My uncle is a Luddite

About a year ago I was in Boston for work and my uncle Vern drove down from New Hampshire to have dinner with me. I've always enjoyed my uncle Vern who reminds me a lot of my father. I guess in some ways he's the more senior version of my dad that never moved away from New England. As we were having dinner in the hotel restaurant I was explaining to Vern that I was in Boston working for the city on a project to move inspectors from using paper forms to mobile software on tablet PCs. These inspectors had just been forced to start using Outlook the month before and now were being wrangled into using arguably the most complex software, holding a tablet PC in your hand and navigating it with your stylus and using handwriting recognition has a pretty steep and dramatic learning curve. Naturally, the conversation landed on the inspectors aversion to this new technology and some of the anecdotes of how they dodged adoption.

Vern's eyes lit up during these bits and he immediately jumped in explaining his own personal philosophy of how technology only further separates us. As an assessor he could go online to research property prices and history, but he found it arguable better to drive down to the county offices in person or chat on the phone for a bit. He became such a regular that the county office workers even got to know his dog.

Sitting at the other side of the room was a group of about 5 people in which two of them were cranking out texts on their phones amid jokes and fork fulls of their meal. Vern explained how this was a perfect illustration of how technology was savaging that group's social interaction. I asked, wasn't technology actually enhancing and expanding it. Nicora and I often text throughout business trips and during the day, each allowing us to "be" with the people directly in front of us, while still connecting on all those common questions or exchanges of that familiar relationships consists of: "what are you doing?, how's your day?, Do you want to go to sushi tonight?"

Here's an article I just came across that seems to support the notion that technology provides for greater connection.

Do you think logging-in logs us out of human interaction?