Mobile Background Checks: Technology As Buzz Kill

CNN is reporting today that two companies have developed mobile apps to do instant background checks! Mobile apps!!!

Now work with me on this one. I am as much a proponent of knowing who you're getting as anyone - remember, I'm that chick that wrote 'Duped By Love' (still available at Amazon.com for the low-low). So I understand completely the need to check out a potential squeeze before you get in too deep, but seriously - does that need to happen at the table while you're chowing down on California rolls?

I don't think so. I think we've done enough with social networking, instant messaging, texting, etc., to destroy pure human interaction. I have daily digital interactions with friends and relatives whose voices I haven't heard in 23 years. I have to text my son to get him to respond to me when we're in the same house. And I regularly get 'I-love-you's' from close family members online that for whatever reason have never said the words in person.

We're all beginning to hide behind a haze of technology, that's my point, people. And my family is no exception. I want my sons to be able to have healthy interactions in social situations, and I want them to use technology as the convenience that it is, not as a replacement for real relationships with real people, but that's exactly what they're beginning to do. And the truth is, they were born into this Age, so they don't even know what they're missing.

It's disheartening to remember the days of my youth, where getting out of the house everyday just to run up and down the street kicking a ball and screaming at my friends was a daily past-time, knowing that my boys will never do the same. Nope. They're getting all of their social interaction while engaging in MMO-RPG with people from other countries that they don't even know. It's just - sad.

(Pause for Acronyn definition: MMO-RPG - 'mass, multi-player-online-role-playing-game'. I learned this one from my 16-year old.)

Am I just old? Is this just my generation's version of 'don't do it - it could lead to dancing?' Uh, I don't think so here either. As a technologist and Internet expert myself, I'm thrilled by the technological innovations that have so improved our quality of life, but I also can't help but think that we've got to figure out a way to pump the brakes on some of this stuff before we're all communicating through devices hard-wired into our heads and making babies in petrie dishes.

According to a survey conducted by the Japanese Education Ministry recently, the majority of Japanese teenagers are addicted to their mobile phones. And addiction to their mobile phones means less focus on studies, and increased vulnerability to pedophiles and other malcontents. The teenagers in this country are headed for the same fate, if they're not already there. And sadly, I know some adults who are faring no better.

So what to do? One little application for doing background checks is one thing, but how do we begin to rebel against the machine? Force those that we love (and those that we think we might want to love) out of the matrix and back into real, fulfilling, personal interactions?

Well - one trick I've found effective is making me boys at least experience some of the cool technology stuff with me - right next to me. We have a great time looking at EpicFail.com videos together and laughing our heads off. Or, sometimes we play some of the cool games on one of our phones together. And as for my family? I regularly lure them into some face to face time by opening my doors and cooking up whatever it takes to get them here. It helps that my husband's curry chicken is to die for.

And what of the instant background checks? I think, we just acknowledge those as the gimmicky thing that they are. Even full online-background checks are sketchy at best (yes, I've used them), so it's not much more than a clever marketing play from a couple of savvy technology companies, this idea of having creatied a mobile application that will allow us to stop a romantic dinner with a new prospect cold in its tracks over the results of a friggin' Google search, or some web-crawling, fact-seeking buzz kill of an application that tells us in real-time everything we probably don't want to know about someone right there on the spot anyway. Stuff that we might find out in the course of time, and that we might have a lot more patience for after we've gotten to know someone. I don't know - instant mobile applications for background checks? MAJOR first date buzz kill if you ask me.

(Cross posted on BlogHer.com)