Good, Bad or Ugly?

For Dana Boyd, blogging is about building bridges of understanding across the great gulf of the online world.

Every useful thing is a 2 edged sword. Most things can be as harmful as they are useful, that includes the internet. Dana tells a story about one awful Blogher conference. What a horrible thing happened when those in the audience instead of working towards building bridges, actively tore a live speaker down on twitter that was trending behind her on a big screen.

And hence we see the ugly side of social media, just in case speeches of hate or intolerance was not enough passed around on Facebook.

The most powerful use of blogging I have seen, which shapes my sense of the value of social media, was a vlog from the heart of the fighting in a city in Syria. It was a teen girl, describing the best she could what was going on. It was honest. It was raw, and it was needed to awake the world the awful situation we had allowed to develop.

Another powerful scene is social media is when 2 countries were preparing for war, but all over social media, notes of love and admiration were sent by individuals in one country to the other stating that they didn't support the war and had no desire to harm the others. This worked both ways and the governments had to back down from the full offensive action.

There is power in the tools of  social media. How are we going to use this power?