Email, As Cold As The Cold War

Allowing for greater touch in computer-mediated communication can extend to people management instruments to attract better talent into business and to dissolve the current high-tech vs. high-touch paradox.

- Alfredo Behrens

Jessica, 23, shop attendant, got a $99 DNA kit for her birthday. She spat into the test tube and sent it for analysis to find out who her mother was. There is a lot of technology and a little touch there, but it shows the desire for “touch” as in the remembrances of touch by Seamus Heaney in Clearances V on folding blankets with his mother:

“So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened”

Yet, in advanced economies, touching seems to be turning something of the past. People are becoming isolated, so much so that in the first lines of the 2004 film Crash, Graham says:

“In L.A., nobody touches you... I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

Graham’s lines may seem like an exaggeration, but if so, why would the American acting giant Uta Hagen argue that America has become desensitized, illustrating her point with the mushrooming of encounters where Americans get together to learn to touch themselves again?

Some societies ‘touch’ more than others. Indians touch the feet of their elders out of respect but avoid touching others in public. On the other hand, in Brazil, allegations of sexual harassment at work are hard to follow through on account of so much kissing and hugging at work, which has set the pace of modern management.