joshmccormack's Journal: The Dangerous Allure of Technology Over Relationships

Technology certainly continues to make gathering, analyzing and spreading data easier every day. In the term data I'm including sales statistics, email and really just about anything that can be transferred digitally.

Just think back to the time before the Internet and what job hunting was like. You couldn't blast your resume out to thousands of employers, you had to at least lick an envelope and pay some postage. Even that was removing a person from any sort of a relationship in the exercise - you could ask someone to take a chance and hire you, without the work of getting to see them, without the humiliation of having to approach someone, hat in hand, and pitch your case for a chance at their company.

But transmitting your resume electronically removes an applicant so many steps from the relationship it's not just a matter of emailing or mailing. You don't need a physical copy of your resume, you don't need to know the address of the company you want to work at - you don't even need to know about the job listing, since you can just post your resume to be searched.

The apparent benefits of this are vast. You get to more efficiently reach out to more companies. However, it's pretty well documented that this method of job hunting is not very effective. The newspapers are full of stories of people saying they've been looking for work for years, mailing/faxing and emailing out hundreds and thousands of resumes. This despite books like the ubiquitous What Color is Your Parachute? advising people to job-hunt in person. Less than 10% of people have gotten their jobs through these methods.

Of course the same thing is happening to other relationships. Stories of Pepsi switching over their deliveries to retail stores from drivers discretion to decisions made by software fed by handhelds are popping up in tech journals with regularity. Again, seems like a great idea. Maybe the software is fed by tons of market research and advanced algorithms. But conversely, you're overlooking the value of a live person's decision and the knowledge they gain from their relationships. I can imagine a great deal of subtlety involved in these decisions, and also preferable treatment be given to products delivered by someone who shows a concern for their clients business.

That's not to say that technology can't augment a system without removing the close contact that can be so valuable, often in unpredictable ways. It is a great temptation, though, to do things cheaper and easier courtesy of technology, and in the process lose out because people like to deal with people, and they like to be treated like people.