VISIONARIES WEEK 5 PROGRAMME 2
LIFESTYLE by JOHN NAISBITT
Back in 1982, I was writing a book, “Megatrends”. And the second chapter of the book I
titled “High Tech - High Touch”. I coined that phrase to describe a phenomenon of the
interplay between the introduction of technology and our human response to it.
“High Touch” is about our humanness and ways we celebrate our humanness. And I thought
at the time - and I still think this is so - that, as more and more technology rolls in, we sort of,
in a compensatory sort of way, create balancing High Touch. We look at High Tech-High
Touch as trying to understand technology through the lens of, say, religion, or through the
lens of art. So technology often distracts us and distances us. And that’s one of the
symptoms of the technologically intoxicated zone that we speak of that America’s in.
We live our lives and children live their lives with screens. They’ve got the television
screens, and the electronic game screens. And we’ve got pager screens. We’re just a
society of screens. And we’re all pretty aware of media violence. And we all see the
American movies. Even more alarming - if that’s possible, I think - are the electronic games
that children play. These are games that train and reward children for killing people. And I
think that among all the considerations of why we’re seeing, literally, children killing children
in schools in the United States - I think that we’ve underestimated the role in the conditioning
of children of the electronic games, which are very powerful and interactive and which many
children play hours and hours a day. They become really real. People say: “Oh, it’s just
fantasy.” But the consequences are real. Children, not until they’re eight or nine or so can
distinguish between what’s real and what’s not real.
And in the States we have such a culture of violence that it’s the normal state. We
Americans cannot see how violent our society is. People on the outside can see. All of the
technology we have to live with in many ways results in a kind of distance and distraction.
In affluent America, for example, kids have their own rooms and their own television sets in
their rooms and their own music in their rooms. And they often retreat to those. So they’re
sort of living together in isolation. I spent quite a bit of time in Asia and Latin America.
And technology leapfrogs everything else. And these symptoms can be anywhere. The
symptoms are the result of overload in technology.
My daughter decided that she was really going to supervise her children and cut down on the
exposure to the violence on television. But there’s so much violence on television and it’s so
sort of unpoliceable that she decided the thing that must be done is the removal of the
television from the home. And that’s what she did. And the kids were very unhappy with it,
very unhappy. Then, several months later, she got the courage to ask them what life was like
without television: was it better, was it worse, were they suffering? They each said that life
was much better. They could linger at the dinner table. They read books, they created games,
they went to bed when they were tired, instead of staying up to watch some more shows.
Life really calmed down a lot. And it’s much a much more peaceful, attractive environment
in that home. And a lot of the neighbourhood kids spend a lot of time at the house, because
they find this attractive as well.
We are not against technology. The point is: appropriate use of technology. And our plea is
to become more reflective about this: to think about what the trade-offs are; and to think about
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whether this technology, as it promises, really saves us time, or whether it results in our
spending more time on technology, instead of on High Touch, as it were.
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