Reporters, and why we need them.
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
I had a chance tonight to watch part three of Lowell Bergman’s Frontline ‘News War’ opus titled What’s Happening to the News, and like the Linda Ellerbee documentary of a couple of years back, it chronicled the ongoing demise of American Journalism in the hands of publicly-held companies, whose managers in spasms of simplemindedness, throw up their hands and say that “Wall Street says make more money this year than last.”
Doesn’t matter if you’re making refrigerators or investigating pedophile congressmen. Make more money this year than last. Show growth. Grow…or…die?
On a day where Wall Street rode a plunging roller coaster fueled apparently by fears about the Asian economy and a “computer glitch or two” (we’ll see how that plays out), it seemed even more absurd to have any respect at all for a system of capitalism that preaches blind growth above all.
“Cutting, cutting, cutting is not a strategy for survival.” I’m paraphrasing the former editor of the L.A. Times, John Carroll. Well, exactly right. By definition, in fact. But it’s one of the only tools moneymen have to show growth. There are only so many ways to pull rabbits from hats.
Bergman, himself a relic and refugee from the old, pre-Lawrence Tisch CBS News, has no shortage of greying heads to choose from to talk about how broadcast journalism used to be a mission of public service, and no shortage either of slightly younger shareholder-friendly replacements (like ABC News head David Westin) willing to redefine news as “anything people are interested in.” Westin also gives us the (I’m paraphrasing here) “what do you expect? We have so many hours to fill.” rationalization that he thinks excuses himself. Sorry, no.
It’s a rationalization that accounts for about 85% of the shiny moving objects we’re distracted by on YouTube, and of course embraces prime time television “newsmagazines” that have, like Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator,” have gone full Chayefsky on us, with shiny abominations that are placed in a container marked journalism, but which fulfill none of the minimum daily requirements.
When our local affiliate carries more American Idol coverage than any other content in their 10 o’clock hour (I am not kidding) we see the New News Managers, guided by that memo from Wall Street, in full flower. Oh, well, there’s so much time to fill, and so relatively few apartment fires and car crashes.
The broadcast recounts the sad decline of network news almost in passing, and then turns to the youthful-ish Yahoo and Google managers, who seem to back away, way away, from the prospect of having a payroll-full of their own darn reporters, but who also recognize that if newspapers and their reporting staffs evaporate, they are so screwed.
The broadcast tries to assert, in telling the increasingly ugly Los Angeles Times/Tribune Company story, that more voices on the national and international stage—covering the big Pulitzer-worthy projects are needed…and I don’t disagree, but I also see those same entities as being the best places for micro-scale, hyperlocal journalism. I think you say yes to both.
Yeah, I’m an eternal news idealist. I just want whoever’s left in news management to wake up to the sobering realities and take a pledge. Here’s what I’m thinking, in convenient bullet point form.
- We want, need, and celebrate lots of reporters, at every level, everywhere. There’s money out there in the vast system of internet television and print to pay their salaries. Get lots of them. Get spares.
- Deploy them to Iraq and to every local school board meeting. Scrutinize enormous corporations and petty tyrants in small town councils. Learn the lessons of modern database journalism and pour what all of what they find into vast databases that are easily parsed, leafed through, thought about, and even occasionally printed out on good old fashioned paper.
- Spend the energy and resources on gathering the information, and don’t worry that much about style and ‘storytelling.’ That can come, will come. But without the information, there can be no real storytelling—you get something like what cable news is now, which is nonstop speculation and prediction and froth.
- Don’t worry about Craigslist. Don’t forget how to sell advertising by not forgetting the power of simple, local advertising that small companies can afford to try.
- Make a fine profit, but don’t mandate that it must increase year upon year. If that’s a nonstarter in the land of public companies, if that means that these collections of reporters must all be employed by non-profits like the Poynter Institute and NPR, so be it. Maybe Wall Street has no place making a business out of journalism.
- Release their hard-gathered content out there freely and widely into the cosmic mixmaster that is the internet, and be sincerely flattered as it is sliced, diced, repeated, and blogged upon.
- Lobby for openness and transparency in government and business as if our democracy depends on it. It of course, does.
- Be as open in your business as you want government and the corporate world to be in theirs.
- Look upon this as a mission of public service, and do your best to live up to that charge in your conduct and ethics.
