Similarly, I find that people often insist on communicating information by phone, when the same information could be conveyed by email more quickly, without interrupting other activities on the recipient's end, in a form which leaves a convenient lasting record which can be referred back to as necessary. In fact, I often find people trying to contact me on the phone even when the advantages of email are so pronounced that they're effectively forced to send a followup email restating what they already said on the phone, in the form they should have put it in originally had they not felt compelled to waste both of our time first.
At LW London last week, someone mentioned the possibility of a Google Glass app doing face recognition on people. If you've met someone before, it tells you their name, how you know them, etc. Someone else mentioned that this could reduce the social capital of people who are already good at this.
A third person said that something similar happened when Facebook started telling everyone when everyone else's birthday was. Previously he got points by making an effort to remember, but those points are no longer available.
Are there other social skills that technology has made obsolete? And the reverse question that it only just occured to me to ask, are there social skills that are only useful because of technology?
I'm not really sure what sorts of things I'm looking for here. "Ability to ask for directions" seems like one example, but it feels kind of noncentral to me, I don't know why. But I'm mostly just curious.