Keith Hart begins his thought-provoking book The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (Profile Books, London, 2000) with the statement: “Ours is an age of money. Half the world worships money and the other half thinks of it as the root of all evil. In either case, money makes the world go round. If […]
communication
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Cyber warfare
In The Information Bomb (Verso, 2005, p. 62), Paul Virilio says the following: “ ‘He who knows everything fears nothing,’ claimed Joseph Paul Goebbels not so long ago. From now on, with the putting into orbit of a new kind of panoptical control, he who sees everything – or almost everything – will have nothing […]
Posted inGeneral, Health
Pins and needles – a lesson on communication
A welcome break from medical politics – I wrote this a long time ago … it still applies just as much now as it did then. All a doctor’s knowledge, skill, patience and dedication are valueless without intuition. When all else lets us down, all the tests and special investigations, it is often the small […]
Posted inGeneral
The discourses directing our actions
During a discussion at a staff seminar today one of the participants, who teaches public administration, was explaining to the rest of us that in his research on, broadly speaking, the communication between government officials (including ministers) and ordinary citizens comprising various constituencies, he constantly comes across communicational gaps — between the documents released by […]
Posted inGeneral
In praise of animals – our fellow creatures
Animals – and not just pets, all kinds of animals – do not enjoy the care and acknowledgement of being our veritable brothers and sisters, as living beings, that they should by right receive. This much is beyond debate. The obscene practice of killing rhino for the supposedly medicinal and/or aphrodisiac properties of their horns, […]
Posted inGeneral
May the e-force be with us all
The first time I really discovered the sheer, raw power of instant electronic communication over the internet was a kamikaze affair. A friend was being treated very unfairly, I thought, by an organisation we both had dealings with. So I decided that enough was enough; wrote a heavy-duty email about what I thought of the […]