Beyond the Share Button: Making Social Network Sites Work for Health and Wellness

This research highlights many challenges and opportunities with using Facebook to support health and wellness. Though the author do not have answers to all of the questions the author outlined at the beginning of this article, the work by the author and others helps researchers and practitioners better understand how social network sites can work for wellness, as well as some of the barriers to successful health or wellness interactions on these sites. There remains much work to do, however. Finally, though advancing some of these research challenges may enable building systems that better support health and wellness behaviors or behavior change, designers of these systems should constantly ask what it "would be like to live with these systems. Systems that have been optimized to nudge or even push individuals to change their behavior-even when those individuals are explicitly pursuing those behavior changes-may lead to small individual health victories or progress toward societal goals at some cost to individual experiences and choices.