For starters, the digital clock in Nana's hotel room was 10 minutes behind, which made her late for her first talk show appearance of the day on the morning Ron Owens Show on KGO Radio. When the pair arrive at the station a few minutes after their appointed time, Owens has already angrily nixed them from the program.

With time to kill before their next talk show, at the public radio station across town, I tag along as they drive to a United Airlines counter to reshuffle some flights. Nothing doing: The computers are down. We joke that if this were a Twilight Zone episode, the technical glitches would escalate madly until technology took its final revenge, perhaps trapping them in a doomed elevator.

The three of us find a coffee shop in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch to recover from the morning's events. All around us are twentysomethings typing into computers, pondering their PalmPilots and chatting on cell phones. Befitting his seer status as the author of Megatrends, a sales blockbuster from the early 1980s in which he revealed 10 future trends, John Naisbitt has a gray beard and a deep, resonant voice. Nana, who shares her father's pug nose, is engaging, attractive and full of conversation.

I'm somewhat disappointed to discover that John and Nana are nice people. They insist on buying me lunch and listen intently to my questions. This assignment would have been easier if the two had been aggressively pompous, because I'm compelled to report that High Tech, High Touch is an awful book.

The Naisbitts' basic argument is that "high tech" is squeezing out "high touch," their coinage for everything that is warm and fuzzy in life, such as the "lick on your face by a dog," "doodling and liking what you've drawn" or looking at a "3-year-old girl who turns suddenly to show you her sweet fresh face and flashes a smile that belies her stubborn personality."

They burn up pages with a blistering assault on Martha Stewart for promoting the high-touch lifestyle while secretly living a high-tech existence with multiple fax machines and cell phones. Then, in long, repetitive chapters, they wring their hands about the effects of violent videogames on children and about the impact of genetic technologies on religion.

Unfortunately, High Tech, High Touch is largely an attack on a field of straw men. The authors assert, for instance, that "few of us have stopped to ask what cell phones, electronic games, televisions or cameras add to or detract from the quality of our human experience." Some pages later, they write: "Living in a Technologically Intoxicated Zone, we are not troubled by the violence on our screens."

By repeatedly flogging the idea that no one but them is considering the impact of technology on people's quality of life, they attempt to position themselves as the brave kid in The Emperor's New Clothes. Now, maybe the Naisbitts and I are going to different dinner parties, but from my experience, many other people worry over these issues, too. Seems to me I've even seen a couple of books on the topic in the last few years.

When they're not lopping off the heads of straw men, they're also making meaningless generalizations. "All the electronic technologies promise progress but in fact ensure distance and distraction," they say. In these sorts of passages, my brain aches for some specifics: Are we talking about toasters, pacemakers, robots? Who knows. Again and again in the book they treat "technology" and alternatively "the media" as if the two were single entities about which one can spout sweeping generalities.

When the authors do provide specifics, I'm often left just as confused. "There has been a shift from living in high-touch time to high-tech time," they write, "since the advent of the wind-up clock (1876) and the battery operated watch (1956)." I'm fatigued just trying to make sense out of such assured pronouncements.

Over coffee, the pair are so kind to me that I find it difficult to reveal any of these dark thoughts, so I ask them about their research process.

"We used a similar sort of content analysis that I developed for Megatrends," John explains. "Basically, we clip out newspaper stories along with some magazine pieces and advertisements and then we look for patterns and shifts in that collection of material. Change is from the bottom up and there is nothing like local reporting to document it."

There's one problem, I think to myself. If I was going to try to assess the effect of technology on modern life, local newspapers would be one of my last stops. I ask them if they applied their method of content analysis to the Internet.

"No, we didn't look at the Internet," John replies. "The Internet is really too primitive and random."

"The Internet is mostly pornography and violence right now," Nana interjects.

Both these statements seem rather remarkable and worth pursuing. "Do either of you spend much time online?" I ask.

Neither, they admit, use the Web. "Why would we want to spend more time staring at a screen?" John asks.

To say these two are not plugged in would be an understatement. Nana never used a computer until 1997 and didn't own one until this year. John claims to be even more technologically challenged. Although he owns a computer (a 1986 Mac), he has yet to get up to speed on e-mail and "wants to take a class to be more efficient in Word."

So they've brought to bear a content analysis of local papers, combined with an ignorance of the Internet and computer skills that couldn't get them hired at Kinko's - it's starting to become clear why this book has so little to say.

I ask them whether they feel they have a well-rounded grasp of the technological changes that have happened since Megatrends hit bookstores nearly 18 years ago.

Nana defers to her father, who answers, "Yes, I think I do."

In the nicest way possible, I tell them that if they do have this understanding, it does not come across in the book. To illustrate, I open a copy to page 24, where they've attempted to define the phrase "high tech." Here, instead of putting their ideas in sentences, they've simply listed 200 or so words and short phrases.

High tech, they write, is, "Menu. Mouse. Bug, spider. Web, Net, cookies. ... Scrolling, clustering, linking. ... Killer apps. Tech-cessorize. Voice recognition. Space tourism. ..."

"This didn't give me a lot of confidence in your broad knowledge of technological changes," I say finally. "I mean, why pick 'cookies' or 'clustering?' What do these words mean to you?"

"I actually don't know what those words mean in their high-tech context," admits Nana. "We picked them out of a tech encyclopedia."

At this point, I'm not surprised.

I follow the Naisbitts to their noon radio appointment. As we walk, I point out the renovation on several old warehouses that will no doubt soon house new-media companies. Once inside the sleek headquarters of public TV station KQED, they proceed to broadcast their dislike of Martha Stewart and warn the world about the dangers of high tech and the disappearance of high touch.

As I listen to the show, I wonder why a publisher would choose these authors for this project. As the author of two nonfiction books, I know that editors no longer buy books but rather purchase "concept vehicles." The sagelike father with his engaging daughter are a perfect publicity package for a perfectly timed message. They'll get on all the talk shows. John has 17 million books in print, and that means he can get a ready horse to go tilting at whichever windmill he chooses.

My impression is that John and Nana are the sort of people who get annoyed when a cell phone rings at the next table in a restaurant. I suspect the source of their antipathy, however, comes less from any understanding of technology's perils than from a feeling of being left out and left behind.

"We feel that something is not quite right but we can't put our finger on it," they write in the book, repeating the phrase two pages later. "Despite all our seeking ... something is not quite right." Although the "we" here is supposed to refer to society, it might better apply to the primary author himself. It is the lament of a seer who has lost his vision.