Social Media to bring world peace?

Posted by: Alex Erasmus

At what could be described as its ‘beta’ stage, social media was a tool for people to stay connected within restricted groups (think Facebook’s origins within American colleges). It obviously widened considerably after that and is now on a par (or even beyond) with us checking our emails everyday. It then became a tool for businesses to have a stronger online presence; one where they could communicate better with their customers and potential customers. In even more recent times, social media has evolved into an almost catch-all term for digital marketing. While those in the know will tell you there is more to digital than purely social media, it certainly plays a large part in today’s media landscape. The advent of Twitter has meant social media is now an information swapping super-highway and full-on customer service portal, in addition to all its other guises.

Social media is sure to continue to branch off and go down other avenues, but one that I doubt many had thought of (me included), is social media to bring peace to troubled regions around the world.  However, that is exactly what is stirring over at Facebook.  Facebook has launched a new portal where it hopes to bring about “peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other”.  On the face of it, this is somewhat vague and to be fair to facebook, the site is very much in its infancy. All that is there at the moment is a place to put your thoughts on the connection between peace and technology and a graph showing the "friend connections created each day between people of different countries, religions, and political affiliations."  To give one example, there have been over 5,000 "Israel-Palestine Connections in the past 24hr."

It does raise the question in my mind over how many people who are actually living in war-torn areas either actually browse facebook or take notice of this kind of forum. I would imagine the majority of connections are made between people now living in other countries like the US or UK, who have left their homeland as they wanted better opportunities. I guess having a forum such as this is good becuase at least it is a platform for debate; a way to share knowledge in order to aid a serious and ongoing concern, even if the countries in question pay far less attention to it than we do.  

But what does this mean in PR and digital terms? Well, it makes me wonder whether social media is powerful enough to go even farther from where it started and be an instigator for a more peaceful, collaborative world. I’m not convinced, but then if someone told me a few years ago that we would all be hooked on micro-blogging by writing 140 characters on ’What are you doing’ then I probably would have thought they were mad.