Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
#FF @JanetLSameh @CommanderCory @stefanoBossi @ncscadsurvivor @healthblawg @CSHHC @HealthJusticeCT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/28/2011 - 20:50This week, for Follow Friday, I'm doing shout outs to people who have recently mentioned me. Starting off the list is @JanetLSameh, who describers herself as "Passionate about using all forms of communication technologies for better health outcomes". She tweeted, "TY 4 great convos'. My regular readers will not be surprised that I would get into great conversations with @JanetLSameh.
Next on my list is @CommanderCory. His profile says, his "passions include poker, music, movies and MMA". Well, that doesn't match all that closely to my passions, and most of his tweets have been about Foursquare and Empire Avenue. However, one of them was a recommendation that people invest in me on Empire Avenue, so I'll add him to the list.
Another friend from Empire Avenue is @stefanoBossi. He is an artist, graphic & web designer, and photographer who had a similar post about investing in me.
The fourth person on my list is @ncscadsurvivor. She has a follow friday tweet about people who were at #MayoRagan and #mccsm. She was on a panel about Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection, something I had never heard of until I went to #MayoRagan. One of the best phrases from the conference was from the panel she was on, "patient initiated research". It is a great idea I hope to see spread.
Another person on @nscadsurviror's tweet was @healthblawg. He retweeted it, thanking her. He was also at #MayoRagan and is well worth following.
Back in Connecticut, @CSHHC mentioned me in a Follow Friday tweet, particularly in terms of the upcoming #hcsmct breakfast tweet up. I work for a different community health center, and as far as I know, I've not met the person how tweets for @CSHHC, but I look forward to meeting them at the tweet up.
Next on the list is @HealthJusticeCT who is really pulling together this #hcsmct Tweetup. We've met to talk about health care social media in Connecticut. I look forward to working together with her on a lot more events as we go forward.
So, that's my Follow Friday list for this week.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/26/2011 - 19:02
#ff #MayoRagan #mccsm #hcsm
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 10/21/2011 - 20:14@SeattleMamaDoc @ePatientDave @EndoGoddss @drmikesevilla @MeredithGould @LeeAase @westr @RAWarrior @jsperber @jamiesundsbak
Friday Evening. I’m home from the Third Annual Social Media Summit at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. By my calculations, I tweeted about 500 times during the week and picked up about 100 new followers. I am exhausted, but the experience won’t be complete until I do a shout-out to various people I saw at the summit.
Starting off the list is @SeattleMamaDoc. She’s a pediatrician from Seattle who is big on social media. People have always told me about her. I’ve looked at her tweets and her blog, and they’re good so I was looking forward to hearing her speak. However, her speaking far surpassed anything I’ve read by her. She was incredible, talking about the moral obligation physicians and other experts had to be on social media to counter celebrity driven misinformation. To help with this she called on medical journals to make embargoed material available to doctors so they could speak intelligently about new reports when they hit the mainstream media. She received a well deserved standing ovation.
One of the people who helped instigate the standing ovation via Twitter was @ePatientDave. He spoke the next day, and was also great. He started off by talking about when he was diagnosed with cancer. When someone is dying, he said, try and keep them off the internet. He spoke about his search for information and how it empowered his battle against cancer.
Some doctors I know seem to dislike it when a patient comes in, having studied their condition and with lots of opinions. It challenges the myth of the all knowing superior being called a doctor. Yet with 6000 medical journal articles a day being published, doctors cannot stay on top of all the medical advances, let alone the lethal lag between when research starts and when something is published in a medical journal.
I remember years ago hearing the saying, “A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality”. As I think of @ePatientDave’s reaction to @SeattleMamaDoc, the saying comes back in a new form. A doctor, committed to finding the best for her patient, like @SeattleMamaDoc, is not threatened by an empowered patient. Indeed cooperation between empowered patients and committed doctors are exactly what is needed confront the health issues we face today. It makes sense that @ePatientDave led the standing ovation for @SeattleMamaDoc
Two other doctors particularly jumped out at me as examples doctors that truly understand how to use social media the way @SeattleMamaDoc described. @EndoGoddess is a pediatric endocrinologist who is an incredible and compassionate mix between geek, doctor, and communicator. She was another star of the summit. @drmikesevilla didn’t have as much of a chance to shine in the spotlight, but I had several chances to interact with him, from our first Foursquare enabled meeting in Starbucks, to exchanging tweets back and forth throughout the summit.
