Tom Slee

Before reading Tom Slee's blog I always thought that the Egypt - Facebook phenomenon was incredible, and that I couldn't think of any other way that these people could be able to get together and accomplish something without this social network. But as Tom Slee stated, it is just the medium in which the people were able to use to accomplish this task, and if this were to occur in any other era without the aspect of social networking, it would use whatever was available. What we did was only take advantage of the capabilities of Facebook, but the fact is that Facebook is not a supporter of either parties, rather it only provides a method. 

As Tom Slee stated, "If Facebook is a technology that delivers democracy, then we can trust it: more of it can only lead to more democracy. But if Facebook is a cultural phenomenon, then its meaning and role will change...". His point of the fact that Facebook does not exclusively align itself with any parties involved, it is merely a means to an end. In this sense, it cannot be trusted as anyone can make accounts, even fake accounts with aliases, to use it to do whatever they wished. Its effect on this event happened  but was only because the mainstream crowd deemed its uses, and this role changes depending on a specific situation, which makes Facebook actually playing for both teams. 

Of course this does not detract from the fact that it did play an extremely large role in deciding the outcome of the overall situation, but it is only that, and no more. It could have been done with any other method if Facebook was not available, but of course it was great that it does exist.