Information rich, relationship poor.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Marketing Solutions

Remember the old joke about the drunk looking for a lost coin under a street light and when asked where asked where he lost it, he points to a darkened area near a stairs. He is asked: Why are you looking over here under the street light if you lost it back there? "Because the light is better over here."

A colleague recently invited me to be a "friend" on Facebook. He was telling me how great it would be that I could see his latest updates, videos, pictures, articles, links and the like. For someone of my generation who did not grow up with this kind of access to information, it sounded pretty cool. I could know what was going on with him at any time. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that I have historically gotten this kind of information when we saw or telephoned each other.

The beat goes on. Our technology advancements have once again enabled us to gain access to more information and increasingly bypass relational interaction. Direct interaction used to be the primary source of information from our friends and colleagues, but e-mail, texting and social networking software like Facebook continue to make us information rich but relationship poor.

This disaggregation of information from the relationship is happening on a number of levels. A friend recently told me about a panel of young women talking about how online dating provided so much information prior to meeting that it is actually hard to have a meaningful conversation that is not informationally redundant. The collecting of information to match people is done by the system rather than in a relationship interaction. The process of discovering information (getting to know someone) helps build relationship. The absence of that process actually robs us of crucial relationship building. The women concluded that as a result there was greater pressure to have sex sooner, even though the relationship was immature, because so much was known about each other going in that sex was the only thing left to do.

Even in the recent credit meltdown, some observers look back to the fact that investment banks used to have an army of analysts--actual people--who spent time analyzing and then communicating about the financial state of companies and whole industries. But thanks to more software, even though the amount of data is ample if not overwhelming these days, the number of analysts that meet with companies, develop relationships and then communicate with the marketplace has declined. These...