This website is undergoing some philosophical reconstruction. In the meantime, find me more active on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking to a group of PhDs and post-docs at the UBC Faculty of Medicine career day. These are the slides I used (I clarified the title in the talk itself; I didn’t come up with the eCommunications title originally, but they released the poster before I could have them change it — not a big deal by any means, but here, I’ve used “social media” to make it a little more descriptive.)

Some rough notes are messily attached to the Slideshare if you click through, and, after the session I followed up with an email saying this:

Hi everyone, I really appreciate the time you all took to come to the session on communications and social media for research today. I hope that at least some of it was useful or inspiring in some way. If you want to follow up with me with ideas or other questions, please don’t hesitate to send me an email.

I’ve posted the slides from today on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/danhooker/using-social-media-to-advance-your-research While you’re there, search for presentations relevant to your research. You never know what you might come across.

In response to the question about further training, I mentioned there are free introductions to lots of social media at Social Media University, Global (SMUG). The name is tongue in cheek, but it’s produced by the Mayo Clinic director for social media, Lee Aase, and the content is tops. http://social-media-university-global.org/curriculum/ (If you hover over the curriculum tab, you’ll see a drop-down menu with different topic options like Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc.)

Also, someone asked me about where to find a list of conferences in specific fields, which I didn’t immediately know the answer for. This site, Research Raven, looks promising: http://www.researchraven.com/ They’re based in the States, though, so they may not have as much Canadian content as we’d like them to.

Finally, I heard from one of the students over email tonight that there is some deal of concern about the time issue. We didn’t touch on that much after my talk, but recently there was a series in Scientific American called “Social Media for Scientists” that you may find helpful. Part 2 directly discusses spending time on social media, and the whole series goes to some lengths to demonstrate the value proposition of participating in social media: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/09/29/social-media-for-scientists-part-2-you-do-have-time/ I hope you find it helpful.

Good luck!

The other day my uncle and I were emailing about a recent family trip, and posting pictures online. Perhaps not knowing exactly what he was getting himself into, he asked me: “How concerned are you about matters of privacy regarding Facebook, Picasa, Twitter and others?  Your dad told me not long ago that he had stopped using Facebook because of that concern. For example, are you concerned, as I am, that my photos on Picasa will remain in the hands of Google even if your aunt closes her account? Am I being too sensitive about this?”

Since I feel this was somewhat apropos to the release of Google+, I thought I would share how I responded to him.

So, I somewhat accidentally wrote you two answers since you asked what was perhaps an unexpectedly interesting question. The first one is short. The second one might require a beverage and a place to put up your feet, but hey, it’s practically the weekend!

Short answer: yeah, you’re probably being too sensitive, but that’s OK. Share whatever you feel comfortable with. If Facebook creeps you out, don’t join. We can always email. But if you’re looking for an easy way to share family photos, you can’t beat Picasa albums — and you can always delete them later if you want.

Long answer: My feeling is well you’ll always have a copy of the photos you post — or you should — so if Facebook or Google goes out of business or crashes or whatever, you’ve got a backup. That’s just common sense and I imagine as a photographer you have quite a bit of hard drive space laying around so it’s not your concern.

Secondly, you are allowed to delete stuff , so if for whatever reason you want to delete your Google account you can. Just take down your photos before deleting your account. Facebook is worse about this, so for photos I’m a little more wary there. Google or Flickr don’t concern me as much. They are more explicit about not taking ownership of your content. Facebook actually states they CAN use your content without asking, so that’s where the concern lies. They are also quite sinister about allowing you to leave (they “helpfully” lock your profile in carbonite Han Solo style — if you ever rejoin, BAM it’s back up like you never left).

I’d imagine a site like 500px, that is tailored to photographers, would be respectful of your content. Often times you can poke around the site for more info about ownership and copyright stuff and it will be clear. Smaller companies usually try to set themselves apart by explicitly saying they’re better than evil corps like Facebook and Google.

Finally, for me, it is inevitable that my life content will be shared on the web because not only will it be more and more impractical for stuff to be on my local drive for various technological reasons (why keep stuff in one spot, when you can access from anywhere!), but also because I am just coming up in the world when that’s what’s being done. I see value in sharing stuff with family and friends and even strangers that outweighs the risks inherent in putting things out there. This is maybe because as a young person I have a desire to meet new friends and have networking to do — but it is also somewhat philosophical, in the sense that I feel there’s more to be gained (socially, mentally, maybe even spiritually) from being open than constantly stopping myself from taking advantage of this incredible opportunity  just because something could “go wrong” (whatever that means).

