brown2020

This presentation accompanied a talk I gave recently to a group of health care executives at an ABL Roundtable event in San Francisco. I was asked to discuss the meaning, importance and potential application of social media in health care.

Social media is often defined as “people having a conversation online.” In contrast to mass media produced by a few, social media is generated by grass roots efforts of millions of people. It has become the largest and most interesting use of the web.

Despite the fact that health care is one of the most information intensive fields, the health care industry notoriously lags behind every other industry in its adaptation of information technology. To get our initial bearings, we decided to kick off the discussion by asking the audience to describe their own personal use of social media.

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My Social Graph on Facebook

The image above was generated by the Nexus application on Facebook. It is a visualization of my social graph: The interconnections between the people I know on Facebook. Social graphs look a lot like how we visualize neural processing in the brain. The image that follows is just such a neural processing map from Brainmaps.org.

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I just finished watching Barbara Walter’s hour long special, Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2008, and I thought I would share my notes. I am typing notes furiously while I watch, so this might look a little rough when I read it in the morning. Here are my notes:

10: Will Smith. The biggest star of the box office of the past decade, Will’s movies grossed over $5 billion total and well over $100 million each for his last 8 movies: Men in Black II, Bad Boys II, I Robot, Shark Tale, Hitch, The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend, and Hancock. What is the secret to his success? Will cares about people, and because he cares so much, all he wants to do is to create something special, something that that makes people feel good. The values that permeate Will Smith’s life and work started at home, where he acquired both a desire to do good and strong sense of discipline. He does not tolerate anything less than 100% from himself. Barack Obama told him that if ever there would be a movie about Barack, he would want Will Smith to play him. Will admitted to saying that he could be president himself if he chose to, but added the caveat to Barbara Walters that he would never, ever choose to. Making movies and making people feel good is way too much fun.

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Social Media is a Conversation: Visualization of Interactions on Facebook

In The Lord of the Rings, a palantír stone was like a crystal ball. When you looked into the stone, you could see what was happening near other palantíri around the world. If you could learn to manipulate the stones, you could gain great power by using the stones not only to see the physical world, but also to peer into the history, the thoughts, and the intentions of other people around the world.

Palantír is an apt name for a new project from Facebook that might allow us for the first time to glimpse the world from Facebook’s point of view. Palantír is a visualization of the data flowing through and collected by Facebook: Conversations, comments, photos, friend requests, pokes, status updates, and more.

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Biochemist Gregory Petsko gave a talk at TED forecasting how an aging population will lead to an epidemic of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. As advancing science cures or reduces the mortality of other diseases, the last to go is the brain. More people than ever are living long enough to face cognitive decline. Is that really such bad news?

As the focus of medicine shifts to the brain, we will see new advances and discoveries in brain science. We have already learned that the brain is plastic and can continue to grow and develop even into old age—if we keep challenging ourselves to learn new things. Petsko ends his talk with what we can do about neurological disease: “use it or lose it.” An entire industry of brain fitness and brain training is emerging because baby boomers don’t want to lose their minds.

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Every song ever written started with a first experimental musical note of the composer. In the same way, every essay, every letter, every book, every blog post, started with that first mental note of the author. Most of the time, our ideas and experiences float away and we forget them. Sometimes, we jot a thought down, remember it, and it leads to new experiences. Sometimes an idea, an experience, a name and phone number, or a note-to-self remembered rather than forgotten, makes the difference in the direction of our lives.

Taking notes can translate a fleeting conception in our brain into action, and that action usually involves sharing our experience or idea with someone else. As we carry more and more powerful technology around with us every moment of the day, might it be possible that we can start to translate more of our otherwise forgotten notes-to-self and fleeting experiences into shared experiences? Into the start of conversations that make our lives richer?

In 1995, Bill Gates concluded his book The Road Ahead with a prescient but disquieting idea: Carrying around mobile technology connected to networks would lead to the fully “documented life”:

“Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as your body temperature, your blood pressure, the barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings.… It will be able to track your interactions with the network—all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, the people you call or who call you.”

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