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We are on the brink of a new cultural revolution, and it truly has the potential to change the very fabric of society, for better or worse. The facilitator of this change is social media, and while this prediction has been around for quite some time now, it's important that we know what we are getting ourselves into. There is no question that we, as socially motivated creatures, have an instinctual desire to be validated, to share our experiences, and to communicate our beliefs with one another. But now that we have established these complex and versatile social networks with which we satisfy these desires, the question is:

How can we maximize the potential for social media to improve society?

Undeniabley, social media provides us with some of the immediate, superficial satisfactions that we sometimes have difficulty finding in face-to-face interactions, but at what point do we have to start asking whether we are doing ourselves a disservice by not further exploring the collective benefits that this technology offers. For some perspective, consider these facts:

• Total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011.
• 51% of people aged 25–34 used social networking in the office, more than any other age group.
• On average, 47% of social media users engage in social care behavior.
• One in six higher education students are enrolled in an online curriculum.
• A person's social media activity often can reveal signs of mental illness that might not necessarily have emerged in a session with a psychiatrist.
• People in Egypt (2011) used Facebook to organize meetings and communicate details of their political revolution.

These facts highlight one thing: social media is quickly becoming the only effective way for our global culture to organize itself and function. It started with young people watching funny videos on Youtube and listening to new music on Myspace, but it quickly changed into a resource for dating, a way to advertise products and run businesses, a more effective method for newsreporting, and, similar to what I'm doing right now, a new way to express personal ideas and have more people hear them. It has become the face of social democracy, and now it has become the face of mankind's future.

To be clear, there is work to be done now to ensure that we steer this revolution towards progress instead of regression. As an example, the LGBT community has been fighting for civil equality for decades, but recently they have celebrated an unexpected increase in public support. One theory I have about this success is that there was an increased presence of LGBT lifestyles in social media as compared to mainstream media because it is, by its nature, created by the people instead of for the majority. Surely, then, there is unrecognized potential for social media to facilitate human rights efforts.

Which brings me to my next point: overall political involvement has seen a marked increase in recent years, and I doubt that's because more people actually care. My theory here is that it's easier for the general public to digest serious information from social media because it mixes it with entertaining bits of mindlessness. I mean, how often could you watch a video of a kitten playing with a shoelace directly after reading a heavy article on foreign policy back when we got our kicks from reading the newspaper? Never.

While social media has enormous potential, it also has an evil dark side that is begging to be manipulated. Now, ideas are powerful, and that's especially true when there is limited access to alternative ideas. The problem with mainstream media is that it can pick and choose the content it provides and the way that it portrays that chosen information. This creates a bias and biases in public opinion become dangerous weapons against personal freedoms. It's the same danger that is found in corporate monopolies wherein one company, in the absence of competition, has the power to manipulate prices to increase their profit. In this case, ideas are the currency and our minds are what could become manipulted. The fear is that as these social networks become more powerful, there is a certain level of self-interest they begin to develop to maintain their power. Censorship becomes the enemy here, and this enemy is rapidly becoming the arch-nemesis of the social media revolution. It may appear as "promoted" stories or refusals to integrate their network into "sharing" apps, but censorship can appear in many ways.

Governments have two options when it comes to censorship:
Support it or Prohibit it and I think you can ascertain which option I support. It took public support to convince the US government to break apart the monopoly of the Bell Telephone Company in the late 1800's, and it's essential that we learn of the dangers of social media censorship now before we no longer have such easy access to this information.

Anyway, hopefully I have made a convincing argument that social media has the power to improve our future, and that it's equally important that we maintain the freedom to interact how we choose. The last thing that our culture needs is another method in which the "few" can manipulate the "many". Hopefully, when we can look back on our Facebook timelines, we will judge them as being primitive and undeveloped instead of as representing the peak of social media's potential. I don't know about you, but I truly hope its the latter because I know we can do better than some of the things that show up on my news feed !