Boston Bombings and Visual Culture

FBI Appeals for Videos.

Wall Street Journal Headline, April 16, 2013

A Visual Culture Is Taking Over the World.

John Naisbitt,  Chapter in his Book,  Mindset!, 2006

The FBIs is asking the public for private videos of the Boston blasts that killed three and injured 140.  People in the U.S. and the world are glued to  their TVs to watch news of the Boston Marathon tragedy.   You Tube is already highlighting videos of the Boston explosions.  Handheld  IPods  and smart phones with visual capacities are rapidly replacing laptops and desktop computers and supplementing news reports to communicate the news from Boston.  Skype traffic is heavy with reports from Boston. Authorities are examining surveillance cameras.  Domestic drones with mounted cameries are in the works.

All of this is evidence that the visual culture is taking over the world,  connecting mankind immediately to news events,  and supplanting print as the principle means of communicating.

The Visual and Healthcare Innovation

The same will soon be true of health care innovation as well.

Telemedicine with visual connections will supplement and sometimes replace physical visits and email communications; Skype-like visits with the doctor will become routine;  physical examination by audiovisual devices will become the norm; dermatologists will check for visual  evidence of melanoma and other suspicious skin lesions;    doctors will follow-up patient visits with visual visits; home-bound patients will communicate and report complications with doctors and nurses audio visually; visual narratives will overwhelm written narratives.

Not Either/Or

In the world of healthcare innovation, it will not be not be an all of nothing world.   As Naisbitt comments in his book,

“While many things change, most things remain constant. It is not an either/or world.  Both word and image will remain. But in many cases the written word will be replaced with  visual representation and literary narrative displaced by illustration. Within the changing communication mix of word and visual, the visual will dominate.  The challenge is to ascertain the optimum mix of word and visual in every field of endeavor.”

What Naisbitt forgot to mention in this paragraph was the world of data and artificial intelligence.   What we shall also have is the World of Watson, the IBM computer that sorts through the world of data to seek the smart solution to health care problems.

In this fast-moving world of immediacy,  people no longer will have the patience to wait for solutions to evolve or be reported  by traditional means.

Tweet:  Clues to Boston Marathon bombings are being sought through hand-held videos and visual images.