Ah, easy for me to say. Easy for me to hope. And, because Frontline (and PBS) is one of those aging journalistic institutions trying to stay as relevant online as on-air, easy for you to watch the whole show and read and view much more on their site. It’s worth your time.
Bumping up.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Boy, I love bumpers. Strictly speaking, those are the graphics or animation elements that are the “padding” between a program and the commercials. They “bump” up against the breaks and..well, you get it. The old Late Night with David Letterman on NBC had a great set of them, reflecting humor and a sense of post-midnight in New York City. The Tonight Show had some great ones back in the 1960s.
But the folks at Late Night with Conan O’Brien, the hairs (oh, ok) apparent to this tradition, have surpassed their mentors, and thanks to internet fandom (someone named ‘CZ’, it appears), you don’t have to wait until commercial breaks late late at night to enjoy them. Just click here and enjoy a great (and abundant) gallery of visual puns…great use of design, in my book.
Who are these faceless design humorists? A quick Google says that Chryss Hionis and Jason Kirschner are the NBC design directors, and Marty Geller is their graphic artist.
Big finish!
Monday, February 19th, 2007
One of my favorite scenes—almost a throwaway moment—in the movie Broadcast News comes when two composers are demo-ing their news theme for the news execs…it comes together in a symphonic flurry of cresendoes and synthesized orchestration, and at nearly its climax, the music geeks say together: “Big finish!”
(Yes, that’s a link to a semi-listenable audio file of that very moment. Thanks, oh internet.)
Well, most days at the end of any of the network news broadcasts, I find myself saying that out loud…and probably annoying Sammy slightly.
But truth be told, my all-time favorite news theme was crafted for the public radio airwaves, specifically by the acknowledged master of public radio music, B.J. Leiderman.
From Marketplace to Morning Edition to my favorite, Weekend Edition Saturday, Mr. Leiderman makes music as varied as radio itself and in the classic tradition of big-B-Broadcasting, which as you may know, is a big deal for me. He has the smarts to use typewriter sounds for percussion when you’re introing a letters segment and to weave the gongs and hubbub of Wall Street into the Marketplace theme…an approach that which may or may not have been inspired by the ancient Wall Street Week theme, “TWX in 12 bars” composed by (I think) Donald Swartz, which featured a real Teletype ASR-33 on percussion.
And now, he has a new website, apparently crafted with the powers of iWeb, which features a great downloadable sampler of his NPR work, suitable for anyone’s iPod (and certainly mine.)
Late night imagery connects.
Sunday, February 11th, 2007
After a quiet evening of converting my business site (well, some of it) to a fiesta of MySQL and PHP, it’s somehow a warm treat for me to discover that one of the many collections of pixels I’ve cast to the wind have connected with some guy I will never know personally, but we have a beat-up old school in Ohio in common. He (‘callmebob’ is his nom du net) says:
I went to Robert Louis Stevenson elementary school in the late fifties and early sixties. I had no idea it still existed. I have lived in Alaska for a long time now. A lot of miles and a lot of years. Thanks for the memories.
You’re quite welcome. And I extend my thanks to the people who shot pictures of Goddard College I somehow neglected to snap in 1975, and to the folks who thought Breezewood, PA was as odd a place as I remember, and the many other photographers and random-camera-wielders who are turning this internet thingy into a repository of visual memories—of places where I’ve been, and places I wish I recorded.
Jobs: DRM does not work.
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
Steve Jobs blogs even less frequently than I do. (I’m not counting the fake Steve Jobs here.) But this afternoon, Apple’s CEO has something to say about music and DRM, and that’s significant.
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.
That’s pretty plain talk from a fancy CEO. And already, the sphere’o’blogs has started to parse and consider Steve’s words in the light of Apple’s deeds. I’m all for blaming the record companies, but if I were a musician, I’m not sure I’m totally sanguine casting my lot with the iTunes Store.
* * * *
In other news of interest to an enthusiast like myself, Apple released an ad (post-superbowl, imagine how much they saved!) that completely sums up my feelings about the security-by-nagging approach that Windows has always embodied. Are you sure? How about now? now? Allow or deny?
Signs of odd times.
