Now imagine a hamburger right there in the middleI am a big fan of the merging of food and technology. My terrible fear of robots aside, I love the Seattle Food Geek and tales of weird-ass kitchen gadgetry. I love molecular gastronomy and cutting-edge cuisine, cooks who are not afraid to take chances, and stories about the intersection of DIY techno-geekery and kitchens. Show me a galley full of immersion blenders, thermal circulators and induction ranges staffed by white jackets who really know how to make the most of them and I’ll be walking around for the next hour trying to hide the big ol’ culinary boner I’ve got and wondering if I’ve still got the knees to stand a 14-hour shift on the line without collapsing into a puddle of jelly.But as with anything, I think there comes a tipping point where the rush to incorporate every new and shiny little toy becomes less about food and more about theater–where the ability to do a thing trumps its absolute necessity. And this week, with a single article by Nick Bilton in the New York Times, I think we might’ve gotten there.A little bit of background for those of you not obsessively following the Manhattan restaurant scene.On September 7, 2010, New York will see the opening of 4food–a “fresh, delicious and nutritious” fast food restaurant featuring donut-shaped burgers (meaning they have a hole in the center), which aims to “upgrade food that people already eat–burgers, nuggets, fries, salads and teas–transforming them into new menu items that are convenient, and almost infinitely customizable to our guests’ lifestyles and cultural preferences,” while utilizing “Advanced, web-based technologies…to make personalized recommendations that meet our guest’s nutrition and lifestyle goals.”Mmm… Nothing makes my mouth water like discussions of advanced web-based technologies.What this boils down to is a restaurant where customers will make their orders online, customize their meals through the 4food website, then have them broadcast on Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. Bilton from the Times got to try things out early, and here’s how he described it.”Customers start by going to 4food.com, where they can build a burger. There’s a list of options to choose from, including the type of burger bun, a beef, turkey, veggie or salmon patty, condiments and more.This is also why the burgers are shaped like doughnuts: customers are asked to pick a “scoop,” which goes into the middle of the burger, from options like avocado and chili mango, baked beans or mac and cheese.Once you place your order, you can give it a name and off you go to pick it up. And this is where the game aspect comes in. 4Food has a leaderboard that shows the most-ordered burger. That turns it into a social networking food game.Here’s how it works: I create a burger, call it ‘The Bits Burger’ and broadcast it to Twitter or Facebook. Each time someone orders my special creation, I get 25 cents credit in the restaurant and my burger rises up the leaderboard. The more customers order my burger, the higher it goes and the more credits I get, until I’m eating free.”Now I don’t know about you, but I think that like medical information or backroom legal maneuvering a man’s burger preference is something that ought to be kept between him and his meat pusher–a kind of sacred bond between carnivores. Granted, free cheeseburgers in a city where a simple burger can sometimes run you $18 sounds awesome, but do I really want everyone in Manhattan to know that I eat my donut-shaped burgers with double bacon, guacamole and the tears of Ray Kroc? More to the point, who else in the world would want to know that?I understand the power of social networking to get customers excited about a restaurant. These days it seems like just about every restaurant out there has a website, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed to alert its (alleged) legions of loyal fans to every minute change in the menu and get them all excited about some lisping, geriatric lounge singer coming in to do two sets of Bee Gees covers on a Friday night. We write quite a bit about the power and evil of sites like Yelp, and we here at Voracious do a fair bit of our own social networking with SWVoracious on Twitter and our Facebook page.But something about this 4food story just tripped the alarm bell for me, making me wonder how much of this has anything to do with eating, with food and our national obsession with it, and how much was just pure stunt technology: doing a thing simply because we can.Personally, I don’t think my cheeseburger needs its own social network, but then there was a time (not too long ago) when I didn’t think I needed a blog either. Or a website. Or anything more than a pen, a reporter’s notebook, an expense account and a whole lot of dead trees turned into a newspaper in order to do my job. That has changed dramatically, and I wonder if there will come a day when any discussion of gadgeted-up fast food and cheeseburgers with their own Facebook accounts will be moot simply because no one can conceive of a time when they didn’t broadcast all their dining choices to the entire world.