Tech and touch

Everybody’s talking to computers. They’re all dancing to a drum machine. I’m so cool and calculated alone in the modern world. I sit so snug and isolated alone in the modern world. We all need the human touch. We all need it, and I needit too.”

That’s from a song, “Human Touch”, by 1980s’ icon Rick Springfield, and he is lamenting about a world where technology has become all-consuming to the detriment of personal relationships. It’s interesting to note that it was released way back in 1983, just at the dawn of the personal computer era and many years before the advent of the Internet.

Since then, of course, the digital revolution has progressed to a whole different dimension. We all have PCs in the office and at home, mobile devices for when we’re between the two, and we can surf, email, msn, sms to virtually all points of the world day and night. With its ability to make distance almost meaningless, technology allows us to be as close to the person in the next continent as in the next block.

For global businesses, this ability to connect and collaborate is a huge productivity enabler. For instance, to produce this year’s Control Engineering Global Manufacturing Trends supplement, (see March issue) required the cooperation of six international editors around the world.

Although we used nothing more sophisticated than email, it is difficult to see how the project, which necessarily involved document checks and changes, could have been done had we not been able to connect so quickly and easily.

According to IBM, the future world of work will see us more and more dependent on technology: “Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling of being there in-person. Work models will be changed by expanded globalization and green initiatives that reduce travel and encourage work at home.”

Sounds a bit scary to me. Already, it’s common for people in the same office to email or message each other rather than talk. And with email usurping the phone even for the most simple of business requests, the result is an deluge of emails from people you have never even met or spoken to. Here, it’s almost as if technology is increasing the distance between people.

So all this makes it even more important to get out of our bubbles and make the most of the real interactions that we do manage to have, whether it’s at exhibitions, seminars, company visits. For relationship building, to establish high levels of trust, and for much more, you really still need that human touch.