I think you have to start to see that value before it makes sense to pile your life’s work into a piece of software that may not survive a year from now. 500px is a good example because it’s new and its future is far from certain. Some people might be devastated by that. Me, I would shrug and start over somewhere new because the sharing is what’s important, not the tool. There’s a real possibility you would be pleased and surprised with the amount of feedback and exposure you could get in a place like that, but you have to want it.

If you read this far, pour another drink, you deserve it.

Love, Dan

Google+ seems to pride itself on making it easy to decide what group of people you want to share things with. Circles are much easier to handle that Facebook lists, and they baked the choice of what Circles you want to share certain content with into every time you hit “share.”

In a Tumblr-esque move, they also have an option to re-share things that others have posted. Via someone else, I shared a message on my profile that said “Welcome to Google+, Mark Zuckerberg” (he, or an imposter, had quietly opened an account shortly before). I thought that was a little funny, and didn’t have much else to do, so I clicked “share” and it zapped over to be shared to my circles.

Now, I didn’t give this much thought until I checked out the original source of the post, where I could no longer see it! What happened is that he posted this thought with a small circle of people, one of whom “shared” it with her larger Circle which is where I saw it and shared it.

But after you are conditioned to think that your sharing is so under control (you have painstakingly sorted your “friends” into “besties,” “weirdos” and “potential employers”) that now you have completely forgotten or never even thought to consider that if you didn’t disable the re-share option, what you’ve spoken, perhaps in confidence, has the immediate potential to escape your carefully inscribed Circle and wander out onto the wider web.

Google’s help page actually acknowledges this oddity:

Unless you disable reshares, anything you share (either publicly or with your circles) can be reshared beyond the original people you shared the content with.

No real moral here, I guess. Just keep that in mind.

This is obviously a very rough outline, but if you have any ideas of how it might be improved between now and then, let me know.

Let me start right away by saying: this presentation is not to suggest that patients cannot be involved in the promotion and sharing of high-quality health information. In fact, I believe patients, particularly those living with rare diseases, are often the ones armed with the highest quality information and the networks through which to share their stories and experience.

This presentation came out of a specific question that was posed in the brief survey that our friend and fellow health warrior Alissa sent out in advance of the Vancouver #hcsmca tweetup. The survey respondent was looking for information on how to connect, as a health professional, with various networks. Because I am a librarian and very interested in the types of information that we use to make decisions about our health, I decided to marry these two concepts in this presentation.

To sum it up: there is a lot of questionable health information out there on the Web. As we (health professionals, activated patients, and health communicators) are the ones armed with the ability to distinguish good information from questionable, I feel it is our duty to share and promote this content as much as possible through our various networks and channels on the Web.

The five examples (though there are many more) I used specifically in this presentation are:

1. @HealthyRT. The HealthyRT project is a group Twitter feed that shares “peer-reviewed” health information. In other words, all tweets are monitored and the content that is shared has been approved by one of the health professionals with access to the account. My impression is that you, too, can join this group, by emailing the moderator.
2. Health News Review. A must-read site that applies 10 quality criteria to news articles (HealthDay, USA Today, New York Times, etc.) about contentious health issues, such as screening tests and innovative treatment options. All reviewers are health professionals, and the editor in chief, Gary Schwitzer, writes a blog that summarizes the issues, and shares other content as well.
3. Grand Rounds. A blog carnival highlighting the best of medical blogging from across the web every week. A great way to share your own content, as well as find the best bloggers writing about health and medicine day-to-day.
4. #vaxfax. By far the least structured resource, vaxfax (“vaccination facts”) started out with a few people interested in sharing evidence-based information about vaccination safety. Becuase this is such a hot-button topic, I am a little unclear on how successfully this hashtag is meeting that goal. But to me, this is the perfect example of where health professionals are needed to help balance the fear-based and pseudo-scientific information that is otherwise being shared on channels like these.
5. Finally, your website. Each and every organization or individual should have some sort of online presence now (this means you). The more you can create, promote and share high-quality health information the better.

