| I agree with you about the face to face interaction - the people I see in shops at a daily basis generally know what I want, and just asks me to confirm, and we can spend that 30 second face to face time exchanging a few comments about other things instead. And that is the thing I loved the most about this concept. It is one of very few recent technological innovations that actually enhances face to face social interactions. By requiring you to tell your name, you now have an "excuse" to introduce yourself and get on a name basis with people you often see day out and day in but who most people might otherwise have a very impersonal contact with. Just try giving shop assistants eye contact. Most places they're not used to people even looking them in the eye, and the entire quality of your experience and interaction with them go up tenfold if you make sure to make eye contact and smile. But we tend to mumble down into our wallets stuck in our own worlds and ignore that there's a human on the other side of the till. I used to do that as I'm strongly introverted normally, but a few years back I started forcing myself to focus on peoples faces whenever I pay, or enter the bus or whatever type of transaction it is, and it makes such a difference in overall degree of human contact (and it makes the response you get from the other person dramatically more friendly) As an example, there's a bus driver who frequently drives my local bus, that I've gone to the same gym as for more than 5 years. I never even recognized him until I decided to start focusing on giving more eye contact. Now we greet each other warmly and talk whenever we see each other. I thought this was "just me" before I took action to change it, but the more I did it the more I saw how taken aback a lot of the people I did it to were, and how out of their way a lot of people I'd give eye contact would go to do things for me - as it turns out even otherwise very social people often completely blank people in these situations. We "switch off" socially in large number of situations. I think Square could have the potential to be far more important to the world for its possibility of disrupting social interactions than its mere impact on commerce... |