As I checked my Facebook profile today I was reminded of what Shirky said about how people can use the internet to gather people into a specific group or cause like with the case of the missing sidekick. I saw a real world example of this in a picture that two of my friends were tagged in.

Needless to say even from a thumbnail it was easy to tell that there was something up with the photo. 

After clicking on the picture I came to see that this wasn’t a joke but a serious case of a missing girl in the community. The comment below the picture also called for people to tag themselves in the picture to spread the message, and make it their profile picture as well. As opposed to joining a group like 1,000,000 for against prop 8, amongst others, this is an example of an interactive campaign for something on Facebook. Cases like this one are seemingly normal these days, for example the recent disappearance of actor Andrew Koening has been very active in the news recently and when people were still looking for his whereabouts friends and family took to twitter. I recalled seeing messages asking for help in finding his whereabouts last week. However, seeing this picture on Facebook really cemented the new use of the internet as a tool because I felt that this time I was part of the audience.