The last point I made there has to do with privacy issues, and patient-provider interaction online. I use the phrase “Connect, don’t advise” to mean that it is OK to point people to the health information that you know is best, and to build a network of other professionals, patients and interested parties. What you cannot do, under any circumstance, is attempt to treat a medical issue or divulge information about specific people and health problems.

Two things just came to my attention about the nature of online life and interaction therein.

The first was published yesterday in the New York Times, entitled The Twitter Trap:

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from . . . from . . . wait, what was I saying?

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect.

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter. Eavesdrop on a conversation as it surges through the digital crowd, and more often than not it is reductive and redundant. Following an argument among the Twits is like listening to preschoolers quarreling: You did! Did not! Did too! Did not!

Balancing this is a presentation at last week’s fab social media conference at UBC, Northern Voice. The title of the talk was “Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life.” It was given by a digital media director named Alexandra Samuel, and based on an article she wrote earlier for her Harvard Business Review blog:

Still, the fact that life online can occasionally surprise and delight us points us towards the truth: it’s not the Internet itself that leads to pathologies like cyber-bullying, spam and identity theft. Rather it’s our decision — individually and collectively — to separate the Internet from the context, norms and experience that guide human behavior. It’s our decision to engage in online interaction as if it were fundamentally different from offline conversation. It’s our decision to label the Internet as something — anything! — other than real life.

There’s no denying the differences between life online and off. In our online lives we shake off the limitations of our physical selves, perhaps even our names and consciences, too. What remains are the fundamentals: human beings, human conversations, human communities. To say that “reality” includes only offline beings, offline conversations and offline communities is to say that face-to-face matters more than human-to-human.

Who do you believe? Are your online interactions and relationships real for you? Or do you view Twitter merely as distraction? What I do know is that part of the challenge (and potential) of social media lies is shifting your online life into something more than just epehemera. It takes time, practice, and meaning, to find reality in online life.

For the upcoming Canadian Health Libraries Association 2011 conference, a group of health librarians including myself are putting together a poster that traces the career paths of five qualified health librarians who all work outside of a traditional library settings. The goal of this reflection is to explore what brought us to our current positions, how the field of health librarianship is evolving, and how library and information studies Master’s programs can better prepare their students for careers that may not take place in “a library” but still call for the information professional’s skill set of searching, synthesis, instruction, and information fluency.

Because we are each tracing our own development, we wanted a theoretical frame to guide the analysis and a way to interpret one another’s responses. Additionally, we needed to account for the fact that we are all trained as librarians, but do not currently work “in libraries.” So to underpin the interview questions that we designed, we used the Chaos Theory of Career Development, which accounts for the inevitability of attractors and chance events in one’s career decision making.

The next steps include analyzing all of our responses for thematic elements, and collating those onto a poster for dicussion. The idea of a career paths got me thinking of visualizing each respondent in a color, like the subway map above. This is just one idea of how to present this visually, and I’m hoping for some more inspiration as the process goes on.

As a teaser, I’ll include one of my responses below (though you can always ask for more). I haven’t asked the others yet, but I’m hoping some of my co-presenters will agree to share some of their responses as well.

1. Describe how you came to have your current position: How did you find out about it? How and why did you obtain or create the position? How (if at all) has it evolved over the time?

I heard through a personal connection that my current position was open, and as luck would have it my immigration documents had come through after graduation and I was able to apply. I was selected for the the position through a combination of traditional librarianship skills–information retrieval, needs assessment, research synthesis, teaching–and some unique skills that I brought by either personal interest or chance–knowledge and experience with social media being foremost among them.

My position is quite flexible, and it evolves with the project load of the office as well as accommodations for personal and professional interests. Currently I work on a lot of web strategy because that is where there is a need in both practical office knowledge translation efforts as well as in research design. But I have the sense that my responsibilities will continue to shift as my skills as a librarian are taken full advantage of by my colleagues, as funding priorities ebb and flow in eHealth, and as our existing projects continue to follow their natural life cycles.

Last week I attended an event called Pecha Kucha Night Vancouver. The idea is similar to TEDx, where a local organizer puts on a series of talks for a general audience. The twist with pecha kucha is that every presenter has 20 slides and only 20 seconds on each.

This particular night was Vancouver’s 16th pecha kucha night (pronounced correctly, I think, as peh-CHUK-cha) but my first time attending. It struck me at first as a series of what were essentially advertisements: a speaker would arrive to the stage and spend the next 6:40 talking about what they do (be it in fashion, art, design, whatever).