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
We’ve just completed (well, mostly completed) a move of our entire ragtag fleet of websites…this one, my business, Sam’s, James’s, Leslie’s, Bill’s, the works. Maybe it’s a tribute to the quality of the hosting company we picked, maybe it’s a tribute to my willingness to stay up late and try to puzzle out the mysteries of ssh and public key authentication…but things have gone smoothly and we’re now in the land of Textdrive. I hear it’s a hip neighborhood; I hope it’s not too hip for our crowd.
Meanwhile, the reaction of some in Atlanta to how some in Boston freaked out teaches me a few things about generations and perspective. My first reaction was “geez, how idiotic can you be to do something like this in such paranoid times?” I shook my head and listened for the sound of Time Warner vice presidents being ejected from Techwood Drive windows. (By the way, I never think of [adult swim] or any of those channels as being ‘Turner’ channels anymore since there’s no Ted connected to them, nohow. And yet all the coverage described the execs as from ‘Turner Broadcasting.’)
But after a while of seeing the foomfah rage on, I began to see it in a slightly different light (heh)…less “what were they (the marketing weasels) thinking” than “boy, do they understand their target audience. They (the audience) wants to see the rules broken, convention flaunted. This generation doesn’t protest the sins of our government by standing up and saying “This is wrong.” They do it by punking (punk’d-ing?) the authorities. They do it in ways that would delight, well, hey, the yippies. The ghost of Jerry Rubin is smiling (in digital LEDs) and giving the finger.
Does the world change a whit? Well, [adult swim]’s market share goes up, I spose.
UPDATE: The resumé of one of the Bostonian guerrila marketers. Art major, Final Cut, Mac guy. Well, of course! the Boston Herald reports:
[Peter] Berdovsky is a freelance video jockey and got hooked up with the New York company Interference Inc. through connections in the video industry, Rich said.
“He’s just a really good guy,” said his friend Jeffrey Woodsin. “I think it’s been blown out of proportion.”Woodin said Berdovsky, the outgoing singer with the band Superfiction, would not want to cause mass panic. He said the pictures of his arrest were shocking.
“Here’s my friend being arrested as part of a bomb scare. I thought ‘There’s got to be a mistake.’ I’m worried for Peter. I’m worried that he’s going to end up with legal repercussions when really it’s the company,” Woodin said. “He was legally hired by the company to do this.”Berdovsky’s biological father passed away years ago and his mother still lives in Belarus, Rich said. Rich says Berdovsky is in the United States as a political refugee from the authoritarian government of Belarus.
And the Boston Globe reported “an advertising executive at Interference Marketing Inc. instructed Peter Berdovsky to keep quiet while police scrambled across the metropolitan area responding to a series of bomb scares…”
In another era, in the movie version of this incident, Faye Dunaway would have been running Interference.
It’ll do, in a pinch.
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
Those of you know know Sammy and me know that we are the last of our generation to be without a cell phone. I’ve long bemoaned the idiocy of the user interfaces (I hate to glorify them by even using that term) and the entire user experience seemed like one big compromise.
And don’t even get me started on the changes for the worse in social behavior that rampant cell phone use has engendered.
All that said, come June, we’ll be gesturing and pinching and poking and rotating and widgeting and googling and rocking and syncing and presence-ing and photo-ing with the best of them, and we’ll do it using a UI as familiar to me as the one I live with every day—Mac OS X.
Yeah, I was impressed. It was a big wow, indeed. And I can now see how all of Apple’s hardware smarts have come together with all of their clever plans for resolution-independent UI, javascript widgets made easy, Core Image, Core Animation, and all kinds of other object-oriented goodness.
Design pundits prattle on about it being the “little things” that make a difference. Here are just three of those little things, probably each involving a huge effort to get right in practice:
- iPhone’s accelerometer detects when you rotate the device from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page or a photo in its proper landscape aspect ratio.
- The proximity sensor detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away.
- An ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the display’s brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light, thereby enhancing the user experience and saving power at the same time.
The end result hangs together so thoughtfully that I just want to smile at the very thought of it. This is design done well, indeed.
UPDATE: As I say in the comments below, if the phone isn’t open to the vast army of salivating Mac developers, it becomes way less attractive to me, too…but as of Wednesday, we really don’t know much about what’s under the hood. Hmm.
UPDATE II: As a non-cell-user, one thing I didn’t think of (and perhaps wouldn’t miss) is tactile feedback. Folks who live their lives surreptitiously poking out messages and changing the configs while their phones remain pocketed in meetings may well notice. And no one (to my knowledge) asked Jobs and company the apparently important question: does it vibrate?
