The 2006 meeting of the American College of Rheumatology was the biggest in history and most certainly the best. The clinical and basic research was spectacular. The attendance topped 12,000 people. Importantly, attendees journeyed from all over the world to Washington, D.C., to speak and to learn. In its spirit and variety, this conclave attested to the globalization of rheumatology and its vibrancy on every continent.
Adding to the excitement of the meeting was the striking new Washington Convention Center. The building is beautiful—if not cavernous—and sits at the center of an area that had once been one of the most rundown and dangerous places in the district. At a museum I visited, a pleasant and solicitous docent politely described the area as having been “seedy.” Economic growth and visionary civic leadership have transformed a site of desolation and decay to a modern nexus of commerce and culture.
While I am still high from TR’s debut, Volume 1, Issue 1 of any publication elicits a strange mix of feelings. It is a culmination of planning and arduous effort enveloped in anxiety and trepidation. As the magazine rolls off the presses and you grasp it in your hands, pride, delight, and relief surge simultaneously. That first issue is a milestone and a cause of celebration but, as the bubbles of champagne stream joyously to the top of the glass, reality hits home as the deadline for the next issue looms and two articles are already late.
In any artistic endeavor, like editing a magazine, there is a bit of a Sisyphean travail. The difference is that, with art, pushing the stone to the top of the mountain is as exhilarating as it is exhausting and, once at the summit, the view is great. Until the stone plunges back to the bottom of the slope, you can savor the smart writing and brilliant color shining on every glossy page.
Another difference between the work of an editor and Sisyphus is that the editor should not be alone on the ascent and that is the main point that I wish to make in this column. TR is a publication both for and by the membership of the ACR. It will succeed best as a team effort. TR needs ideas for articles that will stir interest because they engage the heart and soul of today’s rheumatology practice.
TR is the voice of the members of ACR and ARHP and, as described by Peggy Crow in her thoughtful and eloquent presidential speech, an essential venue for communication for our organization. Given the diversity of the ACR and its division, the ARHP, there will be a multitude of voices. I urge everyone to contribute your ideas and join what should be an entertaining and absorbing conversation about the state of rheumatology as well as its future.
Over-Wired Lives
While I was in Washington, I was struck by both the power and paradoxes of modern communication. Like many of my colleagues, each morning I strapped onto my belt my Blackberry and cell phone, making sure that my cell phone was on the vibrate mode. (To the person whose cell phone blasted “Moonlit Haze” during a session in Ballroom B/C, please learn to use the controls of your miraculous little gizmo. I am no techie but I have mastered the buttons. If I can do it, so can you.)
So armed electronically, I was ready to receive calls and missives from the deep reaches of cyberspace. In the midst of a crowded lecture room bathed in the radiant glow of PowerPoint, the buzz from one of these electronic contraptions is actually kind of nice. There is excitement as the email is opened and I look expectantly at the little screen for some piece of good news, like a paper accepted or an invitation to a chic new bistro.
Alas, the content of most of the 240 emails I received in Washington was trivial. As I learn with grim regularity, Olga in Russia is still looking for a man to rescue her from the loneliness of the frozen steppes and a host of companies want me to buy “cheap men’s pills!!!” I am suspicious about such advertisements, but if someone was offering me a product to enhance my grant funding instead of my anatomy, I might be tempted to log on and lay out the big bucks.
While I can marvel at all the whiz-bang of modern electronic communication, I am also somewhat saddened. As instant messaging has boomed, the time for conversation has dwindled. At the ACR meeting, a spontaneous meeting with a colleague or old friend is a thing of the past. In a building that is a mile long and big enough to contain the Rose Bowl, bumping into friends has become a statistical rarity. When you do see someone you want to greet, he or she is likely to be running between sessions, frantically searching for Room 145, which is nestled in the outer reaches of a building across the street and down a long and twisty corridor.
As the size of ACR meeting has exploded, efforts at contact need planning and the orchestration of a staccato of email strings. “Let’s meet.” “How about 12:30?” “1 is better.” “Where?” “Renaissance lobby.” “See you.”
The Renaissance Lobby, however, is a dark and gloomy place and many a rendezvous there could be completed only with the coda of a cell phone conversation. “It’s 1:15.” “Where are you?” “In the lobby. I’ve been waiting for you.” “I can’t see you.” “I’m near the front desk. Turn around.” “Oh, I see you. You’re behind a plant.”
Reconnect the Map
Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling book entitled The World Is Flat, elevated the title into a mantra for our modern era of electronic communication. In this conceptualization, the flat world, linked intimately and immediately by myriad fiber optic networks, reorganizes life and work to promote unprecedented communication and cooperation that transcend national boundaries. To Friedman, the flat world is a good world.
I am as dependent on the flat world as anybody else is, but I miss the round world. At the ACR meeting, I missed seeing many of my friends. I exchanged far too few handshakes, kisses, and hugs, and my desire to finish a conversation with a close friend and say a proper farewell went astray as I became lost in the overwhelming expanse of the convention center.
While Friedman uses flat to signify closeness and proximity, the word has other much less positive meanings. Among its slew of definitions in Webster’s dictionary, flat can mean dull, lifeless, and insipid. Friedman doesn’t emphasize that danger of a flat world but it is omnipresent and lurking.
As a vehicle for communication, TR is old fashioned. It is a product of a bumpier and more variegated world and it will overflow with images, feelings, and personality. To enliven its pages and put a picture in the beautiful frame that Wiley has fashioned, TR needs you. It needs your ideas, opinions, advice, recollections, remembrances, questions, answers, cogitations, proclamations, and yes, even your shrieks and your rants.
Our lives are too flat.
Write for TR.
Keep the world round.
Dr. Pisetsky is physician editor of The Rheumatologist and professor of medicine and immunology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
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