In and of themselves, these 7 minute product pitches would be fairly entertaining since they are from local business people doing things they love, and generally finding success. The truly great pecha kucha presentations, though, take their pitch and elevate it to a message. The one that brought down the house for me was by a designer named Carson Ting, and his talk resonated because he spoke about what we try to do when we practice social media, but in the context of making commercial art. His message was, to use his words (and pardon my French): “share your creative s***.”

Essentially he explained that as an artist, he uses social and multimedia online tools to not only produce his commercial artwork, but also to document and share the process of creating it. By sharing his creative process so that others can learn and benefit from it, his art becomes much more than just the final product.

This is such an important message in social media and healthcare. We are so often caught up in not only concerns about proprietary projects (because of funding competitions) but also concerns over privacy. Sometimes, we simply “forget” to be open, or we simply get caught up in doing things the “old way,” and we default to a mode of hiding everything until there is some “success” or “final draft” that can finally be shared with the outside world.

That way of doing things hides our true thunder. It keeps others from fully knowing what we do, how we learn and improve, and plays down the fact that we are truly passionate about and creating things that can improve other people’s lives. True success today, to my mind, is when someone is able to take what you’ve done, replicate it, and  build upon it. Not sharing the process shows that we have at the core a personal motive, rather than a lofty goal: improving the health system.

I’m so glad to have been at this event because it allowed me to see engaged people outside of health care who grasp the importance of social media, and the significance of being able to share the process of their work. I hope I can be better about this myself, and I hope the people I work with in the future will be, too.

Twitter doesn’t break news for me often in the sense that hours before an event is reported I know about it. It is my central channel for news, though, so what I like about social media is its ability to provide me with things that are easy to miss through all the pundit and questionable-expert-commentator babble.

RT @xenijardin CNN reporting fact that tipped off ops: mansion valued at over $1M but "had no phone or Internet access"

May 1, 2011 10:14 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BoraZ

Bora Zivkovic

Additionally, @whitehouse was live-tweeting Obama’s speech, which is good because I was able to revisit the soundbites I didn’t record while watching. Like this one:

Obama: “the US is not – and never will be – at war with Islam…Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims”

May 1, 2011 8:40 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@whitehouse

The White House

Other social media are important in the evolution of the news cycle, beyond Facebook and Twitter. Don’t forget to check out the creation cycle of our modern encyclopedia, too:

love watching Wikipedia articles evolve at times like this http://is.gd/HGSBji #binladen

May 1, 2011 8:33 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@courosa

Alec Couros

Outside of the actual breaking news, tonight gave an important insight into why it is important to be authentic on social media. If you schedule your tweets in advance and news breaks, well, you might seem a bit out of place!

Times like these make auto-tweets really silly!

May 1, 2011 8:01 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@stales

Alicia C. Staley

It’s strange to have been out of the States for major political events in the past three years. I don’t miss the gross celebratory enthusiasm that accompanies military success; however, that is balanced by the recognized need for Obama and his nation to get a “win” under their belts.

Couldn't say it better RT @timbray: The world is better without OBL but the celebration outside the White House nauseates me.

May 1, 2011 8:57 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@danhooker

Daniel Hooker

Impromptu celebrations show me just how much we've needed a reason to. We've not celebrated as a nation in too long.

May 1, 2011 9:30 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@simonslee

Simon S. Lee

My Twitter stream was also filled with jokes. Jokes about TSA security (“does this mean I can take X on a plane now?”), jokes about Donald Trump. But, my two favorites I’ll share here were unique (at least in my stream).

sudo rm -rf /bin/laden

May 1, 2011 7:57 pm via Tweetbot for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@drance

Matt Drance

I'm just glad it wasn't the "there's an asteroid we can't stop" speech.

May 1, 2011 8:51 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@thesulk

Alec Sulkin

Finally, I’ll leave you with a thought from outside the USA, and looking ahead to tomorrow’s big night in Canada: the federal election. This is shaping up to be quite a week. Goodnight, Twitter. Thanks for the memories.

Excited to see Canada's pro-Net-Neutrality, pro-fair-copyright, anti-surveillance NDP is in the running for tomorrow election!

May 1, 2011 10:15 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@doctorow

Cory Doctorow