Toon Timbermont

Surfers and Divers, Patients and Doctors…

While I am keeping my promise of reading more on the Personal Identity Management, I gladly take any opportunity to exchange ideas with open but critical minds. This morning one of these opportunities took place… and one of the questions was:

Does a person use information available - and how? Is a better informed person a smarter person? And how will the informed person interact with an educated person?

I do not have an answer, let alone thé answer to these questions, but an extremely interesting read on how the information society - in a broad sense of the word - is impacting our generation (and the generations to come) is “The Barbarians” from Allessandro Baricco (Not translated in English as far as I can tell. For the Dutch speaking you can listen to the Cobra interview, read the Humo review, or even better, read the book)

The key observation in this series of essays is that our society is moving from the “romantic” era, where the ideal of study and effort - resulting in intellectual and cultural depth (diving), is replaced by a horizontal movement, where people glide over the surface in the search for short cuts to fresh excitement (surfing).

Do not expect pages of incomprehensible theory, but short chapters where the consequences of this idea are applied on wine, football and many other - cool - topics… Alessandro fights the idea that there is a big battle between civilization and ‘barbarians’, but rather presents a gradual transition from within society. The only ‘paternalistic’ advice he gives is that we should think well on what we want to keep from the old world. A great read!

In relation to the questions above, we could replace the informed person by the surfer and a smart/educated person by the diver. What happens if a surfer meets a diver? Will the surfer recognize a diver? Will the surfer be willing to recognize a diver as a ‘smart’ person, not really valuating the diving qualities any more? Or will the surfer use the diver as a short cut and continue his journey as soon as he can?

To make these questions more tangible, one could map them to the patient-doctor relation. The surfing patient has now access to a huge set of health information. The doctor has been “diving” for years to build his expertise. When the patient meets the doctor, a surfer-diver communication needs to be established… taking into account that the doctors’ intellectual depth (for many years the summum of the romantic ideal) is not necessarily part of the frame of reference of the patient. It is clear that the patient-doctor relation is already changing and probably will continue to do so. Perhaps Baricco’s paradigm can help putting things into context and provide some ideas on what to keep from the ‘old’ world.

At this moment, we are only seeing the beginning of this shift, and perhaps the mutation from diver to surfer is hiding yet another mutation. One thing is for sure: “We are living in interesting times!”