Working in Movement

Traveling, banking and grocery shopping have changed for me. No longer do I chit chat face to face with a service person who may or may not be very helpful. Now I usually jab my fingers at a touch screen at a check out or check in kiosk. And that may or may not meet my needs. I'm not alone, according to More Consumers Reach Out to Touch the Screen. This hasn't always been the case. Before the improved technology of today, even brave early adopters found the reliability of the machines spotty at best. But the technology is better and people are stepping up to the touch screen. For those customers, using the machine becomes second-nature and it is incorporated into their body image, as talked about in this earlier post.

Like anything else, this situation is not without tradeoffs. Namely, when you interact with a machine, the social part of the experience goes away. A couple of quotes:

The question we should be talking about is not how much faster do you get your chicken if you go through a kiosk," said Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies human interactions with digital devices. "The question is, `What is it doing to our social world when we deploy this technology to all these parts of the life cycle?'

But for many of those who declined to use similar technology in similar places when it was repeatedly tried over the last 20 years, the main appeal of the machines is the chance to avoid what they say are increasingly frequent frustrating, hostile or guilt-inducing interactions with service workers.New York Times

Now, can they do something about the voice mail hell that's all too frequent in calling almost any business?