Matt Morgan: The sticky floor test—why I’m returning to face-to-face communication

“The medium is the message,” wrote the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, long before medicine migrated to inboxes and instant messages. What he meant was that how we communicate will shape what we’re saying. In healthcare, that matters more than we like to admit. This is because the more important the message, or the more confusing the problem, or the more urgent the decision, the less it belongs only on a screen. When the stakes rise, fingers on keyboards should give way to feet on hospital floors.Last year I made a small promise to myself to return to live communication. Not a rejection of technology but rather a refusal to confuse the convenience of the message with the meaning. It began with a concert trip to see Counting Crows, a soundtrack to my younger years. The floor was sticky, the beer overpriced, my view intermittently blocked by a boomer expressing himself…