The New Yorker talks about the power of social media in this article about Facebook. Excerpt:
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It’s easy enough to support someone in private but far harder to voice that same support publicly—and the public support is a much stronger sign of actual support... If Facebook had stayed in its original incarnation, it might indeed have gone the way of other, forgotten sites like Friendster. But it went beyond that. The wall and its comments, all those “likes” and “shares,” and, yes, even the once-maligned News Feed are so powerful because they make our grooming of one another more public. .............