We at CivicActions have helped clients to develop "Social Media" websites which enable members of a community to bond around shared media for fun, learning, advocacy and transformation. One of the principal aims of this development has always been the empowerment of individuals and communities to rise above the echochamber of monolithic media channels by accessing wider sources of content and even by becoming the media makers themselves.
Now
YouTube, the current granddaddy of Social Media sites in the videosphere, and best known for "America's Funniest Home Videos"-style fare, seems to be growing into a role of crucial and transformative importance: leveling the playing field for presenting disparate eyewitness views of something as profound and inflammatory as the current Hizbollah-Israeli conflict -- unfiltered by editors, advertisers or even production values. It's chaos, but somewhere in the triangulation of a million lens-eyes, we can hope that the complex truths of such difficult circumstances may be brought to light in ways that don't fit neatly in between car commercials.
