“Machines don’t serve us, we serve them.”

This phrase was one of many repeated by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times from the Davos Conference recently. Normally a reasonable feller, I’m afraid Friedman got the point but missed its meaning.

The point? We’re on the verge of technology backlash. The irony of wireless technologies, designed to untether business professionals and executives from their desks, is that they increasingly tether these increasingly tense individuals to technology. Which is worse: Being tied to the inbox on your desk, or to your PDA, pager, cell phone and portable microwave?

At the Davos Conference, also known as the World Economic Forum, 1,000 of the world’s most influential people hear and discuss radically new ideas. Usually, a key focus is on what technology is going to do for us. Friedman reports that this year, participants worried more about what it’s doing to us. And that’s where the discussions missed the point.

What triggered a lot of this discussion is the need to be 24/7, always on, and always available so as not to be left behind. Many of the participants took this personally.

There’s no question that lots of business leaders and business-leader wannabes turn themselves into 24/7 always-on individuals. It is, to them, the price and burden of success, or so they say.

But is it, or is it simply a way to feel important? Keep in mind, these are the same people who complain about IT promoting technology for technology’s sake. Then they buy a WAP-enabled cell phone or sign up for wireless e-mail on their PDA, just because it’s available.

Friedman described a presentation by Microsoft researcher Linda Stone, who described a phenomenon she calls “continuous partial attention.” Most of us have been guilty of this at one time or another, reading our e-mail while talking to someone on the phone, and muting that conversation to answer our cell phones. Personal technologies are, of course, to blame.

Except, of course, that they aren’t. With apologies to Hamlet, the fault lies not in our technologies but in ourselves.

Continuous partial attention isn’t a new phenomenon. Back when the only personal information technology was the telephone, executives frequently accepted phone calls and scanned The Wall Street Journal while meeting with hapless supplicants. Technology may have democratized this form of bad manners, but it certainly didn’t invent it.

Another data point: I have, over the years, watched quite a few commuters reading their morning newspaper while driving during rush hour, and quite a few more putting on make-up. I much prefer those who talk on their cell phones — at least their eyes are pointed in the general direction of forward motion.

For those who think the new technologies require them to be available and alert at all times and in all situations, I offer the following: Didn’t you ever learn anything about the basic skills of management?

It’s quite true that increasingly, customers expect businesses to be available whenever they’re ready to buy something or need help with something they’ve already purchased. Except for banks (and someday they’ll figure it out, too), most businesses have found ways to accommodate this expectation, expanding availability by using automation, multiple shifts, and setting up operations in multiple time zones.

That’s whole businesses. Individuals who accommodate their need for extended availability by using personal technologies need to expand their repertoire. Among the alternatives: delegation, voice mail, e-mail, and not checking your messages until it’s convenient. Because while the number of situations that may require immediate attention may be very large, the number that require your immediate personal attention is very, very small. If that isn’t true — if you’re the only one who can deal with emergencies that may crop up at any moment — then there’s something very wrong with how you’ve organized your work.

The solution: Organize your work differently. And stop thinking you’re so essential to everything that you have to be continuously available.

Maybe, though, the problem really is with these new technologies. It may be that we need to make them more user friendly. In that spirit, here’s a suggestion to the designers of PDAs, cell phones, pagers, and everything else we carry around with us: Make the Off button bigger.