Everyone's a Doctor...

In the past weeks, the subject of the "new media" and it's relation to our everyday lives has been mostly frivolous and focused on things such as games, music and television. However, this week's topic is a lot more serious. It has now become incredibly easy to diagnose medical problems, simply by "Googling" the symptons. No doubt somebody else out there has had the same symptoms and documented them online, just waiting for somebody else to find.

Tania Lewis states, "...the internet would seem to represent the ultimate site for disseminating health information to ‘lay’ people...", and she is absolutely right. It seems that anyone can be a doctor these days, that's not to say that doctors will become redundant, as obviously, that would never happen. It does mean that the layman will be able to know more about themselves and their body much easier than before the new media changed everything.

Is this "self-diagnosis" more dangerous than it seems? It could be, indeed. Medical information obtained from an unidentified individual may not always be the most accurate, in fact, it could be completely wrong and have dire results.

I for one, have used the internet to diagnose some minor medical conditions, however, would I rely on it for serious conditions? Probably not.



References

Lewis, T. (2006). Seeking health information on the internet: lifestyle choice or bad attack of cyberchondria? In Media, Culture & Society, volume 28, issue 4: 521-539.

The Umbilical Link

It's been well established that the new media as a whole is becoming widely more accessable to previously untapped markets; but is this dissemination of media getting out of hand? Genevieve Bell states that,

"Mobile phones are bought for children so that they can be used to communicate with them, but also as a sort of game that parents perform with their children, whereby the phone provides a constant umbilical link spooled out from parent to child that the parent is able to use to reassure him/herself of their child’s safety." (Bell, 2006)

This "umbilical link" seems to cross many lines, but mostly it seems to cross the line of trust. It seems to some parents that the mobile phone is more a spying device rather than a convinient method of communication. This misuse of new media could be considered unethical, however, parents do have the right to keep watch over their children.

Sometimes parents take this right to the extreme. "he had recently enabled location tracking functions on his daughter’s cell phone—he remarked, ‘I know where my daughter is within a radius of 500 meters.'" (Bell, 2006) Surely there must be a point where the parents can trust their child enough to not need to know exactly where they are at all times. When did parents suddenly decide that this level of stalking was necessary? Children managed to grow up just fine without constant supervision before the new media had a stranglehold on society.

Has the new media made this "helicopter parenting" too easy?



References

Bell, G. (2006). The Age of the Thumb: a Cultural Reading of Mobile Technologies from Asia. Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, Summer 2006, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 41-57.