Customer Reviews

High Tech/High Touch: Technology and Our Search for Meaning

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In High Tech - High Touch, a new book by John Naisbitt and coauthors Nana Naisbitt and Doug Philips, the questions of the next millennium are raised. The authors do not answer these questions, but they urge us to begin discussing them. Where are we taking technology or is it taking us? Has technology fulfilled its promise of giving us more leisure time or has it made our lives busier and more complex? Is the line between real and virtual blurring and if it is what does that mean to our children and our society? Are we on the verge of a leap in evolution through genetic engineering or will we tinker with life and create monsters like Dr. Frankenstein? Will religion and science find ways to understand and appreciate each other or will they continue their bitter battle over the turf of truth? And what does the Specimen Art movement say about who we are and where we're going? High Tech - High Touch is a fascinating exploration of these and other significant questions of our time. I highly recommend it to everyone living on our little island in space.

Recently I always keep asking myself a question: " Are we addicted to the Internet world too much?" This book raises some good questions for us to begin to think about: 1. Do we favor the quick fix, from religion to nutrition? 2. Do we fear and worship technology? 3. Do we blur the distinction between real and fake? 4. Do we accept violence as normal? 5. Do we love technology as a toy? 6. Do we live our lives distanced and distracted?

Reading this book is a very good beginning to look for signs of these symptoms in the world we live as well as in our culture. "Technology always originates from human nature."

In Megatrends Mr. Naisbitt discussed the correlation between the human need to balance the high technological advances we achieve with a need to obtain a personal and humanistic approaches to our lives. Hence, impersonal and mechanistic high tech medicine correlates with the rise of personal vitalistic types of alternative medicine; personal computers have inundated our homes, but the #1 use of them is e-mail and now the lost art of letter writing is being reborn in an electronic form; the voluntary simplicity movement as an antidote to technologically induced lifestyle complexity. I expected that this book would continue in this vein, but it was more of how technology is further unbalancing us and depersonalizing us.

If you're looking for a book that justifies being a modern Luddite, or a warning for where we may be heading, this book is good for you. It's a good book at explaining alot of current trends in our technologically dependent culture, but not what the title lead me to expect.

Don't read this book. It will confuse you into thinking that the world of technology is dangerous and emotionally painful, without every actually explaining to you how or why. The only reason I don't give it fewer stars is that it's real easy to read. The problem is, it doesn't actually say anything.
I'm doing my master's thesis on how technology effects human experience of meaning, and I was really looking forward to this book as a layman's thought-provoking look at the subject. By the time I was halfway through it, I was ready to bang my head against a wall. There's just no substance, no logical progression of thought-the whole thing is full of semi-neurotic, somewhat morbid emotional appeals (e.g. naming a section about video games "From Pingpong to Murder") and unsupported logical jumps. The author clearly passionately believes that using technology isn't "soul enriching," and that using it so much is driving us into the arms of numb, addictive distractions; he bases the whole book on those assumptions without ever making a case for why they're true.
High Tech, High Touch is constructed more like a repetitious epic poem of lamentation than it is any real discussion of anything. Long laundry lists of statements, both of facts and of melancholy poetic conjecture, which never build to any kind of analysis. Example, on p. 45:

"The most dangerous promise of technology is that it will make our children smarter. President Bill Clinton's 1996 State of the Union address proclaimed 'the Internet in every classroom' to be a noble goal. Access to information will not teach synthesis and analysis. School expenditures in information technology reached [a high number] in 1997, yet at the same time programs for music and the arts were defunded. [sic]" (p. 45)

That sounds pretty bad, right? Sure it does. But what does it actually say? It doesn't actually say that technology won't make children smarter, or what really does make them smarter. It doesn't explain why it's not noble to have the internet in classrooms. It implies that students don't analyze or synthesize information via the net, only access it, but it never supports or explains that idea (Online classes? Educational software? Email discussions with experts? Forums where other people are studying similar subjecs? How is net research different than library research r.e. analysis and synthesis?) It doesn't say how much, or where, the arts were defunded, and it implies that the arts are more "noble" than online networking but doesn't explain why. The entire book is like that.

This book is grounded in a concept that embodies an increasing psychological disconnect between two generations: those who grew up with networked technology, and those who didn't. The concept is: "If an event or interpersonal transaction doesn't take place in the physical world, it can't fundamentally benefit or fulfill you." This book assumes that and restates it dozens and dozens (and dozens) of times, but it never actually provides an argument for why we should believe it. To a lot of people who didn't grow up with technology, that statement is so intuitively, emotionally obvious that it doesn't need to be supported or explained. The problem is that, according to a great volume of current research being done with the "net generation," that concept is -not- intuitively obvious to -them-. They find personal significance, power, community, and existential meaning in the things they do online. These two different experiences of an emerging trend must -both- be acknowledged in any supposed assessment of technology's effects on human psychology or quality of life.
If you want to learn about what technology is doing to our minds, read Smartmobs or Growing Up Digital. If you want to learn about consumerism and overwork and meaning, read Your Money or Your Life. They'll show you more than poetry and fear.

My congratulations go to the author who was able to compile a book about the "new" economy and information age. The only downfall of the book is in the extreme examples that Naisbat used to explain why mass media is hurting our lives as humans. Overall, an enjoyable and entertainable read.

I must agree with a number of other reviewers about this book. It promises a lot more than it gives. It too it seems to me beats a pretty dead horse, when coming down as major point on media violence as major abuse of technology. It is not that this is wrong, but rather that it is such a glaring and commonplace truth that one does not need it to be banged into one's head over and over again.
About the basic idea of a split between the high tech material world and the 'high touch' inner world, this too has a certain feeling of the commonplace. I also do not believe it accurate , if only because the technical obviously works on our feelings, and our feelings transform the world of the technical.
I suppose the main conclusion of this work is that we have to be careful, use technology wisely, not become its slaves. A lot of people for a long time in the Western world have become making this point. Consider Thoreau " The railroad rides mankind" .
There is however information in this book on new developments in various areas of scientific and technical work. This can be valuable.
But on the whole one must look elsewhere for true wisdom on the subject.

This book takes on the important issue of the role of technology in our lives, and I agree with the general orientation of the authors, but their exploration of the issue is amateurish.

To start with the positive, the authors begin by correctly noting that technology profoundly shapes our lives in both positive and negative ways. It affects how we see ourselves, how we interact with each other and the world, the kind of physical and human world we create, how we spend our time, our mental habits and emotions, and indeed our basic beliefs and values. The book emphasizes negative effects of technology, both actual and potential, and I agree with this emphasis. Moreover, the authors describe us as living in a "technologically intoxicated zone" and I think the term is apt.

But from here the book begins to go downhill. Rather than broadly and/or deeply looking at the influence of technology on our "search for meaning" (per the subtitle), the authors appear ignorant of the serious work others have already done in this area, and they instead somewhat superficially and arbitrarily focus on a few select areas.

The first major area is violence, and I fully agree that the prevalence of violence in the media and video games is seriously detrimental to our society, to the extent of warranting major regulation. But the fact that technology can help deliver violent content doesn't make this primarily a technological issue, so I think the authors spend far too much time on this topic.

The next major topic is biotechnology, especially genetic engineering. I think this discussion is more relevant to the subject of the book, and the authors do a decent job with it, but again I think the authors spend too much time on it. It's fine to point out the ominous perils of genetic engineering and the corresponding need for regulation, but what does this really have to do with our search for meaning today?

Finally, they discuss the role of art, focusing on visual arts. I agree that art is a uniquely valuable means to explore the human condition, so it's certainly relevant to the question of the meaning of life, and art can thus help counteract some of the detrimental effects of technology. But the art emphasized in the book is shockingly provocative art which features human body fluids, physical deformity, and even corpses. Such art is purportedly intended to emphasize our material embodiment, as opposed to viewing ourselves as mere realizations of genetic software to be manipulated at will. This is fine as far as it goes, but it totally misses the possibility that our human existence transcends mere materiality, so this is a very constraining assumption with respect to the search for meaning.

In the end, while this book covers some interesting topics, it doesn't even begin to do justice to the subject matter and offers few concrete proposals, so I can't recommend it. Readers interested in this area are better off with more rigorous and sophisticated work, such as found in the philosophy of technology.

One of the most misleading titles I have ever read. Although purporting to cover issues regarding society's relationship to technology, the authors present a short and poorly reasoned discussion of media violence, followed up with much fluff regarding gene therapy and genetic manipulation.

I agree that violence in the media has a detrimental effect on society, however, I cannot stomach the idea that "the nihilistic music of a German rock band" contributed to the Littleton Colorado school shootings. Such tripe derails any rational discussion of the subject.

Regardless of the out of date information regarding genetic science, the heart of the book adds nothing to the premise. Had the authors actually spent time developing the idea of the "Technologically Intoxicated Zone" instead of presenting the ideas of religious scholars regarding gene therapy, the book may have had some value.

The original promise of the book is left entirely unfulfilled and the reader is left to fend for themselves regarding their own relationship, and that of their community, to technology.

I feel that the title is deceptive and the irrelevant arguments presented are disjointed.

John Naisbitt is very high touch in person. When he told me his next book would be about high tech, high touch--the most popular and shortest chapter in Megatrends--I was hoping for examples of how to achieve that balance. Alas I was mistaken. I came away from the read very sensitized to the encroachment of the technologically intoxicated zone. I chuckled at realizing our two biggest markets are consumer technology and escape from consumer technology. These are valuable lessons and well documented. There are a few personable moments in the book that point towards turning off the TV. But the reader needs to look elsewhere and inward for the antidote.

Megatrends author John Naisbitt's new book (co-written by daughter Nana Naisbitt and artist Douglas Philips) is a fat book of ideas that touches upon genetics, art, media violence, time sensibilities and even South Park. Unlike most futurists, the authors make judgment calls about future timelines and inclinations. However, they agree with other futurists that full immersion virtual reality is coming, although they add that it's probably not a good thing, especially for your kids. Their compelling discussion of the genetic revolution is wide-ranging and fair-handed. Their interesting take on media violence and video games seems more controversial, evidencing a distaste that echoes the genre's most hostile opponents. Their view of modern art, which touts body part art (i.e. Piss Christ and sliced cows) but ignores the computer-driven fruition of amateur filmmaking, also seems odd. You may find yourself arguing and fighting with this very stylish, well-written book, but we [...] promise you won't be bored.