Has the technology that was intended to bring us together actually split us further apart?  This article seems to imply that this could be the case.

Tim Sanders has spent his career promoting the use of technology, and it’s in this quest that he experienced his darkest of moments.

Sanders, the chief solutions officer at Yahoo!, said his career was thriving in the mid-1990s, yet he began to feel increasingly empty. He noticed colleagues sending him instant messages from 5 feet away. He watched brilliant engineers slowly replace face-to-face relationships with lower-risk contact online.

“I saw a paradox,” he said, “a world of community with loneliness.”

Sanders came to define the condition as “New Economy Depression Syndrome,” a state of work-related stress brought on by information overload, constant interruption by technology (think e-mail, instant messaging and cell phones) and the increasing personal isolation that technology affords us.

And here’s something that bloggers might need to think about.

New research suggests that limiting our use of technology might be good for your health. A study by Chiba University in Tokyo found that spending five hours or more in front of a computer increased a person’s risk of depression, insomnia and other mental-health-related diseases.

The study, which monitored the mental-health changes of 25,000 Japanese high-tech workers over three years, found that employees who worked five hours or more in front of a computer were more prone to depression and anxiety. The results were published late last year in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

One thing I’ve noticed lately in my own workplace is the push towards “virtual teams.”  I’ve been working on a team for the past 16 months and I’ve only met two of the people on that team.  We do everything through conference calls, instant messages, emails, and web conferences.  We somehow manage to get the work done, but it’s not very satisfying.  I’ve worked on other projects where the team members were all located in the same place.  It just seems more efficient to walk into someone’s office and work something out, rather than trying to handle it via phone calls and emails.  You can’t wave your hands around and draw on the whiteboard via the phone.

I don’t see this trend getting any better, though.  There’s a rumor afoot that we’re going to have to give up our current offices and move upstairs (and into cubicles) (or we may have to move to another office altogether).  Given that my job entails a lot of time on the phone (that pesky virtual team business), being in a cubicle will be painful (even with a headset), so I may have to compound the isolation by working from home more often.  Some of the other people on my floor may even give up their offices altogether and work from home fulltime. 

The company may think it’s going to save money this way, and their bottom line will show a savings, but I think that there are intangible costs that they can’t track so well.  Our tediously anal hourly tracking system, despite having a zillion codes for everything, doesn’t have a code for ‘farting around trying to make someone understand something over the phone when I could explain it in 30 seconds in person.’ (At least not yet).