Fred Fortin, World Health Care Blog, June 5, 2008
Mark C. Taylor’s intriguing book, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, is one of those brilliant boiling pot examinations of social theories and philosophy which forces one to think and re-think where we are heading in this new flat world. Of course, when confronted with such intellectual challenges, my initial thoughts are always to line up the questions good authors generate and put them to the test in health care — my personal anchor to all things real and important.
The processes of globalization and proliferation of information technology, according to Taylor, is “creating a new network culture whose complex logic and dynamics we are only beginning to understand.”
Taylor is studying that site between chaos and catastrophe, where boundaries are shifting, power relationships are becoming quite shaky, but order has not been overthrown - at least not just yet. And in theory it is never quite eliminated because “separation is always incomplete, for we remain entangled with that from which we struggle to escape” as Taylor puts it.
So a question that this theoretical assault raises for health care could be this: Will there be a “moment of complexity” where the ‘grid’ that structures health care — the systems, hierarchies, roles, science, authority and the rest of it — gets, well . . . torqued. As he describes,
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