Use your voice.

In the last year, I've noticed a trend in America that's really interesting, and actually kind of cool. It's been going on longer than a year, but it's really caught some steam in the past year. With the use of social networking, blogs, and twitter, the average person finally has a voice, and people are listening.

There's been an uproar on Facebook in the last two weeks which emphasizes what I've been seeing. Facebook recently changed their Terms of Service [which, as a user, I don't remember being notified about, other than "CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!"]. In a nutshell, the new terms basically stated that even if you closed your account, Facebook still owned everything you put online- pictures, interests, conversations. By posting it online, you gave them license over everything you submitted. This made a LOT of people angry- it's been all over my Facebook news feed since February 4th when the terms switched. People started groups, people posted things on their walls, and some even went as far as putting a legal statement on their profile to ban Facebook from using the content [I don't know if those were legit or not]. Anyway, The Facebook Team listened, and this morning, they returned to their old Terms of Service. Ordinary people were heard.

Then there's all of this bailout mess, where more often than not, companies were irresponsible with spending. GM is asking for more money today. Citigroup wanted to use their bailout money to buy a new private luxury jet [Obama told them to "fix it"]. Thousands of jobs are lost every day because of poor decisions from "leaders" [I realize that there is more to the economic crisis than this, but it is irrelevant for this post]. Every day people are being negatively affected as a result of greed, and they started speaking out. They voted for a President who heard their concerns, and they have a President who is still hearing their concerns. Ordinary people were heard.

It's not just limited to these situations. Twitpic crashed the day the plane landed in the Hudson River because someone on the ferry uploaded a picture. Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton gets millions of hits a day on his blog and has the power to make or break a celebrity's reputation by what he reports. Tim Stevens, from GCC, posted a quote from Senior Pastor Mark Beeson on Twitter, and in 18 minutes, 11 people had re-tweeted [quoted him] and 5,545 people heard what he said. Ordinary people have an incredible sphere of influence now, thanks to things like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.

So now that we're being heard, what do we have to say? How can we use this realm of influence to impact our world, to bring light into the darkest places, to make a dent for the Kingdom? People are listening, so what are you going to say?