High Tech - High Touch

Presenting: High Tech / High Touch (2001, Nicholas Brealey) by John… Naisnitt (close! it’s John Naisbitt, the megatrend whisperer). ISBN: 9781857882605. Condition: Good, which in the dignified dialect of second-hand bookmongers means “has seen a few airports, learned several opinions, and can still hold your attention without flashing LEDs.”

This is the early-millennial field guide to living with gadgets without turning into one. Naisbitt peers at the shiny promise of technology and asks the rude, useful questions: What does the machine do to our manners? Our bodies? Our kids? Our idea of a good day? Expect brisk tours through virtual community vs. actual neighbours, always-on work vs. never-off brains, medical miracles vs. mechanised mortality, and shopping as sacrament vs. touch as therapy. It’s part cultural X-ray, part pep talk, part “step away from the beeping thing and go look at the sky for a minute.”

From the outside: the tidy Nicholas Brealey paperback stance—clean cover, sensible spine, and pages with that calm early-2000s cream. Our Good means honest edge rub, a courteous spine crease (think “raised eyebrow,” not “system failure”), and text unblessed by fluorescent highlighters. It sits on your shelf like a humane software update.

Inside: Naisbitt writes like your smartest dinner guest who also reads user manuals for fun. He counts what can be counted (adoption curves, demographics, bandwidth) and names what can’t (meaning, belonging, the feeling that your phone is somehow eating your afternoon). Chapters hop from telemedicine to theme-park spirituality, distance learning to the return of the handmade, pausing to note that humans routinely invent tools to fix the side effects of earlier tools—then call it progress and schedule a meeting.

The trick of the book is balance without beige. It loves innovation, distrusts hype, and keeps asking for human scale. Where technology thins out our senses, it prescribes touch: art, craft, ritual, eye contact, food cooked by someone with hands. Where work accelerates, it suggests boundaries with consonants. Where culture fragments, it proposes communities that aren’t moderated by Terms & Conditions. There’s even a prophetic shiver or two about attention as currency—which aged… accurately.

Why this copy? Because Crappy Old Books specialises in the noble paradox: decidedly un-crappy paperbacks with just enough patina to prove they were read by humans, not cached by servers. Our Good means “lendable to the colleague who says ‘just one more email’ while blinking in Morse,” “perfect for trains and tech detox Sundays,” and “ready to be quoted at meetings, gently.”

Ideal for:

• Optimists who like a seatbelt.

• Skeptics who enjoy data with their side-eye.

• Managers trying to lead people, not dashboards.

• Anyone who has ever stroked a wooden table after a day of glass screens and thought, oh right—texture.

Potential side effects: lower screen brightness, higher eye contact, spontaneous gratitude for libraries, and an alarming desire to print photos on actual paper.

In short: a witty, steadying, still-relevant reminder that progress is only progress if people remain recognisable. High Tech / High Touch helps you keep your humanity plugged in—brought to you by Crappy Old Books, where the name is self-deprecation and the stock is pleasantly tactile.

Keep browsing: See more IT books Other books by John Naisnitt