courtesy, patience, eye contact — are deteriorating.” The deterioration is real, and she sensibly postulates causation: Being alone with one’s obsessions on social media encourages impatience, intolerance, solipsism and narcissism. And “digilante” justice inflicted by global mobs policing deviations from mob-defined proprieties. Furthermore, socialization is generally superior when teenagers do not socialize primarily by texting.

Sensible parents know that learning to be bored gracefully should be part of growing up, and Rosen, who knows that “people hate to wait,” understands that “checking your phone to escape the tedium can feel like a micro-revolution against the tyranny of time.” This escape from boredom feeds what she terms “the relentless acceleration of everyday life.” And she asks: Might boredom, which is a deeply human experience, “have a purpose?” Would a society without boredom also lack daydreaming, which can express a creative mind?

Her questions are suggestive. So, however, is this: Was the 14th-century peasant who spent dawn to dusk behind an ox, plowing fields for his lordship, bored? Perhaps not. This possibility is horrifying: The peasant, leading a life bereft of distractions, was incapable of boredom.

The sudden coming of computers, smartphones, tablets, social media, etc., collectively constitutes a vast, uncontrolled social experiment. It is, however, uncontrolled only in that government, fortunately, has not managed to take charge. Markets (meaning trillions of individual choices), subgroups of society (e.g., schools, parents) and individuals who share Rosen’s doubts increasingly exercise control over screens.

Rosen’s refined sensibility is rightly offended by the passivity of people who treat screens as troughs that enable endless gorging on distractions. She cites Ambrose Bierce, the Civil War veteran (he was at Shiloh) whose “The Devil’s Dictionary” defined patience as “a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” Rosen knows, however, the perils of a society incapable of patience. She sensibly worries that people who are taught by their screens that they are entitled to instant and constant amusement — people who cannot delay apps’ often watery gratifications — will compose a society too impatient for the pace of deliberative politics: for democracy.

George Will is a Washington Post columnist.