* Selling our Souls to False God of Relentless Efficiency

Letters to the Editor

The Valley News

Word count: 349

Editor:

A recent New Yorker article entitled “Big Med” (think “Big Brother”) describes the coming-world of McDonalds-like hospital chains, and reports a current experiment in which regional off-site control centers, staffed by doctors and nurses, monitor Intensive Care Units in  dozens of hospitals at a time by video camera and computer analysis, often catching errors like an incorrectly inserted breathing tube, or heart medicine whose level of potassium will fatally damage the lungs of  a patient with emphysema.

Virtual surveillance might also work well in schools.

An off-campus control center staffed by teachers and administrators could monitor dozens of schools at a time, alerting on-site administrators to possible drug-deals in hallways, sexual harassment at lockers, bullying in gym, etc.

Think of the benefits if a TV monitor in the wall  alerts the teacher that “Johnny  is text-messaging ; “Sarah threw a spit-ball ” and “the entire class is making faces when teacher turns his/her back to fiddle with the smart-board.”

Imagine what such a universal, unblinking, virtual set-of-eyes will do for the development of our children! They will surrender entirely by first grade any shred of privacy which might have managed to survive the facebook/twitter tsunami, and enter a world in which they expect to be watched every second. We'll call it Don't Fail, Surveil, (DFS).

This is certainly the wholesome life we want for American children as their characters are molded in what used to be called schools, but will soon be called “Information Delivery Systems.”

And it is certainly the hyper-efficient workplace we seek for our doctors and nurses, who  will surrender their  autonomy to the distant digital double-checking of control  centers, and come to think of themselves not as professionals whose judgment is often crucial to life and death, but as understaffed medical practitioners whose number can be trimmed even further as wall-mounted cameras and computers scan hospital crisis centers for every possible mistake.

Let’s call it Skype and Scalpel (S&S), like Bed and Breakfast, or Fish and Chips.

It is certainly worth sacrificing the dignity of professionalism, the privacy of individual freedom, and the joy of childhood to achieve such wonderful efficiency, don’tcha think?  

Paul D. Keane