High-Tech High Touch: Technology and Our Accelerated Search for Meaning: Technology and Our Search for Meaning - Softcover

Naisbitt, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857882601 ISBN 13: 9781857882605

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

This text offers perspectives and insights on the interplay between technology and people. It is a compelling tour of our contemporary "technology immersion", and the author sets out to explain the new dynamics of our cultures, where each of us fits in, and how we can make the most of the extraordinary changes that are taking place in society today. The book explores everything from the views of doctors and scientists on genetic engineering to the problems that parents face contending with violent computer games. Its forecasts span science, war, religion, commerce, communications, art, manufacturing - and many other areas of our lives.

About this title

Review:

The great irony of the high-tech age is that we've become enslaved to devices that were supposed to give us freedom. That's why in HighTech/High Touch, John Naisbitt decided to revisit a chapter from Megatrends, his 1982 bestseller, in which he discussed the split between high tech and what he dubbed "high touch."

We all know what high tech is--these are the technologies that "make us available 24 hours a day, like a convenience store," Naisbitt writes. He says we live in a "technologically intoxicated zone", the symptoms of which include a continual search for quick fixes and lives that are "distanced and distracted." High touch, on the other hand, is the stuff we give up when we're tuned into the technological world: hope and fear and longing, love and forgiveness, nature and spirituality. To discover where the twain shall meet, Naisbitt takes us on a journey that includes Celebration, Florida, the Disney-created community that was fully wired from the get-go; Martha Stewart, who shows people with complicated lives how to enjoy simple tasks like gardening; extreme sports and adventure travel, in which ordinary people expose themselves to the full fury of nature and gravity. And that's all just the first quarter of the book; Naisbitt goes on to look at how video games desensitise children to violence; the challenges the human genome project presents to religion and spirituality; and, finally, "specimen art", in which artists create disturbing images of life, death and human sexuality.

There's no conclusion, in the traditional sense, only a look at what's happening in our world. But the reader will probably take some sort of action after finishing High Tech / High Touch: switching off the cellphone for a few hours a day; permanently locking away the children's violent Nintendo games; maybe even booking a vacation at the most remote location possible. Anything to get away from the constant buzz of a wired world. --Lou Schuler, Amazon.com

About the Author:

John Naisbitt is widely regarded as one of the world's top social forecasters who has been accurately describing the future since 1968. His books including Megatrends, together with Global Paradox and Megatrends Asia (both published by Nicholas Brealey) have sold more than 14 million copies worldwide. The recipient of 12 honorary degrees, Naisbitt has been a visiting fellow at Harvard, a Distinguished International Fellow at ISIS in Malaysia, a visiting professor at Moscow State University and is a renowned international speaker. Nana Naisbitt and Douglas Philips, both writers, artists and entrepreneurs, have worked on projects for Kellogg's, Motorola, Leo Burnett, and Shell Oil Company.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1857882601
• ISBN 13: 9781857882605
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288