New Media – Power to the people or threat to stability?

In the world today, traditional mainstream media is transforming into the new media. This occurs in the wake of the emergence of the internet, Weblogs (blogs) and essentially the citizen journalists. However, should the new media be seen as power to the people, or threat to stability? I feel that it should be seen as the latter.

With the appearance of the internet and blogs, people are provided with an easy passage to get their views across to the masses. The vast majority would use it for constructive purposes, like providing feedback to governments on its policies. However, there would be this minority of extremists who would use blogs and the internet as a medium for propaganda. Though they may be a small group, but all it takes is a few of these individuals to spread their manipulative ideas through a medium accessible to the masses - internet or blogs, to breed hatred and bring about instability. And there have been already a few cases on such activities, like that of the website which is the used by the Islamic terrorist group - Al-Qaeda to spread Anti-Western propaganda by glorifying suicide bombers, or rather martyrs of Islam in their eyes.

Furthermore, if governments try to control these extremists online, by banning anti-establishment blog sites, people would start to feel as if they have been restricted as a whole. The masses would feel that the government is trying to take on a dictatorship style of governance, by silencing their sceptics, though it might not be the case. These views are further fuelled by the banned bloggers themselves who would grab these opportunities to attack the government and gain supporters by falsingly reassuring the masses that their views on the government silencing opposition are true. This would cause unnecessary resent, thus leading to future instability.

Sad to say, the new media is already in existence, thus prevention is no more an option. Hence we have to find the cure to the new media. Maybe by adapting ourselves, and becoming more rational creatures which are able to differentiate between logical claims and claims that are aimed at just wrecking havoc, could we transform the new media into a power to the people.