“Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten ahold of the wrong half.” — anonymous author

If you want to sell a lie, wrap it in a truth. Technology has been selling us half-truths for a while. While promising to salve our human need to connect with people, technology gave us news feeds and advertisements. We wanted intimacy and meaningful relationships but technology only delivered virtual proximity… the half-truth that let’s us feel close while in fact being quite distant. That’s the thing about half-truths. They work all too well.

As an experiment to see how deeply ingrained our technological disfunction runs, I recently spent a month without a phone. The results were surprising. Since re-acclimating, I’ve been trying to monitor my own (ab)use of my (de)vices, wavering back and forth like a teenage boy in church promising God he won’t lust. My eyes have certainly wandered (or in this case stared mindlessly at a screen).

Side note: The other day, I laughed to myself at the ridiculous position we put ourselves in when we stare down at a device in public. We can’t see or interact with anyone around us… that’s obvious. Bump into people or road signs on the sidewalk… sure. But think about the double chin we give ourselves as we turn our head down into our chest. Then the blue screen lights our face so unnaturally. It’s just not a good look on anyone. Perhaps if we tie the behavior to our vanity, we’ll think a little more about it.

We’re not oblivious. We know we’re guilty. It’s as if we all recognize that our world is a bit off-center and we’re waiting on someone to show us how to get realigned. The question is… what would it take for us to put technology in its place, and begin to connect more genuinely with the people around us?

Some ideas:

1. Technology should sit more in the background, not telling us how/when to connect, but supporting the natural progression of interactions we have with real people.
2. Technology should understand people the way we’ve come to know them; not by name, number and email, but by the context surrounding the relationship.
3. We should be able to use technology to connect with the people in our lives without fear of exploitation of our most sensitive information.
4. As we grow our network, technology should recognize the potential in each encounter with a new person and quickly help us make a more meaningful connection.
5. What am I missing? Add your suggestion in the comments. →

For the last several months, I’ve been working with an amazing team on a new product that I think is going to help bring us to a resolution. It’s a treaty of sorts between the human desire to connect directly with others and technology’s exploitation of this need. It’s called Humin.

This last generation has seen some incredibly smart devices come to market, but we’ve yet to build a smart phone. The phone on your device is today what it was 6 years ago- a list of alphabetical names that places more priority on “Aaron” than “Mom.” Since our paradigm of connecting with people is changing rapidly, we’ve attempted to build a new platform that can serve as the point of contact for all of your people in your life.

The CEO of Humin revealed the product of our team’s hard work on stage this week at DLD (You can find all of the newsy stuff here and here and here). It’s been a good week. But the real challenge lies ahead: not simply to sell a product or get downloads, but to shift our mindset together.

As the weeks go by and we launch to the public, I’m thrilled to think that people all over the world could become more intentional about being present at dinner, engaged in conversation and willing to connect more deeply with each other. It’s time to live up to the true promise that technology has offered.

Reimagining our relationship with our technology will take some (a whole lot of) work, and one product isn’t going to solve the whole problem. There’s many ways that I think Humin leads us in this direction. But I’m obviously biased. If you’re interested, you can signup to #GetHumin when we launch to the public at our website. If you’re willing to take the challenge with me, go ahead and hit that recommend button below.