Too Much Tech Diminishes Work Relationships?

Lansdowne writes "The Seattle Times has an article today on Tim Sanders, a Yahoo exec who claims too much technology may be bad for your health. According to Sanders, small groups of engineers who went to completely electronic communication in their workgroups became 'very lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people.'"

Correlation != Cause and Effect

[kakos]

As many people have already pointed out, there is simply a correlation between technology and unhappy, depressed, anti-social geniuses. This is the easiest mistake a person can make when looking at correlations.

As any beginning psychology student can (should) tell you is that a correlation does not indicate a cause and effect. So, from this, we see that unhappy, depressed, anti-social geniuses use a lot of technology. We have a strong positive correlation between technology and depressed geniuses. It could be that technology causes it, or it could be that depressed geniuses like technology, or it could just be a coincidence.

In order figure out which it is, experiments need to be performed. Observation alone cannot figure this out.

Re:perhaps the other way around?

[carolinef]

Or then again perhaps it[IT] allows people who may not be comfortable talking face to face the opportunity to avoid face to face contact precisely when it is most needed.

I would find it very easy in my job to communicate entirely by email and IM, but I've found that a kind of "chinese whisper" effect takes hold and more uncertainty is introduced than would be the case in a face to face conversation. So I force myself to get out of my chair. Apparently there are good ergonomic side-effects to this too...

E-Mail CYA

[darkmeridian]

I've prefer e-mail for communication in work because it affords me the opportunity to think twice or even thrice before "saying" anything. Keeps me out of trouble. Also, co-workers can't deny receiving data from me if I have the sent mail receipt and an exact transcript of what I sent and when I sent it.