If there’s anything that marks the age in which we live (does that make me sound as old as I think it does…?), its the pervasiveness and ease with which we can access whatever information we choose. Random questions can be searched and answered on the spot, weather forecasts can be immediately known, music and books instantly available. And, while we’ve come to take it for granted, I can recall when being able to have a phone conversation in my car was a new and wondrous luxury, and I really appreciate the amazing progress we’ve made as a society.
That said, reading this today gave me pause. Its not that the concept of crowd-sourcing one’s medical condition isn’t a really phenomenal idea…it is. And, certainly, this writer seems to have received positive results by doing so. What’s more, I think that its the natural evolution of (dare I use such a cliche term as) the information age. Though I’m moving out of the health care field, I’ve seen the constant movement over the last decade of transitioning all record-keeping to digital format, and I don’t think that one must be a futurist to see this as an easy extension of that.
Pushing aside for a moment how privacy laws will struggle to evolve at a reasonable enough pace to accommodate something like this, though, I had a moment of strong push-back after my initial positive reaction to reading this. While certainly none of us are islands, I also think that there’s such a thing as too much input from too many people. With the thought of publicly airing my medical history, I reach that thresh-hold pretty quickly in my head.
Part of me sees this as a great use of our technological capabilities to seek expert advice from those that we would not otherwise be able to contact. Part of me screams in fear that this will become yet another privacy-wrenching expectation of the “extrovert ideal” that dominates our cultural functioning.
And, part of me wonders if, God forbid, I ever were to receive similar news, I wouldn’t pursue any option available, including some version of this very strategy.
This brave new world of ours just keeps getting more interesting, doesn’t it?