title: Sociotechnical challenges and progress in using social media for health.
abstract: Social media tools that connect patients, caregivers, and health providers offer great potential for helping people access health advice, receive and give social support, manage or cope with chronic conditions, and make day-to-day health decisions. These systems have seen widespread adoption, but often fail to support the goals as fully as designers and users would like. Through Ackerman's lens of the "sociotechnical gap" and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) as a science of the artificial, we review contemporary sociotechnical challenges and progress for using social media to support health. These challenges include a tension between privacy and sharing, policy information credibility, accessibility, and tailoring in social spaces. Those studying, building, deploying, and using social media systems to further health goals will benefit from approaching this work by borrowing from Ackerman's framing of CSCW. In particular, this requires acknowledgment that technical systems will not fully meet our social goals, and then adopting design and educational approaches that are appropriate to fill this gap, building less-nuanced systems as partial solutions and tools for advancing our understanding, and by working with the CSCW research community to develop and pursue key lines of inquiry.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, dub group, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States. smunson@uw.edu.
authors.forename: Sean A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Munson
authors.forename: Hasan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Cavusoglu
authors.forename: Larry
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Frisch
authors.forename: Sidney
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fels
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D001955:British Columbia; D002908:Chronic Disease; D003657:Decision Making; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D061108:Social Media; D012944:Social Support
keywords: health; privacy; social computing; social media; sociotechnical systems