Global clothing retailer C&A pilots an unexpected use of the Facebook Like in its Sao Paulo store. It equipped its garment hangers with displays that show the number of Likes each item has received on Facebook in real-time. Admittedly, the display looks a bit retro digital from a distance. Also, I am not so sure if women will be inspired to buy a particular item if many others have indicated that they also like the item: a low number of Likes might actually be a better recommendation. At least to certain women. I think.

But never mind that. This is not the Psychology Blog, although changing your Facebook relationship status (or other statuses) nowadays seems a crucial moment in life that must to be carefully timed.

Many of us cannot imagine living anymore without the dynamics of the social web, which is powered by the Internet and mobile devices. Still, we yet seem in full search for the optimal balance between social and technology. Mobile apps like TheFinds’ Glimpse could just as much – or even better – guide consumers selecting products based on the social network. And there are already plenty of apps (like Layar) that provide consumers with an Augmented Reality – which could easily include Facebook likes - through their mobile devices.

The question is however whether the latest mobile app really will help us to become more social, as shopping with a friend may become much less fun if she is continuously pointing her smartphone to items, finding out what Facebook thinks. Also, there is a good chance she will be less focused on the actual items for sale, occupied as she will be by handling the device and interpreting the information that pops up.

Of course, we are not even considering shopping anymore in Virtual Reality (anybody in SecondLife against this, any of the four?).  But Augmented Reality just might look a little bit different from what we currently think as well. More real, if you like.

The late Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC would be more relevant than ever with his vision of Real Virtuality: we should not be entering or caught up in the virtual world. Instead the virtual world should enter ours, not screaming for attention but as true calm technology: “that which informs but doesn’t demand our focus or attention”. Our next mobile device may just as well turn out to be a digital hanger, a pico projector, smart paper, glasses (the parodies are by now funnier than the original) or just an occasional, soft Internet Whisper in our ears.

Nothing more than appropriate that I participated in a new workshop concept the other day that was also coined Real Virtuality. Invented by our always creative colleagues of the Accelerated Solution Environment (ASE) it featured real Like, Follow and Retweet stickers that the participants could use during the furthermore tech-light session for – well – social purposes. There were even Dislike stickers (eat your heart out, Facebook!).

Unfortunately I cannot explain in detail to you how the Paper iPad worked, as we do occasionally tend to enjoy the fruit of our Intellectual Property just a little bit longer. It was anyway a great day with great clients at our chateau Les Fontaines, in the middle of the woods.

Guess Mark Weiser would have liked the place as well, given the final paragraph of his landmark paper about ubiquitous computing and calm technology: “There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods”.

Technology that calms us. I could live with that.

Traveling back home from holidays in Italy, we were painfully reminded of our sometimes empty-headed, uncritical reliance on real-time information and automated support. Our lovely Flemish speaking on-board navigation system guided us – as usual – through unknown territory. This time however, it disappointed us twice, which was most instructive. First, it insisted we could pass through a very narrow passageway in a remote mountain village where even a trimmed-down Smart would have gotten desperately stuck. Yet, just seconds before impact we realized the system was wrong and I hit the brakes. Second, it sent us right into the centre of Zurich (lovely city by the way) where we should have passed it on our way to Basel and then France. We actually knew this – had travelled there before – but still the system was so convincing and insisting that we followed its wrong directions.

The big insight came when we decided to shut the navigator off for the remainder of the journey. A trivial decision that soon felt like being liberated.

The friendly owner of our last stop towards home – a charming hotel near the Vosges mountains – explained a route through the woods to us that turned out to be much nicer than the system would have ever come up with. Combined with a short, but careful study of the main milestones en route we were equipped with all we needed to get back home. While on the road – with no display to monopolize our attention with a flow of directions, distances and maps – we were clearly more aware of our surroundings (the lovely Lorraine countryside for example) then before. The journey thus felt more relaxed, more like a true experience and all in all more gratifying.

Let’s face it: more than ever, we rely so much on the availability of information and technology that we slowly but surely forget what the essence is of the activity we are trying to support. Data and tools become the new objective, the altar, the addiction. Sometimes with disastrous results, as illustrated by a ‘new breed of flight accidents’ that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) contributes to abdicating responsibility to automated systems – such as the autopilot - resulting in weaker flying skills.

