A book made me think about the Internet

I recently put down "The Victorian Internet," a book about the creation, early adoption, mass acceptance & demise of the telegraph. In it, Tom Standage points out how the telegraph & its effects are similar to the Internet. (Sometimes the comparisons are a stretch, but mostly they hold.)

Out of the many ideas presented, two provoked me:

The telegraph and its inventor [Morse] were praised for uniting the people of the world, promoting world peace, and revolutionizing commerce. The telegraph was said to have "widened the range of human thought"; it was credited with improving the standard of journalism and literature; it was described as "the greatest instrument of power over earth which the ages of human history have revealed."

Before and after this passage Mr. Standage points out the anticipated effects of telegraphy were overstated and overhyped: people did not unite, world peace did not come & business was still business but only faster. I wonder if the same could be said of the Internet, often hailed as revolutionary and as important as the printing press in the course of human history, and which I believed to be the case rather blindly until reading this book.

Of course the telegraph-based network differed from the Internet in one critical way: accessibility. The Internet is accessible by anyone who can read and has in front of him or her a connected computer. People who don't own a computer can get on the web at their local library. The telegaph on the other hand was not accessible like this. Additionally, one needed to be highly skilled to decipher and to send messages using the telegraph. This isn't the case for the Internet.

Which brings me to the other passage: "Thanks to the relentless pace of technological change, telegraphy was changing from a high-skill to a low-skill occupation; from a carefully learned craft to something anyone could pick up." This is because when automatic telegraphs that decipher electrical impulses into letters and numbers mechanicistically hit the scene, they became fully operable by unskilled labor.

And this reminded me of a meeting I had with a clinical informatics professor last week. He was showing me his nifty diagnostic software made for the Internet. It let the user seeing a patient answer questions that would build a history & physical report and then answer more questions to lead to a diagnosis. Which made me think that if a group of doctors are simply specialists in "diagnosis", and such a diagnostic "device" is accessible to anybody on the web, then where is the big demand for this group? Can the Internet lead to such drastical changes in medicine?