“While this may be a little off-topic, it really has a lot to do with how we get information on what is happening in China including what’s going on in health care. Rebecca Mackinnon, an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, recently completed a revealing study titled ‘Blogs and China Correspondence: How Foreign Correspondents Covering China Use Blogs’.”
See my complete post over at the World Health Care Blog.
Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music startup Audiocafe is creating quite the sensation with his new book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture”.
One reviewer summarizes Keen’s arguments: “that many of the ideas promoted by champions of web 2.0 are gravely flawed. Instead of creating masterpieces, the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.”
Another writes “The villains in Keen’s narrative are a “pajama army” of mostly anonymous writers who spread gossip and scandal, “intellectual kleptomaniacs,” who search Google to copy others’ work and the “digital thieves” of media content in the post-Napster era.”
“Instead of a dictatorship of experts, we’ll have a dictatorship of idiots,” says Keen.
Of course the blogging world is not taking this lying down. In fact you can check Keen’s own blog on how the battle is going. It’s hilarious.
“In the wake of news about bad seafood, tainted toothpaste, fake drugs and lead-painted toys, China announced the appointment of a new health minister, a Paris-trained scientist and only the second non-Party member to be named to a ministerial post since the 1970s. No reason was given for the change.”
See my complete post over at the World Health Care Blog.
From the Freakonomics Blog:
“And Today Is…
June 28 is Insurance Awareness Day, which works well with tomorrow’s opening of SiCKO.”
“Thanks to Salon’s Andrew Leonard I’ve been following some blog commentary on recent statements by Pope Benedict XVI on globalization. The Pope argues, not surprisingly, that while globalization has benefited many millions of people, it has also led to growing inequities in the world that are fueling significant unrest. Other principles that need to guide the economy are justice and charity, the Pope explained. He calls for a globalization “characterized by solidarity and without marginalization of people”, values, which, together with sound economic policies, he says, could go a long way in finding solutions to the ethical challenges in a globalized world.”
See my complete post over at World Health Care Blog
Chatter among health blogs has focused on a post by
“Patients need to see their doctors to get the right medical care. But better-informed patients recover faster, manage chronic illnesses better and may even avoid some illnesses altogether. And patients should feel in control of their situation.”
Not an original observation, really. But she believes that consumers should have access to the same computer systems that are designed to remind doctors about tests and treatments that their patients should have. And she’s part of the team at Google working on health and trying to do something about this problem. What Zeiger is trying to get close to is what we all would like to have — a doctor in the family who can point us in the right direction or with whom we can bounce treatment options against. Whether Google can come up to this expectation is questionable. But coming even close would be quite an accomplishment.
“In a previous post I argued that the future of China’s public sphere and non-profit infrastructure is uncertain at best. But the momentum surrounding health care reform — and one must add, the foreign NGOs that are coming to China as a result — should both help, and be helped, by this vital yet struggling grassroots development.”
See my complete post over at the World Health Care Blog.
At least 59 percent of the American public supposedly feel that no presidential candidate represents their views on health care in the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. And 57 percent say that no candidate is placing a big emphasis on health care. Hillary and Obama do lead the pack of candidates on this issue but the majority of the the public is still on the sidelines of this debate.
But what is really astonishing is that between March and June the number of Americans with those views has grown substantially! So what do we make of this? Health care remains second only to Iraq in the public mind. Everyone says it’s important. Everyone says the system is dysfunctional. But everyone appears not to agree with everyone else on what to do. Either the public is not engaged, or the candidates are not putting something forward that the public can understand. Maybe it’s still too early in the campaign for people to get fired up. Or just maybe, the public is wary of getting too fired up on something this complex and this important.
“Last week the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations(IHR) went into effect. In an earlier post I talked about how these regulations are designed to give the WHO broader authority in helping countries deal to “prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease.” While all of these efforts still depend on the cooperation of the governments involved, the new regulations will still enhance global health security according to David Fidler, an expert on international law and public health at the Indiana University School of Law.”
See my complete post over at the World Health Care Blog.
Britain’s outgoing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, wrote an insightful commentary in where he says today’s media are “a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by “impact”; that “attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial. . . What creates cynicism is not mistakes; it is allegations of misconduct. But misconduct is what has impact.” and ” more than ever before, (the media) hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.”
He says that the “final consequence of all of this is that it is rare today to find balance in the media. Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life’s usual grey is almost entirely absent. ‘Some good, some bad’; ‘some things going right, some going wrong’: These are concepts alien to much of today’s reporting. It’s a triumph or a disaster. A problem is ‘a crisis.’ A setback a policy ‘in tatters.’ A criticism, ‘a savage attack.’”
Blair’s remarks were none too well received by the British media of course. But as I read his commentary, I could not help thinking about the American MEDIA and its handling of health care issues in the past. If I ‘m not mistaken, health care has been in “crisis” for the last 20 years or so, maybe even longer. And just about everyone in health care, from drug companies, insurers, doctors to even consumers, have felt the sting of what Blair is pointing out.
If we agree with what he is saying, then the question is, what can we expect will be the media’s treatment of the health care debate where it is now front and center in a presidential election? And by the media, we can’t leave out our own ‘health blog industrial complex’ that we’ve now inflicted upon the rest of the planet. I am almost afraid to speculate what will happen when we move from tossing around ideas to making real decisions. Will we have a ‘revolution’ in health care, or will the ‘haves’ once again triumph over the ‘have nots’ through deception and money? In other words, what tired and over-used ideological narrative will the media choose to fit the facts within? Will the calls for moderation and sanity be voices in the wilderness, or worse, seen as the enemy?
No answers here, and maybe our fate is already sealed by some undetected political and media dynamics already set in motion. Anyway we are all along for the ride, so get your pens, pencils and laptops ready. The game is afoot.
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