Yes, technology is a great thing and I wouldn’t want to be without it.
I know I am not alone in this but sometimes I get the feeling that as a human race we are slowly losing the ability or desire to appreciate the things in life that we are so eager to try and replace with technology. After all, one has to wonder if face to face discourse is willingly being replaced by video and electronic text when Fred Wilson writes the following:
But the idea of a physical place that we "must be" doesn't have the same impact anymore. Right now, I can engage in a debate with friends in Australia, China, Japan, India, Israel, Italy, France, England, NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago at the same time. Or we can post our thoughts to each other (and the world) over the course of a day, a week, or a month, and share our passions with each other and learn from each other.
Our Cafe de Flore is Techmeme or Tech Newsjunk or Twitter or FriendFeed or Tumblr or Flickr or something else. And we are just getting started. It will be interesting to see if the new cafe society produces the kind of work that the traditional ones did.
If this is the case then I think it speaks sadly for our society as we apparently are distancing ourselves from each other. As much as technology in some ways is trying to make our lives better, we should also not be willing to so easily give up on the real human act of interaction.
Regardless of what Fred may believe, I truly don’t think that any amount of electronic discourse can come close to those conversations we share with friends within arms reach. I don’t believe that any video conferencing can come close to sitting at a bistro cafe on a sunny Sunday morning sharing brunch while talking about both the mundane and the important. Friendships made over digital connections can be important, but they don’t even come close to those forged through holding a friend during their times of trouble or when they sit with you sharing nothing more than the setting of the sun.
Even in our individual lives we seem to be trying so hard to replace everything with some sort of electronic equivalent with the idea that it is the better alternative. Sure computers, PDA's and all the other forms of communication might give us more options, but does that necessarily make it the better alternative?
This is something that Graham Chastney was talking about in a post earlier this week when he wrote the following
With a notebook and pen there is nothing else, I sit on a sofa away from a keyboard so there are no distractions. When I write, I'm not worrying whether it's legible, spelled correctly or whether it is good grammar, I'm just writing. When I use a keyboard my brain won't allow me to be free, it wants me to be correct. While I'm trying to be correct I can't stream, it's disruptive.
In his post, Graham also notes this tactile need of physical items and the act of making notes as being important:
There's more to it than that though.
A notebook and pen are tactile things. When I'm sitting in that place with those object my brain knows what is coming, I've built a routine and the routine helps. When I first started it took me ages to get into a stream, if I follow the routine the stream now comes quite easily.
When I have finished one notebook it goes on a bookshelf next to my other notebooks, there is something very satisfying about seeing the number of books increase. Seeing files feel a computer disk doesn't feel the same.
As good as technology and computers become they will never be able to equal the things that truly inspire human beings and nor should they. We need to realize that as important as technology is in our lives it is even more important to realize that there is no replacement for real life human interaction, because if we do, I think we lose a very important part of our humanity.