On an optimistic note.
Monday, January 8th, 2007
I’m not much for resolutions or other yearend foomfah, but I do believe in staring one’s year looking optimistically at the road ahead. It’s also a nice antidote when there have been some tough bumps to get over.
There are a raft of positive notes raised in answer to the question “What are you optimistic about?” over on the Edge Foundation‘s site, but this one resonates with me, in part because it is a modern evocation of the “sunlight rule” of journalism and in part because geolocation, geocoding, geopresence, and other things geo are fascinating to me right now.
So. One of the answerers, Chris DiBona of Google asserts (hopes?):
Widely Available, Constantly Renewing, High Resolution Images of the Earth Will End Conflict and Ecological Devastation As We Know It
I am not so much of a fool to think that war will end, no matter how much I wish that our shared future could include such a thing. Nor do I think that people will stop the careless destruction of flora and fauna for personal, corporate, national or international gain. I do believe that the advent of rapidly updating, citizenry-available high resolution imagery will remove the protection of the veil of ignorance and secrecy from the powerful and exploitative among us. (more)
Somehow that captures the spirit of more than a few who work at Google, that their work can have positive side benefits for their fellow humans as it brings gazillions of dollars in added stock valuation. Maybe some at Microsoft or Apple or, hell, Time Warner have that same sense of mission (it does, after all, make it easier to go to work in the morning), but at the G-place it certainly seems to seep from their pores. This in itself, however is not sufficient insurance against any large organization of people (corporate, political) suddenly finding themselves, through inertia, the laws of large numbers, or individual fear and avarice, doing eeeeevil.
But as long as we have ways to expose eeeeevil to the sunlight of publicity (meaning in its purest sense bringing it to the attention of the public as a whole), I have lots of room for optimism about the human condition(s).
Steven J. Korte, 1957-2007.
Friday, January 5th, 2007
I was so fortunate to make friends at Ohio University who I’ve laughed with and learned from my entire life.
Now I have to refer to one of them, Steve Korte, in the past tense. I worked with Steve at WOUB, the public TV and radio station at OU that gave us practical experience in what one of my journalism profs loved to call “the workaday world.” That’s Steve at work in this picture from 1977, wearing what looks like an ancient headset and a ‘Hocking Valley Bluegrass’ t-shirt, directing a crew of four through an evening’s programming.
We got an email from Steve’s wife Susan yesterday conveying the sad news that he passed away from an apparent heart attack just minutes into the new year. Susan and Steve met in Athens, worked together early in their marriage at WHBC radio in Canton, Ohio for not much money, and raised a daughter (almost off to college) and a son in a town that had a lot of family connections, but not much in the way of broadcasting opportunities.
He turned his love of pipe organs into a series of gigs (can you call them that?) at churches throughout Canton on Sundays, and used his deep understanding of sound and music to create original compositions, recordings of his and others’ performances, and I can only imagine what albums, tapes, and digital bits of sound he has stashed away over the years.
Like many of the true broadcasters he loved to collect the artifacts that make up radio and television’s young history—classic RCA carbon microphones, old jingle packages from the days when radio had great jingles, and snippets of sound from all over. He took some old audio tapes of mine and his, cleaned them up and sent me a one-of-a-kind CD called ‘J.C.Burns Radio Arcana’, filled with all kinds of wonderful bits from his past and mine, packaged elegantly with a custom-made cover. What a great gift, and of course, its contents wander around with me today on my iPod.
Where some of us would just remember an old song from a Columbus, Ohio kids’ program, he’d sit down and painstakingly, authentically recreate it. Here, please enjoy Steve’s rendering of ‘Wake up Mr. Tree’ from WBNS-TV’s Luci’s Toy Shop, circa 1960-something.
He took a job at Diebold that he was way overqualified for in order to make a good life for his wife and family, but in my mental snapshot he is and was a remarkable father, broadcaster and musician, and I’ll miss him. Our hearts go out to Susan, Lily, and Will.
* * * * *
Found this obit for Steve in The Marion Star, in his hometown.
Last 90 days.
Monday, January 1st, 2007
I am looking at a photo or two of a Cargill plant at dawn in Sidney, Ohio, perched atop my iPhoto smart album labeled ‘Last 90 days.’
