It's easy to become emotional over technology's behavioral impacts

by Paul Andrews
Seattle Times columnist

In his Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) keynote address in Seattle recently, Microsoft president Steve Ballmer revealed why he does not yet use a Windows CE personal digital assistant.

It was a very small issue: He may be able to take notes while talking with someone, Ballmer said, but cannot maintain eye contact. He has to keep looking down to see if his writing is recording properly.

Producers of next-generation Windows CE devices undoubtedly are working hard to address that deficiency. Yet it shows how the march of technological progress still stumbles over the little things in life, often having to do more with social mores than technological prowess.

Consider the cell phone. Two years ago, author Michael Crichton, at Esther Dyson's PC Forum conference in Tucson, railed at how rude cell users were becoming. A recent lunch partner had shown no qualms about interrupting their conversation to answer a phone call, Crichton complained.

Today, few people think twice about doing so - at least in tech-savvy circles. The ocean beach, once considered a haven from fast-lane pressure and demands, has become a chirping, chiming, beeping zoo of digital devices affording sunbathers the opportunity to catch up on the office and home while working on their tans.

Checking e-mail may be next. Two-way pagers are becoming popular, and the Palm VII wireless organizer permits logging on to the Internet without a phone connection.

Equipped with an earphone-microphone similar to what Secret Service agents wear, people will be able to receive phone calls or speech-synthesized e-mail while simultaneously appearing to be paying attention to the person or group they are with.

This will require another change in social norms. During a high-tech adventure game in New York City last summer, one team equipped themselves with earphone mikes attached to their walkie-talkie radios. They reported getting strange stares as they walked down the sidewalk, apparently talking to themselves.

We tend to get emotional about technology's behavioral impacts. At a party I attended recently, the prospect of the eBook replacing its paper corollary threw polite cocktail conversation into red-faced, voices-rising arguments over the merits of bound paper that you could curl up with versus a soulless plastic slate devoid of pages to turn.

The culprit was Dick Brass, the voluble pioneer of Microsoft's ClearType project that promises to make on-screen reading every bit as intuitive and easy on the eyes as reading paper. Brass showed a video he had put together, simulating a TV commercial a few years down the road, where an avuncular pitch man endearingly pleads with viewers to forgo their eBooks and buy paper books, presumably out of respect for good old-fashioned American values.

Brass' arguments were brutally logical. With the right eBook - one as browsable and readable as paper, capable of holding margin notes (digitally written) as well as of getting wet, of being dropped and of being jammed in purses and backpacks, all at several dollars less - people would have no reason to stick with heavy, space-consuming, acid-based paper versions.

But Brass' points were poorly received. What it came down to was this: People like books. They like what books represent - a childhood experience, the act of learning, the knowledge they contain. Even bookshelves, which would presumably go away in an eBook world, were cited with fondness for what they represent - memories of a father's study, the warmth of a public library.

These are ephemeral generational qualities, however, that will fade in the face of the sheer convenience and efficiency of the right eBook. After The Seattle Times went to electronic typewriters, the newsroom permitted employees to buy their old manual typewriters. I bought five Royals and Underwoods, which are somewhere in the attic, untouched for years.

It may be that CE devices figure out a way for Steve Ballmer to take notes while maintaining eye contact. If, instead, we find ourselves being excused while we bow our heads to take notes on digital pads, I will not be surprised.

User Friendly appears Sundays in the Personal Technology section of The Seattle Times. Paul Andrews is a Seattle-based writer and longtime observer of the technology industry.