We live in a world of illusion.
The internet and our mobile devices convince us we are in touch with each other at all times. This is not true. I can read what my 400+ friends are doing on Facebook. I can Skype with people half a world away. And email usually brings a response to a letter far faster than the US Mail ever could.
But I cannot participate in those friends lives. I cannot truly hug my former students in Korea, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, or England even if I can see their faces. And like the mail that clogs my physical mailbox every day, the vast majority of my email consists of the kind of junk mail the US Postal Service would ban. The personal notes I get are generally terse bits of a few lines–and are generally devoid of anything personal.
We also believe that we have nearly instant access to every conceivable bit of information. Many believe that whatever they find on the internet is as true as what is in the newspapers–that it has been relentlessly edited and fact-checked by people who know what they are doing. The truth is that the vast majority of so-called news on the internet has been vetted by no one and consists mainly of opinion and supposition.
Even I get caught up in these illusions sometimes–for all that I tell myself I should know better. I worked as a journalist. I have studied information theory. I know there is no way a single individual can keep up with everything. But I like to think that in certain areas I am on top of things.
On Friday, I had a conference call with some people in the development office at Dana-Farber. The Walking with Jane Dybowski Fund for NEC page on their website went live Thursday afternoon. They are not far away from launching a new NET/CS website. And I had asked them to try to figure out how much Dana-Farber had raised last year for NET/CS research–and while they had some numbers–far more than I expected–they still had some research to do.
They also told me they had discovered a group called New England Carcinoid Connection. They are a group of 100 individuals–medical professionals, patients, caregivers–who had started meeting in 2006. They even have a website.
And I had never heard of them before.
I like to think I am staying pretty up to date on all things NET related. But somehow a group of 100 people in my own backyard escaped me. I cannot tell you how dumb I feel. But the people at Dana-Farber didn’t know much either. They are having a conference call with the group on Monday to see if what Dana-Farber is doing is something NECC wants to get involved with.
I was interviewed today about why I am doing what I am doing. One of the things I said was that ignorance had killed my wife as much as the cancer had–and that I was determined to end that ignorance.
But sometimes we have so much information that the sheer quantity of it makes us ignorant.
