Lately, I have been consumed with course work, running a business, and trying to stay up to date with medical technology, information and news. Its seems even me, someone who prides himself on knowing the latest, can’t keep up with how fast information moves. Some may say they are keeping pace using Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Instapaper, or any of the hundreds other ways you can aggregate information. I’ve begun to ask myself, whats the point of keeping up? Is that even possible? Does it even matter? Does keeping up help advance my goals. Can I truly be creative, develop, build, and grow into the physician/health care professional I want to be when I’m constantly watching my ticker/stream of aggregated sites and personalities?

The more and more I try to think of ways to share my story, my perspective on the field of medicine and health care, I get discouraged because I’m never satisfied with where I am currently. I want my online and offline philosophies to match up. I want to be conscious of how what I do here will effect today, tomorrow, and the next day. Just as a person shops and refrains from buying certain brands because of health or company practices, I want to only promote, use, and create with software, people, and companies who take a conscious approach to how they are using the internet and all the other amazing tools being created daily. I want to work with people who truly care about what they are doing, not how many people they can get to follow them. Does this make sense to anyone?

I find myself always thinking/creating/stealing ideas from other bloggers. Yeah, I said it stealing. Truly is there really anything that is ever brand new or original these days? It definitely doesn’t seem like it. I am in no way encouraging you to directly rip off another persons idea. As you’ve probably heard before, imitation is the best form of flattery, right? I encourage anyone, if you like how I use the web, want to know how I built my site, what to know my perspective on anything web related or with social media, or even want to steal a concept from my blog, go right ahead be my guest. (just don’t pretend to be me, or blatantly rip off/copy my site and repost it’s contents)

With that said, I’ve stopped trying to figure out how to keep tabs on the latest information simply for the sake of keeping tabs. I’ve made it a personal goal of mine to keep pushing myself and my pursuits in medicine and in the field of health care to make things better. To not get discouraged when I see people doing things I’d never do. I’ve created my own personal standards for how I want to use the web, Twitter, Facebook, or any other program for that matter. I want to be better for the sake of being better. I want to invoke and pursue quality and pay attention to the smallest of details, because details matter. Obviously, I won’t be perfect, I will make mistakes, but I will do my best to repair things when they break.

Hi I’m Nicholas Weaver, and I’m passionate about bringing a more genuine social media experience to the field of medicine.

There is a lot of talk about with “social media” these days. It’s still relatively new, but in most cases social media has become a popularity contest, more about the speaker than the audience.

I think it’s really simple. Social media is just the extension of technology in a human way. It sounds silly, but people just want to talk to other people.

If all you have is an official hospital page on Facebook or Twitter, you’re doing it wrong.

If you have a protected account, or hide what you do online from rest of the world, you’re doing it wrong.

If you aren’t promoting what you are creating, or even worse if you aren’t creating, you’re wasting everyone’s time. And you’re doing it wrong.

There’s no right or wrong platform to use. It’s about where the people are. If your audience is on Twitter, you should be on Twitter. If they are on Facebook, that’s where you should be.

In order to truly take advantage of social media, you have to become such a part of the community you’re working within that you care less about the tools your using and more about the people.

What I would suggest is that although these spaces are limited to the internet and handy mobile applications. This shouldn’t detract from the personality and humanity of the person behind the medium. The people using these tools should be more authentic and consistent. Always looking for ways to make your communication as effective as possible.

That won’t get you all the way there. There are plenty of practical steps to help you get from where you are to where you need to be. But that’s where I come in!

I write at doctordreamweaver.com. Its a space I have created to share my pursuit of a career in medicine. You can also follow me on Twitter @dr_dreamweaver.

Guillermo and I wanted to talk about a few things we found to be quite depressing/ridiculous going on around the world. A couple questions we have for you all. How is one to go about helping make sure people are making informed decisions or are we to just let people continue to do things and figure out ways to fix/repair it once its all said and done? I am not interested in helping people make decisions I would make, but people should make decisions with consideration of all parties involved, right? People of American Culture don’t like to do this it seems. I wonder what things would be like in this country if people’s expectations weren’t so selfish?