Social Media -

We all hear a lot of scorn about the ubiquity of so-called "social networking" and similar sites. MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, LiveJournal, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, LinkedIn, Meetup, Twitter...you can’t help but ask exactly who needs to be THAT social?

Some of us find ourselves feeling superior, that we’re involved in REAL life enough that we don’t need a cyber life, too. That being that obsessed with broadcasting the minutiae of your day is foolish and a waste of time.

We were forced to reevaluate that thinking in the past few days, as these sites have been a journalistic and political lifeline to exposing serious questions about the results of the Iranian election, and the aftermath.

Iran’s government controls the media, including the internet. And they’re not exactly known as being consistently foreign journalist-friendly about coverage of anti-government protests or other unallowed subjects. The rest of the world and, indeed, many of Iran’s own citizens might never know the truth about what’s going on. Except for the fact that, dissidents used social networks to "broadcast" street-level news. The international media now has unprecedented access to citizen sources.

What started out as "social networking" is becoming "social ACTIVISM networking". For the first time, citizen journalism with global reach - in REAL TIME is able to bring attention to issues and events, without being colored by corporate interests. This could represent a revolution in both journalism and human rights.

Governments and media do have their own agendas, even in countries which have democracy and stability. There have been far too many events in world history where atrocities haven’t been recognized and reported until it’s far too late. Some are still going unreported. Could Twitter help stop a genocide in progress? Could it expose and bring down an illegally-elected government?

Of course, perhaps the bigger question is whether, surrounded by a raging flood of Tweets about Britney’s latest meltdown, friends’dinner plan changes, and random status updates… we’ll actually KNOW if it does.