Dominic George: Boys and their vexing devices

Bruce Wills' communication skills have won him an award.

Rural radio personality Dominic George airs his views here every Thursday.

Technology is rapidly changing the way we interact.

School holiday time and my wife is starting to lose it over the amount of urine pooling on the bathroom floor. The problem is she brought three boys into the world but still doesn't understand one of life's more intriguing little mysteries; the stray slash.

The stray slash occurs when, despite a carefully calculated aim with the best of intentions, the ol' jet stream shoots out at right angles, hitting the rim, the floor, the wall and virtually everything else in the general vicinity, except the water at the bottom of the porcelain. On rare occasions you can even get two streams shooting off in completely different directions. It cannot be explained.

Another little holiday dilemma I've encountered recently concerns how my two 8-year-old boys can rack up $500 worth of "in-app purchases" on their iPods? They buy a game for $1.29, and then spend another $50 every time the game tells them to. That little issue has since been dealt with but it got me thinking about the way kids, and people in general, communicate. Most people tend to have their heads continually tilted downwards as they lovingly cradle their little communication device.

A lot of conversations are now conducted without any eye contact being made at all. What's more, those who are considered good communicators now tend to engage with people on an electronic level. You can't say it's not human interaction -- it is humans interacting, just not in the traditional way.

A few weeks ago the outgoing President of Federated Farmers Bruce Wills was awarded the title of Landcorp Agricultural Communicator of the Year by the Guild of Agricultural Journalists and Communicators. Guild president Graeme Peters said at the time one of the features of Wills' tenure is the countless hours he spent talking to farmers and urban people, selling the importance of agriculture to New Zealand's economy.

For some, clearly, the ability to engage people through talking is still considered the premiere form of communication, but evidence suggests that won't always be the case. Future Guild presidents are likely to say the winner of the award was a dab hand at Facebook and his Instagram photos were a real blast.

A perfect case in point is Farming Show host Jamie Mackay. The problem for a man as restless as Mackay is his compulsion to embark on boring and insufferable endeavours to occupy his spare time. Golf filled the void for many years, but after a cataclysmic capitulation to 2012 Agricultural Communicator of the Year, Steve Wyn-Harris, Mackay mercifully gave the game away. In its place is now Twitter. A typical conversation between us in the morning is as follows; Dom: "Hi Jamie". Jamie: "Hi Dom ... have you read my latest tweets?" Dom: "No, Jamie, I haven't." Jamie: "You really need to be reading my tweets ..." At which point I walk away. Now, here's a man who has made his fortune by "talking" on the radio, but has taken to a social media platform like an adolescent male who's just discovered his appendage is for more than simply peeing uncontrollably at right angles to annoy his mother.