So that means, with the relentless clarity that only computer-based metadata can provide, that it’s been 90 days since Sammy and I first headed up I-75 to “help out” as her Dad was scheduled to have a stent put in a coronary artery. As many of you know, this turned into a much more serious triple-bypass operation with extra postoperative complications, and a lot more “helping out” that reached a new chapter this week.
The photo is one that Sam shot from our motel room after a night of conviviality with our friend Martha in Cincinnati. A few short days before Sammy’s birthday. We were driving north into fall, and although we were prepared (I would say) for complications, we weren’t (I would say) prepared for all of what we had to do over the past three months.
We had a good holiday with our greater family (including Sammy’s parents but alas, not including my sister and her husband out west), and then Sammy flew back to Michigan, sheparding her parents safely back to the land of cold winters. Two days later, I loaded up the truck with furniture and other stuff her family will need and headed up the very familiar truck-filled lanes of I-75.
Meanwhile, the very next day, her mom checked into a facility that says they’re especially good at what’s called “memory care” these days. A new chapter begins for her, and for us. She lives now in an AmeriSuites version of her life, with familiar chairs and books and new furniture from an Atlanta Target and a TV she really isn’t interested much in watching and a view of the changing seasons from a large picture window.
By many standards, it has all gone very well, due in no small part to the strength of my spouse; her determination to do a good job for her family. By many standards, this is a process that can’t go very well, because it is a series of compromises brought on by what her mom can and can’t do for herself now, and her dad, now a recovering heart patient nearing 90 (he’s doing quite well with that recovery) can only do so much for so long.
So it’s sad. And it’s hopeful. And I’m just glad I can look back at this photo and reconnect to where we were and what we were thinking then…and I try to carry as much of that as I can, over and through the last 90 days, onward into 2007.
Better day.
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
This is why newspapers used to publish multiple editions.
This is what “breaking news” actually is.
This is, well, a relief.
[Update: Ha!! A Mac OS X joke about the Defense Secretary’s departure.]
Nice day.
Wednesday, November 8th, 2006
Yeah, it’s still a fairly red state down here, but I’m proud of Ohio and I feel better just generally rolling through the heartland—maybe the message folks are sending will make it to the halls of power.
Always the optimist!
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
Ah yes, we “can’t put it together—it is together.” “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” One of my earliest influences and inspirations in publishing, writing, design, and living is being honored at a Stanford University Library symposium.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog is a panel discussion with Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold and others, pioneers all, who led me into the idea that with some Letraset and an IBM composer and some homebaked bran muffins, a batch of well meaning..well, hippies could set out a guide to the resources needed to live healthier, more connected, and more productive lives.
Get that composting system started! Repair your VW bug! Discover 1970s-era contraceptive choices! Make your own yogurt! Find out about these newfangled computer things! Somehow the WEC became a part of my house, along with the Mother Earth News and various other journals we’d order from the Catalog’s pages. Their ‘access to tools’ was a powerful key to a vast world outside Grandview Heights, Ohio, and I wanted to read more, learn more, and explore more—inside and beyond their smudgy newsprint pages.
They published in a cobbled-together, semi-underground manner, and they told us (right down to the minutiae of the process and their balance sheets) how to do it ourselves. They linked the planet (or at least a US-centric version of it) before there was a World Wide Web, and in the earliest days of computer-based communication, their pioneering BBS the WELL brought people crouched behind Apple II screens connected by screeching modems closer together. Brand’s attitude was paternal and big-picture-seeing even from the earliest days…was he ever a young man?
By the way, it looks like much of the contents of Brand’s office is now available to researchers at Stanford. If it ends up completely online, then the Whole Earthers’ legacy will have truly come full circle.
Call us all (more) politicized.
Saturday, October 21st, 2006
Most Mac developers I know tend to talk very little about politics, so when a well-articulated precis of the situation shows up in a blog where where one more usually sees discourse on the idiocies of those who write and sell software, I’m taking it as one more sign that the level of national discontent is higher, higher, ever-higher.
Wil Shipley (co-author of Delicious Library and proprietor of Call Me Fishmeal, says it well: “We have let the fear of violence against us turn us into animals. We’re so frightened by those images of jets crashing into skyscrapers that we’ve forgotten that being the victim of a terrorist attack is, in fact, among the least likely of the bad things that can happen to us. We have to stop.”
