Exercise for the relationally anemic.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Marketing Solutions

The business of selling class personalized stationary ... is gaining momentum after a period of stagnant sales ... sales have risen more than 20% in the past year ... Personalization is enormous ... it's sort of a rebellion to the impersonal nature of communicating electronically

--The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2007

Personalization is not for everyone nor is it for every situation. Many of us are pleased to check out of our hotel, order our books or retrieve our bank balances online, and conduct any number of other transactions without a personal interaction. In fact, many of us delight in being able to do certain things without any human contact because--face it--human interaction takes effort and consumes energy.

However, as a society we must admit that things continue to change dramatically. The rate at which automated, self-serve, electronic, human-less transactions continue to replace human interactions is incredible. Compared with our parents and grandparents who primarily conducted their life's transactions with people they knew--bank, grocery store, car repair--we primarily conduct our business with people we don't know and increasingly without people at all (strangers and nonhumans). In fact when things went wrong, we used to say, "I want to talk with someone down there I know." That then morphed into "I want to talk with a human--no doubt, a stranger--down there." Then as things moved offshore we conceded again, "Is there a stranger in a foreign land on the other side of the world whom I can barely understand--that I might talk to?" We have really lowered the bar.

The rise of emotion-saving devices

Just this morning on one of those morning shows they were demonstrating this electronic robot with a face and even large expressive eyes as a relational tool for friendship. Ah, yet another way to avoid the heavy lifting of relationships in our lives. This new world first brought us labor-saving devices like lawn mowers, washing machines and electric irons. Now it is bringing us emotion-saving devices so we don't have to wear ourselves out with face-to-face or even phone conversations with other humans.

Those labor-saving devices worked out really well. They made us more efficient, productive and ultimately more wealthy. However, they did not make us healthier. We became physically soft, weak and too often overweight. It turns out that when we no longer needed to perform the physical work, we still needed the physical exercise. In...