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Moments later, a cell phone rings on a bookshelf near his desk.
"That's my daughter," he says.
He says it as if he never has been so sure of anything in his life.
"I bet you that is my daughter."
As he checks, his face flushes with satisfaction.
Bugeja, 54, considers his daughter, Erin, a native of the digital age like many other 23-year-olds today.
As director of ISU's Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Bugeja is constantly surrounded by these "digital natives" - students walking the halls of Hamilton Hall with iPod buds in their ears; others getting a phone call on their cell phones minutes before class; and still others taking advantage of the wireless Internet on campus to buy a pair of shoes on eBay.
It's a phenomenon Bugeja takes note of often. The depth and unseen potential consequences of these high-tech toys is the premise of his 2005 book "Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age." In it, he defines the interpersonal divide as a "social void that develops when we overuse technology or overconsume media." Bugeja argues technology has created a separation of mankind, and that as those tools become more powerful, interpersonal relationships will become more endangered.
Technology, he says, promised to connect people of diverse cultures. The advent of the Internet and technology, such as global positioning devises, promised to connect us in ways only thought possible in the dreams of the greatest visionaries. Somewhere along the technological lines, he says, all of that got clouded with dollar signs in the eyes or corporations such as Apple, Motorola and others. The world, he says, has gone from being promised the age of information to getting the age of distraction.
This overconsumption of media and overuse of technology worries Bugeja. He thinks it not only threatens interpersonal relationships, but also the ability of people to think critically and address the "real issues" of the day.
"As a person who values physical community and my interpersonal relationships, I sometimes feel that unless we can all wake up as a society, we are just going to increasingly yield to the power of technology," he says.
Bugeja, in many cases, has become "the" source for national media looking for a quote from the "other side" in stories about Web site phenomena such as MySpace and Facebook. Bugeja argues that the more time people spend on those social network Web sites in a virtual world, the less connected they are becoming with community and events in the real world.
As a leading authority on the effects of consumer technology - namely the negative effects - Bugeja admits many students have questioned his affection for the digital age.
But Bugeja is not opposed to technology. In his office, two large computer monitors stand behind him, along with a laptop, a laser printer and an iPod complete with carrying case and accessories. And somewhere around his office, he says, is a digital camera.
He says he has dealt with many people who hear his argument and automatically characterize him as a man who is too old to truly understand the new wave of technology and yearns for the day when movies cost a nickel.
But the way in which Bugeja differs from these critics, he counters, is that he knows how to use the technology in the way it was intended.
"The difference between students who ask those types of questions and what I do is that they only understand technology as consumers," he says. "And I understand the mechanics of technology."
Researching the effects of consumer technology is no longer about career ambition for Bugeja, he says. Rather, it is a desire for the next generation to make a contribution to society rather than to stockholders, he says.
"We need to free students to make independent choices about whether they want to dump all of their personal money into this or perhaps resist it," he says. "I want to tell them, 'Please just understand what the interface wants you to do, and the marketing aspect that you need to deal with and the debt you need to deal with.'"
But how can people listen to Bugeja about opening the eyes of the "digital natives" to what he perceives as the threat of consumer technology when he has failed to open the eyes of someone so close to home as his daughter?
"It's one thing listening to your dad," he says. "You can always tell your dad that he is plumb wrong and that he is too old, but if you are a student, it is hard to tell a professor that ... at least to his face."
Bugeja's daughter was coming of age while he was writing his book and truly coming to his realizations about the threat of consumer technology. His son, a 16-year-old high school student, is a different story.
Late last year, a reporter from USA Today called Bugeja in search of a student who never had signed up for an account on MySpace or Facebook. The only person he knew who fit the profile, he told the journalist, was his son Shane.
"I don't find it interesting - having someone reading about you, and you don't know them," Shane told the reporter from USA Today. "Doing what everyone else is doing is not necessarily an attractive thing."
Bugeja says he has spent time with his daughter on the issue, but "technology is a hard thing to compete with."
"If you don't intervene while they are adolescents and you are a parent, you are going to lose them," Bugeja says. "These devices are incredibly powerful."
William Dillon can be reached at 232-2161, Ext. 361, or William.Dillon@amestrib.com.