And on the way over here (I’m in Chicago), I listened to a couple of Keith Olbermann‘s ‘special comment’ essays in tasty podcast form. The MSNBC anchor is increasingly outraged, increasingly strident, and yet his rage teeters safely on the side of making an intelligent (and yes, often emotional) case. These aren’t rants, but boy, are they passionate, and I can’t help but visualize a hypothetical George Bush’s face, forced to listen to Olbermann’s modern-day Murrow turn at close range, close enough to occasionally catch an errant drop of spittle. Bush, listening as he always does, without comprehending. His moral disconnect countinues to feed our national distress…and it remains our problem to solve.
Excerpts from MSNBC’s Countdown as an RSS feed are here.
See for.
Friday, October 20th, 2006
How is Cocoa—the Mac programming language—like the Citroen C4? Well, it’s not. Forget I mentioned it. Hello from Chicago, more specifically, C4, a Mac developer’s conference that is trying its best to inherit the legacy of MacHack and a number of other legendary gatherings of programmers and programmer-like types that I haven’t attended, either.
But I did go to the Drunken Batman ‘Evening at Adler‘ last year about this time and about this locale. And so, a year later, I’ve ponied up actual money to attend this new iteration.
And this year, after Sammy and I have spent most of October on parental hospital support duty in central Michigan, I zipped over here in 3 and a half hours or so and, well, darned if I’m not surrounded by actual famous names in Macdom. Well…famous to people who care where the stuff they run comes from. I’m one floor up off of Chicago’s State street, in a conference center that appears to be above a Panera Bread, and there is a full house of remarkable people.
Take the guy behind it, Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch. A Chicagoan who apparently earns his living doing some sort of web objecty high end business custom..uh..well, actually, I have no idea what he does, but he’s up at the podium, trying to demonstrate how to make a program crash in zero lines of code. And doing so in such a way as to invoke chuckles, guffaws, and actual coder laughter.
It’s a vacation from our October for me, and if you asked me why I’m interested in the things they discuss, the languages they hold dear, and the traditions they uphold, I’d have to give you a ‘dunno.’
But I have learned that C4 stands for the Code Culture Conspiracy Community…and apparently I’m part of that collective.
Enjoy your evening.
Long day’s journey into recovery.
Monday, October 9th, 2006
Hello from Michigan, where Sammy’s dad continues to mend in the hospital after open heart surgery that is daunting even when you aren’t almost 90 years of age.
Experiencing this process from the edge (I’ve only visited the hospital once or twice; Sam has done the heavy lifting of parent-in-hospital care) I’m struck by how providing information to the patient and his/her family about what’s happening now and what’s going to happen next seems firmly rooted in the last century. It may well be that there’s a tradition of a “need to know basis” that comes out of a similarly hidebound attitude about doctors as elevated priests of knowledge.
This approach has its advantages—if you screw up or change your mind, it’s easier when you don’t have to discuss it—but it also leaves patients confused…in a situation where they’re already befuddled about basic questions (“What day is it again?”) enhanced by the cocktail of drugs and anesthetics that they’ve been asked to down.
In the Intensive Care Unit, the monitor that Nick was hooked up to had streams of data—heart rate, blood pressure, and so on—in clear, colorful, antialiased type…it was one of the nicest displays I’ve seen since Dr. McCoy’s Enterprise bedside. But that readout was located behind the patient’s head—he couldn’t see it. He could, however, turn the TV set onto CNBC and get similar cascading streams of real-time data about Wall Street’s health.
I kept thinking that since they described the process of recovering from significant surgery as a progression, a curve to follow, there ought to be a large colorful real-time screen right in front of the patient that displayed that curve and the mileposts along it, nicely formatted and overlaid. Heart rate: 78 and steady. Next nurse visit coming in 04:12:01. Dinner tonight will be cottage cheese, deal with it. Last urination: 37 minutes ago. You slept 4 hours last night. If your hemo numbers drop below 211, expect to get some whole blood. Your daughter last visited you 45 minutes ago. If all goes well, you’ll be released in 2 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes.
Your son-in-law last cut the grass at your house 2 days ago. Your wife’s stress level: 17% and rising.
And perhaps to quote one of the Enterprise-D‘s descending bedside metrics: medical insurance remaining: 21%.
It’s always nice to know where you stand—even when you’re flat on your back.