I am glad to add @drmikesevilla to the list of other luminaries in health care social media that I’ve had the opportunity to meet, several of whom were at the sumit. These included @MeredithGould, @LeeAase, @westr, and @RAWarrior. I had met each of them at a previous #MayoRagan event at the Mayo Clinic’s Jacksonville, FL campus.
Added to this list, I want to include @jsperber and @jamiesundsbak, two people that I’ve met online via the Social Media Health Network and was very pleased to finally get a chance to meet face to face.
Ah yes, the power of writing. I was pretty tired when I sat down to write, but the words came into a much longer blog post that I expected, and even with that, there are plenty of people I would have liked to have mentioned. Perhaps I’ll write more about the conference and the people there soon.
Not Quite Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/20/2011 - 07:29Okay. It is Thursday morning. I am in Rochester, MN and should be packing, heading off to the final day of meetings, and then hopping on a plane home.
I have much more to write, but not a lot of time or energy right now, so I hope to provide a little more info later.
Until then, I'm going to post a video that a co-worker took of me, and others, at the Social Media Health Network dinner last night.
#MayoRagan - Fighting the Powerlessness of the Virtual
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 10/19/2011 - 08:36After a busy day, and a pleasant dinner, I headed back to my room to relax. I looked at the pile of books next to my bed for a little light reading. I had been reading Michel Foucault's "The Archaeology of Knowledge", which has been though provoking, but I had had enough thoughts provoked during the day, so I went for something a little lighter, Jean Baudrillard's "Screened Out". It seemed somehow appropriate.
I scanned through the different articles in the collection. "AIDS Virulence or Prophylaxis?", "We are all Transexuals Now", "No Pity for Sarajevo", "Otherness Surgery". Several of them would probably be a great night cap to a great day. I settle on "The Powerlessness of the Virtual".
It was about when some students held a demonstration which delayed a high speed TGV train in France for ten minutes.
All they will wrest from the transparency of the rich is this ten minutes of immobility, this ten-minute freezing of the TV spectacle of which they are the victims.
I paused to wonder what Baudrillard would have thought of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. He goes on to say
A scaled-down version of the clash between the real and the virtual and its fantastic consequences at the planetary level: the dissociation between a very high frequency virtual space and a zero-frequency real space.
This lead me to think about Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig, trying to make sense of his own life, sets out on a motorcycle, with his son riding along, to rediscover some of his past and his quest for quality. He choses to ride a motorcycle on the backroads to be more in touch with what is going on around him, instead of viewing the interstate out the windows of a sealed up car, not much different than watching a long television documentary about the land zipping by.
Okay, this is a long introduction to my reactions to Tuesday's sessions at the Third Annual Health Care Social Media Summit at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. The final keynote of the day was @SeattleMamaDoc. She is as powerful and passionate a speaker at a conference as she is online and she received a standing ovation.
As more and more of our communication takes place online, takes place in the virtual realm, we have to worry about whether we are riding an information superhighway with Baudrillard similar to the drivers on the interstate that Pirsig spoke about.
@SeattleMamaDoc embodied something closer to riding the backroads of the internet on a bicycle (with a properly fitted helmet!), closer to the quest for quality that Pirsig writes about.
We cannot afford to let science online be dominated by celebrities that don't really know the topic. We need scientists, researchers, and experts to find their voice online, and find it as a voice that is meaningful and heard, and not just a ten minute delay of a high speed train.
How do we do this? It is similar to Pirsig's trip; joining in conversations about quality; storytelling.
@SeattleMamaDoc was not the only compelling speaker on Tuesday. There was a great panel about patients with spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) and how they had come together online to inspired medical research. One of the panelists used the phrase, "Patient Initiated Research". I thought that captured very nicely the power of the patients, the researchers, their connections online, and hope for new areas of medical research. I tweeted that as a great new potential buzz phrase, which ended up being retweeted by many.
"Patient Initiated Research", its a great idea whose time is overdue, and is also an antidote to the powerlessness of the virtual.
Yet the virtual continues to evolve, and with that, I should do a shout out to one of the other presentations that I thought was incredible. I tweeted that @EndoGoddess managed to fit about three hours of information into a one hour time slot. I don't have the time or energy, right now, to hit even a small subset of the points she did. Suffice it to say that she is doing some very interesting work with texting and apps to improve health outcomes, and when you get right down to it, the real power of this conference, no offense to people focusing on marketing or ROI, is improved health outcomes.
The virtual has changed dramatically since Baudrillard wrote his article, and perhaps with a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sitting next to a health blogger's computer, the virtual can become a bit more powerful, especially for those running with ideas picked up at the summit this week.
