technologies impact on interpersonal relationships & contacts !!!

This is an excerpt from a post at venture blog.

new technologies have (to date) served to weaken interpersonal and family relationships. What used to be phone calls are now emails. What used to be personal hand written letters with lots of doodles is now plain text. Many occasions for interpersonal communication (going to the bank, filling up the car with gas, buying groceries and many forms of shopping) are now being intermediated by technology instead of interpersonal connections. I met a Stanford researcher a couple of years ago who was studying the effect of technology on child shyness and socialization. Her thesis that technology use is materially different between shy and non-shy people is supported by initial research. The rise of! shyness and introverted behavior has tracked surprisingly well with the rise of the PC, bank tellers, automatic gas pump payments, video game consoles and the other human disintermediation technologies. Remember when kids used to go outside and play with their friends? Technology is not very well suited to serving the higher order emotional needs of humans. Wait a minute, wasn't one of the promises of technology to free us from drudgery so that we had more time for the "important things in life" like family, relationships, art, music, etc.?

I beleive that this is becoming a serious problem, all of us get barricaded behind our computers/laptops/cell phone that we are forgetting or not realising the loss of interpersonal relationships/contact.