Well, to bring life back to the discussion, I have this reply for Clark in the OP
I am an atheist living in Indonesia, and my parents make just enough income for me to have all the imported books that I want, but not enough for me to go to college abroad or to join AAI and the stuff. If my kind want to make a real organization in the real life, it will be such a mess especially with the hardline organizations (both Christian and Muslim) being around. Which means that our largest gathering is inside facebook, not in real life, and the fact is for people like me, who can't afford to have education abroad, forums like this and discussions with intelects in facebook is the best discussion I could get in my life. For you, perhaps, this kind of things doesn't affect you because you already have it in your life, and you're living in a relatively freer country than mine (well mine is already considered relatively free, we have been reported multiple times in a local english-language newspaper, total casualty had been exactly one atheist, because he broke "the taboo" but his incarceration can still be considered as human rights violation, but that is for another discussion, and in basement)
So dismissing this social media as a development is simply, according to me, a bias which you might have for living somewhere where you can find many things facebook and twitter provides, but then again in real life. Twitter and Facebook had been an assistance for the Arab Spring (the real one by the young man, before the Islamic Brotherhood hijacked it). And then again it played such a great role in the first truely democratic election in Jakarta resulting in our new governor Joko Widodo, he didn't have speeches and pamphlets around like other candidates, he simply visited all the backwaters where the problems are and filmed it and uploaded it to youtube and spread pictures to twitter where the huge of masses of the middle class is waiting to retweet them and spread it to the next person. In my experience, especially in the middle class -laden Jakarta, Twitter and Facebook had been a very useful tool for the growing democracy and also a very huge forum where people can talk politically without having to leave their shops or their work in the office, and whatnot with the quirk of having the traditional media going much less efficiently compared to the west, the social media had been the no.1 destination for the middle-class to discuss and stage actions.
For people who can use it, or for those who have traditional media being dumbasses like here, social media can enhance your activities more than just to spread some jokes, or to see the news of your friends starting to get married. Social media, especially for the middle class, has become an integrated feature of their political life. In here the battle between Islamism vs Secularism is not fought on in the streets, but rather in twitter, with less mess resulted in it unlike the protests going on by some college students and whatever the hell they're fighting for today which always result in a street filled with burnt tires.
