Status update: Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, marries Dr Priscilla Chan. Their marriage represents the ongoing integration of social media and medicine—for better or worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.
Social media is the broad spectrum of online communication tools providing channels for connecting people. Social media enables real-time sharing of text, audio, photos, and videos to both active and passive users. This evolving online community, known as Web 2.0, is a second generation of Internet. Web 2.0 is defined by interactive applications that promote user-generated and user-controlled content. Social media has emerged as part of the construct of Web 2.0.
Consider these social media facts: Facebook has over 900 million active users. Twitter users are uploading 340 million tweets daily. This flood of user information is being catalogued by increasingly sophisticated methods such as the hashtag (“#” symbol), categorizing trending topics and posts. The proliferation of social media is promoting a change in the way people use the Internet from purely recreational to encompass professional and clinical usages. Incorporation of social media and its overarching infrastructure of Web 2.0 into health care is increasing and generating discussions in the medical community.
Read more: http://www.bcmj.org/mds-be/physician-tweet-thyself-guide-integrating-social-media-medical-practice