Social media alters society

http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Social+media+altering+economy+society+World+Conference/7428825/story.html

"The power and speed at which social media can be put to use was exemplified in 2009, when an agency of the U.S. Department of Defence sponsored a contest known as The Red Balloon Challenge. First prize: $40,000.
It involved the launch of 10 red weather balloons deployed at unidentified locations across the country. The object was to use social media to identify the GPS co-ordinates for all 10 balloons.
More than 4,000 teams entered the competition. The Defence Department figured it might take up to a month for the team messages to get out across the Internet and for reported information to be collected from the public and verified.
But the winner — a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — took just less than nine hours to find the red balloons.
They did it with financial incentives — offering to share the prize money with anyone who helped provide them with information."

This is kind of a bland article but it does show how social media can make things possible that were impossible before.