Heroes Not Zombies

My mother was telling me recently that she remembered her father having electricity installed in their house 76 years ago. When they moved into that house the room lights were all gaslights, and the street lights were gaslights. My grandfather had the gas in the house replaced with electricity and he was the first person in his street to do so.

In my mother’s lifetime there was a time when electricity was a new thing! I’m amazed by that.

Let’s whizz ahead to when I was a GP in Ayrshire in 1982. When I went out to visit a patient, my wife would have to wait anxiously until I returned to tell me about the next patient who had called while I was out. There was no way to be in touch with me other than by telephoning my house. When I moved to Edinburgh in 1986, my partner and I bought one of the first mobile phones. It was the size of a brick and over half of it was its battery. Edinburgh only had one mobile phone mast at the time and when out on call to Portobello, the great Arthur’s Seat blocked its single signal.

Just for fun I bought a dial up modem for my PC, and spent hours (yes I mean hours) adjusting “initialisation strings” to get the chirping little device to connect to a computer in Grangemouth so I could send an email (not that there were that many people I knew who used email!)

In 1982, (yes, same year I started General Practice), the world saw the birth of the “world wide web”.

Thirty years later, the web is everywhere, and it’s changing everything. Especially because now we can access it on our mobile phones wherever we are. What does this do? I makes connections easier to make and maintain. I am no longer bound by time and space. We can communicate back and forth in real time, or asynchronously – I can send a message to a Japanese friend right now and they can read it when they get up in the morning and send a reply for me to read tomorrow. I have formed friendships in Holland, France, Italy, Japan, South Africa, America which I’d never have been able to form and continue in my twenties.

The web doesn’t just let me form friendships, it lets me find others who share my world view, and it lets me learn and discover whatever piques my curiosity. We can learn what others experiences are of particular hotels or restaurants, we can learn to speak other languages, we can access information and knowledge to such a greater degree that now people talk about the “noosphere”  – like the atmosphere which surrounds our Earth, but a blanket of knowledge, rather than air.

Patients come to the doctor now having already learned something about their illness, its potential treatments, the potential side effects. This shifts the power towards the patient in such a good way.

We can’t claim the ignorance we used to be able to claim. And we can’t claim to be isolated they way we used to.

Look at this photo of the atmosphere around the Earth, and imagine it as a noosphere held within a great world wide web….