Not long ago I wrote about Web log guru Dan Gillmor's experience at a conference where Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio was speaking. Gillmor and others carried on an e-mail and instant messaging exchange during Nacchio's talk, uncovering information that undermined his credibility with the audience. Gillmor sees this as a kind of empowerment.

But I remembered a university class I spoke to some years back. Because the venue was a computer lab, everyone had a screen in front of them. I noticed that, as I spoke, hardly anyone made eye contact. Indeed, many seemed to be actively using their computers, but I had no idea what they were doing and could only hope they were taking notes.

Is this empowerment? And if so, who is empowered, and to do what? Because I rely on eye contact for audience feedback, I felt as if I were speaking into an empty room. Michael Bugeja, who heads the journalism school at Iowa State, would have a ready answer. Bugeja's new book "Interpersonal Divide: The Search For Community in a Technological Age" (Oxford University Press, $19.95) sees the overuse of technology as disruptive to community, dividing people's attention and creating sitting duck targets for marketers.

This may sound apocalyptic, but Bugeja makes a reasoned case that what is wrong isn't technology itself, but our inability to moderate what we do to reasonable levels. He argues that the basis of human interaction is face-to-face contact, a network of relationships that go into the building of a healthy community. We lose some of this every time we shut ourselves out of local or family events to hop into the virtual world of nebulous, ephemeral relationships.

I can't sign off on all Bugeja's notions, but I'm glad to see them aired in so compelling a book. He's on to a phenomenon we've all experienced -- a family winds up existing in separate rooms because each must have his or her own screen. Speaking to a passerby is forbidden because they're on the cell phone, or using an iPod, in a virtual reality of their own. Marketers armed with Web data get to know our preferences better than our friends, and the nonstop ramping up of sales pitches swamps our incoming e-mail.

I recognize all too much of myself in many of Bugeja's examples. And of course it's not just TVs and PCs that create the divide. The other day at the grocery, a woman ahead of me in line was talking on a cell phone. She continued the call without acknowledging the cashier's hello, never made eye contact with her, and took the bill amount from a screen mounted next to the register. "Happens all the time," the cashier told me. "What happened to manners?"

As for PCs, they're now in two-thirds of all U.S. homes. "Computer use," writes Bugeja, "has added hours to the time we spend looking at screens instead of each other. That weighs heavily on our ability to interact effectively with family, friends, colleagues ... We are squandering more of our lives chatting, surfing, or interacting idly with others, all of which tends to homogenize important relationships and shorten attention spans."

"Interpersonal Divide" is a powerful and damning indictment whose advice on moderate technology use (ask where you need it, ask why you're doing it, and so on) is sound but destined to be overwhelmed in the noise.

Try to carry on a conversation in a restaurant with TVs on the wall, while the people you are talking to are constantly raising their eyes from yours to the screen. It's an apt image for a society overdosing on gadgetry, and cause for alarm for those who feel society's brakes starting to fail.

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