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In 2002 Todd Gitlin wrote a book called Media Unlimited about what he called “the torrent of images and sounds” that overwhelm our lives. In the eight years since the book was published media has only become more ubiquitous in the lives of people around the world.
The super-saturation of our lives by advertisements, television shows, movies, video games, news, and the Internet seemingly serves to support the status quo. Yet, media is increasingly being called on to solve the social ills of our time. The conflicting purposes of media warrant some exploration:

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It is 8:15 AM in Bethlehem. The city is cordoned off from Jerusalem by an enormous cement barrier cutting a serpentine line between the two towns that are only seven miles apart. In one town King David and Jesus were born and today eighty percent of its inhabitants are Muslim. The other town holds the third holiest site in Islam, the place where Jesus died on the cross, and was seat of the United Kingdom of Israel ruled by David. The inhabitants of one town can no longer travel to other except for on very rare occasions. According to the media, the people living in the two towns cannot share the same spaces.
I am eating breakfast in the home of a Palestinian Christian family. The father and mother, wonderfully hospitably people in their sixties with great senses of humor, are sitting on the couch watching satellite TV as I eat a plate full of falafel, humus, pita, and other local foods. At pretty much any time during the day you can enter their home and the television will be on broadcasting anything from church services in the morning to Egyptian cinema in the evening or the Arabic version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. I am told it provides distraction and escape in a town where physical movement for local inhabitants is extremely limited.

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It is 12:30 PM in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am waiting to go to the airport to leave for Bethlehem. I run upstairs in my house, open my computer to kill time, and log into my YouTube account. I am greeted with a video from a friend in Australia. His shaggy hair appears on the screen and he begins reading a script that I prepared for a social media based publicity campaign for a small, new nonprofit organization. “Your efforts today, tomorrow, and in the future will determine our generations legacy… together we can… build a path to peace, “ he finishes.
I think back to when I met him in Dubai a little over a year ago at an international youth conference. We spent four intense days discussing the daunting challenges facing our generation with other students from around the world and what we were doing or could be doing to address them. When we left the conference we took with us a shared sense of optimism partial created by the knowledge that we could work together, thanks to technology, despite the vast distances separating our homes.

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The two stories above both revolve around technology. However, technology achieves different outcomes in each. In the first story it is used as an escape from a physical reality. In the second it is used to engage with reality. If technology is going to address the challenges of our time, we are going to have to seize the opportunity created by social networking and social media (media from below) and use it as a grassroots tool to create dialogue and empowerment. In the current atmosphere of media and technology, individuals have a tremendous amount of agency to join together and shape our future.