in Morality as Social Medicine I wrote some initial notes on a concept that I have been working on for a while which we could call __digital medicine__. I heard this term on a recent podcast with Sam Harris and Adam Gazzaley, and it encouraged me to respond.
https://www.listennotes.com/e/p/5d2abd3d1cdc41f5bae5d7070c9b2dfb/ The Price of Distraction - on Making Sense with Sam Harris
I also remember coming across the concept of digital health in the context of EU legislation which required mobile applications in the area of health care to be licensed as medicine. This seemed accepted and sensible to the health startups affected by these provisions.
# More
My interest here is to take the concept the other way round. Yes there can be important health effects of digital artefacts, culture and social beliefs, but it is perhaps more interesting to apply the medical model to those artefacts in a deeper and more general way.
Here we begin to look at The Health of Society as something that includes physical health - but also much more. It asks what it takes to thrive. It applies a different model of thought to the problem space.
Stories and philosophies, especially when embedded in a powerful delivery mechanism like a mobile phone can most definitely have positive or negative heath effects, but perhaps more importantly the idea that ideas are active social agents in an ecosystem that has real ramifications lends us to the even more powerful notion that applying a health like model to culture might make a lot of sense.
This leads us to ask some important questions: - Who Protects us from the Cliff - The health of Life-like patterns - Social medicine
We don not attempt to answer them here, or indeed any time soon. But we do seek to explore them through pilots in municipalities - that is with real people who care.