It happens within enterprises as well.

We all know the false illusion of control the spread sheet has been providing to managers, biding time behind their desk rather than managing their business and people on the work floor and outside. We may have the coolest Customer Relationship Management (’CRM’) tool imaginable (let’s say a cloud-enabled Salesforce.com app with social extensions running on an iPhone 5 that popped up in a bar) but it may not help us a bit building a better, warmer relationship with our clients, especially if we prefer frequent, face-to-face contact with a smartphone above the client.

Nicholas Carr shows in his book The Shallows a blood-chilling image of the way “connectedness” changes our very brains. Abundant real-time data and tools encourage the rapid, distracted sampling of small chunks of information from many different sources. As a result, we become much faster and handier in getting exactly the support we need. It’s even addictive, as our brains become hungry for these delicious short, frequent bursts of information and events. What we are losing in the process is our ability to concentrate, contemplate, and reflect. Eventually, the essence of what we are doing thus becomes a vague and distant memory, something you have tagged and then archived in the cloud for later, unlikely to show up again.

What can we do about it? Certainly, real-time information and devices will not go away. There will be more. But we can be mindful about the way and moments in time we apply them. We can reaffirm their role as supporting and enabling tools, rather than as our main source of energy and the meaning of life. We can train ourselves to observe dense flows of information, rather than process it all (apply this to Twitter, for a start). We can even use technology to deal with technology, in order to filter out what we really don’t need or want to absorb: in the end, the best technology is invisible.

If all else fails, there is still – at least metaphorically speaking – a crucial, highly effective component of any computing device. It’s called a plug. Try pull it out every now and then. You’ll love it.

I’m the publisher and editor of Slow Magazine. In the first two years of publishing we’ve won national design (Australian) awards, we’ve attracted many avid readers and subscribers and we’ve enjoy producing an authentic publication that looks at life beyond the obvious fast lane. However, when I talk to advertisers, (and every magazine NEEDS them), most businesses still “don’t get it …”. Yes, I guess the whole essence of Slow, and the mainstream understanding how important the Slow ethos is, is about a decade away. Do you think this is right? Is Slow the new Green scene, it just hasn’t fully arrived? Are we talking now about a movement that will be mainstream in 10 years? Or will it always be counter culture to a point?

At the magazine, most of us feel we are publishing a title that is on the edge of something big. We seem to know it. But the big question is, will our advertisers ever ‘get it’?

Sooner or later any idea - like Slow Technology and Slow IT - will be copied. And why not: slow thinking is for everybody and where the very concept of an accelerating society seems to be triggered by technology, it only makes sense to contemplate slowing down.

This certainly pertains to those poor IT experts, haunted by a never-satisfied user community and yet another wave of new, revolutionary technologies to be applied.

This Slow IT manifesto (what’s in a name) by InfoWorld contains some quite down-to-earth, pragmatic guidelines for IT personnel on how to do ‘less with less’. All in the spirit of Slow Technology, albeit with a subtle flavour of using ’slow’ to just shield off demanding, irritating users.

Oh, and apparently there are T-shirts for sale to show your commitment to the good cause. Some things just don’t change, I guess.

You are writing a book entitled ‘Slow IT’; what do you mean with slow IT?

A similar thing is happening in conferences, in the way delegates all pull their laptops out during the keynotes.

Living in a culture that celebrates the elimination of barriers, we have become accustomed to technologies that promise us a higher quality of life. The railroads of the 19th century and the motorways of the 20th century are familiar examples of technological, political and economic projects that nowadays are taken for granted.

We may be disturbed by car pollution and airplane noise, but we do not usually question the infrastructure of mobility. No, we seldom question the drive for convenience and immediacy, for higher and higher speeds, for less and less friction. Commuting and long-distance travelling have become integrated aspects of our daily life, permeating our minds and value systems. Speed and mobility have long been terms with positive connotations, paving the way for projects of political and economic “improvements”. How should we otherwise understand the emergence of urban, interurban, regional, interregional, national and international infrastructure projects? What are we without cars, trains and airplanes?

Historical mistakes are not a good excuse for not doing anything today or tomorrow. So, what should we do? Why not begin by asking how we really want to live, how we really want to work, how we really want to use our common habitat. Let us imagine a world guided by slow mobility.