ICTlogy

ai-see-TEE-lo-gee

From 2005 to 2007, good friend Francisco Lupiáñez took part in a Manuel Castells’s project entitled Technological Modernisation, Organisational Change and Service Delivery in the Catalan Public Health System (aka PIC Salut).

His main findings in the Public Health system related with the adoption of ICTs are really similar to the ones I pointed at — there related to the Educational system — in my conference Opening Session: Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions (indeed partly based on data from a brother project, L’Escola a la Societat Xarxa: Internet a l’Educació Primària i Secundària, also led by Castells and belonging both of them to a framework project about ICT adoption in Catalonia, Spain).

These findings can be summarized as follows:

• ICTs are broadly considered as a promising tool among physicists and nurses, health care professionals at large (managers, the pharmaceutical sector, etc.) and patients.
• Internet and intranets are widely used to get Health information.
• But e-health management and service delivery systems, even if in a growing trend, they are far from being mainstream and are quite often rare.
• ICT used is mainly focused to interprofessional use, while patients (or the direct use with the customer) are excluded from the equation.
• Productivity, efficiency and quality don’t seem to be affected because of lack of accompanying measures in habits, procedures, strategies, policies, etc. at all levels.

Put short: information and some professional interaction, but almost total lack of communication. e-Health 2.0? No way. Interactivity does not exist and, actually, the “reputation factor” still plays a very important role that the Internet has not solved yet (i.e. who do you trust?).

More details about the results of the project can be accessed here and here.

For those who can read Catalan, this is a very interesting presentation:

On the other hand, there’s a conference at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park on Thursday 15th May 2008 just about this subject. Please find here more information about the programme.

Manuel Castells is a scientific I admire. There are things I share — most of them — and things I don’t. Right now I’m working hard with two works of him:

which I find really interesting and a recommended reading for everyone.

This is why I find so disappointing when an author of his stature can so unexpectedly slip out of the road by writing:

the Internet is quickly becoming a medium of interactive communication beyond the cute, but scarcely relevant practice of chat rooms (increasingly made obsolete by SMSs and other wireless, instant communication systems)

[bold letters are mine]

Of course, I’m not questioning him for not foreseeing that SMS would not replace instant messaging — which is what he’s actually meaning by the general concept of chat rooms —, two technologies that now live together in perfect harmony, especially in teen environments. It’s about the scarcely relevant practice of chat rooms.

This is 0% evidence, 100% value judgment.

Evidence about the relevance of such practice is way easy to be checked. First of all, we should remember the origins of both e-mail and instant messaging: high-tech scientific laboratories — there’s plenty of literature about this issue. But once it went out of the scientific environment and got popular, there’s more and more evidence about the relevance of such tools: the Pew Internet & American Life Project issued in that same year, 2004, the report How Americans Use Instant Messaging about 53 million American adults using instant messaging programs. Well, this is quite a lot of people doing scarcely relevant practices. But just at the end of last year, 2007, Garrett and Danziger analyzed how instant messaging was used at work for work purposes in their article IM=Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace, finding positive uses — yes, you read right: positive. So, evidence absolutely shows that there are good, interesting, useful practices around instant messaging.

What about value judgment? Well, I’d personally agree on assessing as useful, effective, efficient, etc. the use instant messaging for criminal purposes: phishing and pharming, organizing terrorist attacks, seducing minors for sexual purposes, etc. Actually, the main security concerns nowadays about the Internet are precisely in this line: how to avoid the effectiveness of tools like instant messaging, social networking sites and e-mail for criminal purposes. Hence, what is to blame is the criminal who uses these tools, but the tools are working great — even if in bad hands, because tools know no ethics, no law (well, Lessig would complain about this last point).

Summing up: a tool is useful, efficient, effective or relevant besides the fact that we like or dislike the way it is used, but based on its performance.

Same with social networking sites. In a work I’ve already talked about by David Beer and Roger Burrows, they write about Facebook. Even if they are quite open minded, there’s a full chapter about the bad uses of Facebook concerning teachers’ privacy issues which, from my point of view, is almost a digression that really does not deal with the sense of ‘democratization’, as stated in the title of that chapter.

While the authors complain — more than criticize — about the fact of having some colleagues exposed to public dishonor, they lose focus on the subject of analysis: Facebook, social networking sites, shifting towards the (bad) education and practices of such students, which was (supposedly) not the matter of debate in the article.

Day after day I am surprised by the recurrent exercise to blame on the Internet things that belong to “real” life: Law, Education, Business Management… And, even worse, to state about Internet applications and uses things that are absolutely false, taking as evidence what, all in all, was just lack of deeper knowledge and prejudice. Even in the most brilliant scientists. We all have bad days everywhen.

If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest: