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

I agree to a large extent that with New Media, it brings power to the people rather than threatening stability.

Firstly, with New Media, people are engaged in the politics in their country. For example, in Africa, the Media and Guardian hosted a blog for all politicians in recent local elections. This resulted in many comments from the citizens and helped to encourage debate. With New Media, citizens were more involved and their voices are heard. Now, the government have to think and make policies not only based on the comments of the ministers in the government but also the general public. Besides that, the opinions of the public can be found easily on a political issue. In this way, governments can then take an approach or make a policy that suits the citizens' needs the most and reduce discontentment in the citizens to the minimum.

Secondly, the people are given new ways to express and share their thoughts and opinions without having to fear that their comments will be totally censored by the government. How is this so? In the past, people have to get through the newsletters to share their thoughts to the public. Hence, censorship on letters that opposes the government can easily be imposed. However, with the presence of new media, people share their views using the web which the government have difficulty in controlling censorship as there are great numbers of users.

Though new media brought power to the people to have a say in the politics, it does bring threat to stability.

New media provided many route for informations to reach people. However, some of the informations may cause conflicts to countries. One example is the use of new media by terrorists to manipulate people's mind. It is common to find satellite dishes in Iraq today. People are more accessible to various ideas no matter it is morally correct or not. Hence, terrorists could put up false informations and try to influence the mind of the people. In turn, it threatens the stability of the country as some joined the terrorists and carried out terrorists acts in the country if they were influenced.

The threat of stability may come from the citizens themselves. One example is the incident of a few teenagers in Singapore making racist remarks in their personal blogs. The rise of new media does provide platforms for everyone to voice out their inner-thoughts. However, this poses danger as there are users who abuses their rights and causes unnecessary conflicts. In the example given above, conflicts regarding racial issues may rise up due to the remarks made by the teenagers. Thus, to a certain degree, new media brought threat to stability too.