High Tech - High Touch : technology and our accelerated search for meaning.
John Naisbitt with Nana Naisbitt and Douglas Philips Nicholas Brealey Publications 2001

All across the marketing community - but not, we suspect, academic life - there is a strong folk-memory of Megatrends, John Naisbitt's futurology blockbuster from 1982. You can still find copies yellowing in the offices of senior agency personnel. His success confirmed the existence of a massive appetite within business for strong, compellingly believable versions of the future. Perhaps, looking back, his work anchored the forecasting trade well and truly in the zeitgeist. By the 1980's, the old commercial certainties were beginning to crack : monopolies were about the hit the buffers of privatisation, protectionist cultures were falling under sustained deregulatory assault, competition was reinforced in a mixture of economic liberalism and slowly rising consumer power. Big companies had to learn to be supple, to bend quickly to emergent trends, to keep ahead. Forecasting, inevitably, boomed. And John Naisbitt, first big cab off the rank, raced to fame and influence.

And this brings us to High Tech - High Touch. Essentially, this is an exploration of the friction between technological innovation and the human soul. Like so many US books about the future, it carries a warning that if we are not careful, our love affair with technology will sour our goodness as people and communities. "The introduction of any new technology", says Naisbitt and his co-writers, "alters life, relationships and societies on a macro and micro level". But "humans have introduced technology without thinking about how relationships will change, about what exactly will be enhanced, what will be displaced, what will be diminished".

So, once again, we have here a strange brew of perfectly sober analysis about scientific and cultural trends laced with lifestyle advice. Along the way, the story is seasoned with quotes and comments from specially interviewed religious leaders, theologians, politicians and scientists. This whole style will not sit comfortably with many readers. For one obvious thing, there is a sense of what seems to us a deliberate and therefore ersatz gloom. According to Naisbitt and co, family has weakened, individuals are cocooned, community has eroded - that so familiar litany - and alienation is the price millions now pay for membership of our cold, high-tech age.

This leads sometimes to really terrible euphuism. Naisbitt tells us at one point that "people are becoming more mystical" and that "Americans are eager to embrace the security and sanctity of religion and indeed that "America is in the midst of a religious revival". None of these assertions is really proved to our satisfaction - even though Naisbitt quotes from one (unsourced) study which compares church membership in 2000 with that of 1776 ! - but this repetitious, almost incantational style of claim-making is clearly thought to be sufficient for the reader. In the same section, Naisbitt quotes from one Martin Marty, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Chicago, who tells us :-

"All over the place there are more visible evidences (sic) of religion in public life. All across the spectrum of public life, people are more at ease with expressions of religion".

Professor Marty is not, alas, given the space to support his seemingly impressionistic views with facts (or even "evidences"). And the notion that a professor of comparative religion would, maybe, naturally talk this way (he-would-say-that-wouldn't-he?) does not invite any detachment from the author, the famous spotter of megatrends. Anyway, while "others believe technology offers some kind of cure for all of society's ills" - has anyone ever said any such thing? - Naisbitt's firm conclusion is that "despite all our seeking, we still feel a spiritual void".

Now, to us, this way of composing argument is always tottering just above the phoney and the manipulative. And this is a real pity because a lot of the anxieties expressed in High Tech - High Touch are real and true enough. There is a long discourse, for example, on just how intrusively casual and casually intrusive images of violence have become inside American or indeed Western culture. Naisbitt's argument is that alongside the mass democratisation of communications and information technology that the last decade has brought lies a mass and still unregulated access to the pornography of violence via what he calls the "military-nintendo complex". His is an assumption-destabilising criticism of electronic games and the brutalising use of violence that defines the sub-culture they create. The consequent question is a reasonable one : by what counter-cultural tools do we wean young people off a reconciliation with guns and gore? How do we make violence uncool when it has become the heroic currency of youth-focused techno-culture? How have we allowed the simulation of violence so much association with fun and pleasure?

All this is not a new argument - but Naisbitt makes a good case for saying it should be a promptly revisited argument precisely because new technologies have hugely expanded access to potentially destructive images without any corresponding moral restraint being advocated within the technologies themselves. His long inventory of acts of horrific violence in US schools - many of which have attracted global media attention - would make, in the context of all his arguments about games and the Internet, even the most liberal intellectual stop and think again.

And, yes, there is a too very serviceable chapter on the still unclarified ethics of genetic manipulation and gene therapy - as good as anything we have read on the subject this last while. All the way through, we felt a real itch to like this book. It puts good questions to itself and thinks it brings real warnings. And we could not deny the humanism at its heart. We even admiringly thought every now and then that this was a book that was blatantly not seeking easy popularity or even accessibility - the rather hard section on "genetic determinism" being a good case in point.

Yes, we do want to approve of High Tech - High Touch. But, oh God, did it really need to be so homespun and so preachy? All the intellectual needs to do to serve his or her society is to call it as it is, to measure without prejudice and to weigh options without reference to personal preference. On this strict measure, Naisbitt and co. do not win our prize. But this is not a frivolous book. And, all said, we did admire it a bit.