Video time!

“I would take us all back a thousand years, when our ancestors lived in small villages and there was always a healer in that village—and his job wasn’t to give you heart surgery or medication but to help find a safe place for conversation.” Dr. Mehmet Oz

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/02/04/130204fa_fact_specter#ixzz2JNd2kTQP

Most of the videos  and that quote seem to go together in my mind. Let's go back to a quiet, safe pastoral existence where all was peace, calm and safety...except that it wasn't. The same thing has been said during every information revolution, from the invention of writing to the printing press to the radio. Too much change too fast is disorienting, and it is always possible to point to some who get knocked down by the tide or lose balance in the maelstrom of change.

The healer who offered conversation would not have much to give my nieces with cystic fibrosis -  but they are alive because of interventions that involve more than village elders, and the new medication that they are on is making a major change for the better.

I realize that Dr. Oz is a heart surgeon and obviously deals in more than treating with reassurance.

The real question is how to balance through change, how to make it work for us and not come to rule us.

And, in the end, Nature will always have the last word.

For media examples of technological change, look to Star Trek: The Next generation, which presents a (mostly) Utopian view. Or compare Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series and the recent BBC adaptation Sherlock, where the technology that was cutting-edge in Doyle's time becomes the technology that is now prevalent.

We have  a device in our pockets that can connect to all the knowledge in the world. Mainly we use it to look at cats and post sarcastic remarks.

This stream-of-consciousness style writing is in no way to be taken for finished thought, and may make no sense whatsoever. 

#edcmooc