People use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites as channels for self-expression. But whether updating or uploading, people are telling their social stories with only two tools: text and images.
But what if social media wasn’t confined to words and pictures, but instead, allowed users to uploaded graphs or tables? In other words, could data, pure data, become a token in our social currency?
That’s the thought contributed during a panel session at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco by Gary Wolf, contributing editor at Wired, and an organizer of Quantified Self, a community whose users meticulously track certain aspects of their lives, some down to infinitesimal levels, such as how they spend every minute of the day (no joke).
Wolf’s comment followed a presentation by Stead Burwell, the CEO of Alliance Health Networks, who demoed Diabetic Connect an information and community site for patients battling diabetes. Alliance spent a great deal of time (read: money) on creating user profiles that would allow visitors of the site to connect with their peers, patients who share similar experiences. But that connection, they found, was key. As Burwell said in his presentation, users not only like to receive badges and virtual rewards, they like to hand them out as well.
Noting how willingly people update their status on social media sites like Facebook, sometimes with unrestrained detail, Burwell wondered how to bottle this social energy to get patients to openly share personal health data.
In my opinion, the limitations aren’t technical. After all there is nothing preventing users on Facebook from uploading a JPEG charting the number of miles they ran in a given month. Sure, social media sites could make tools available to users to facilitate the process, but that’s the easy part – there are already a number of product-related sites, such as Nike+, that do just this. The shift that Wolf describes, and that Burwell hopes for, is more philosophical, a change in the type of information we feel comfortable sharing with our friends, families, and colleagues.
So here’s my request: If you track any aspect of your life, whether your weekly running mileage, calories consumed by food, weight fluctuations, or daily blood glucose readings, share your data with your social network. Let’s see what happens.
Photo via Flickr / Sean MacEntee
Comments
To add a comment to the original post, click here.
You must be signed in to post a comment.
Sign in nowTo paraphrase the Blues Brothers, “If raw milk cheese kills me, I don’t mind dyin’…”
Haggie: Ha – maybe you have a point! I hope you’ll tune it to find out what I uncover.
[...] Read post 1 here: So long, raw milk cheese [...]
Perhaps they should irradiate the cheese or use another sterilization method that does not change the taste. Irradiation is so underused!
In my book, people should be free to buy whatever they want so long as their is a disclaimer and it is well above the market price.
Irradiation isn’t the answer. Raw dairy products is more complex issue than taste. For some people it is taste, for others it’s about health. When you irradiate something it doesn’t differentiate between harmful and helpful bacteria. It might sound gross in this day in age of over-sanitizing everything we can, but there are healthy helpful bacteria that are useful to our bodies and if we irradiate our food we’re altering it nutritionally. Same goes for pasteurization. Some people argue that cooking does too (though I think there are things that are meant to be cooked … though not overcooked or burnt.)
Basically I want to be able to continue to choose to eat what I want how I want it. I would NOT buy raw milk from a farmer I didn’t trust. Raw milk cheese on the other hand is a little less likely to be a problem than plain raw milk. No chemical additives, no flash heat treatments, no irradiation, no genetically altered seeds.
I want to retain that choice of what food I put in my body without having to buy a farm out in Timbuktu to grow it all myself. Where does it end?
And the reason I’m a raw milk advocate is that it has helped me with my allergies when traditional drugs and shots did nothing. I’m not saying it was a cure all, just saying it’s one of several things I started doing and when I remove it my allergies do start coming back.
I was excited to see the Wired piece too, although I was would have liked some mention of feedback as part of larger more complete social systems. It seemed to focus on how on individual can minimize risk; i.e. negative feedback. What about positive feed back (hypcercycles or catalytic cycles)? Scientists have talked about feedback loops’ role in evolution, and I think that feedback loops are incredibly important for major social change. I wrote a blog on it:
http://thefeedbackloop.org/2011/06/22/feedback-loops-stir-shit-up/
Lovely reflection on climate and infectious disease. I will share this with the JIDC FB users.
I find this to be a fascinating relationship.
As I was doing some research a couple of weeks ago I became aware of this paper
published in the JIDC. Not trying to plug the journal, but I highly recommend this article reviewing Cholera in the marine environment. Entitled: Influence of environmental factors
on the presence of Vibrio cholerae in the marine environment: a climate link
http://www.jidc.org/index.php/journal/article/view/19734600/207
Before reading this paper I had not thought about this environmental relationship deeply. Of course Cholera would be connected to the marine environment (mainly I had thought of sewage), but I had not thought about the connection with weather patterns.
Thanks,
Alyson
Thanks, Alyson. I thought people might like this PNAS study. For all the talk on climate change, I’m surprised that there isn’t more effort directed to understanding how this could impact public health and infectious disease. Thanks for sharing the links.
Does not storms play an important role in the dissemination of Infectious diseases agents from one continent to other or to the neighboring countries?
Hi there. Thanks again. Everyone really liked your write-up. It was shared many times by JIDC members.
[...] a podcast of the introduction to Goetz’s book The Decision Tree: Navigating the Future of [...]
[...] a podcast of the introduction to Goetz’s book The Decision Tree: Navigating the Future of [...]
Well that’s an interesting story. I can only imagine the possibilities of these “miracle berries” and what kinds of recipes would be created.