Chapter 1: Transforming Democracy – An Overview
The new telecommunications and computer technology is changing the traditional relationship between members of the public – at least those with access to personal computers – and authority figures of all kinds. It is arming the former with information once unavailable to the public at large, and putting them in a better position to ask questions, challenge experts, and participate in the decision making – not unlike the enormous changes wrought by the invention of the printing press centuries earlier … Doctors, like government officials, are not gods. The more patients and their families know, the more informed and intelligent their own judgments can be.