“Very little penetrated the gloom,” Roméo Dallaire recalls in one of the most unsettling passages of Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, “but as my eyes became accustomed to the dark I saw strewn around the living room in a rough circle the decaying bodies of a man, a woman, and two children, stark white bone poking through the desiccated leather-like covering that once had been skin.”

What if Dallaire had been able to tweet this scene? What if @BarackObama had picked up this snapshot and tweeted it to his 10-million-plus followers? What if YouTube had taken the 1- second clip he had recorded on his smartphone and featured it on its homepage? Would that have saved the life of almost a million Rwandans?

There has been no lack of attention to the impact of new media on the way we read, listen, meet, interact, exchange and do. The population of Facebook is more than 10 times that of Canada, and it took only 9 months to get to 100 million users; the radio, in contrast, took almost half a century to reach 100 million users. Today, 24 of 25 of the largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation; meanwhile, the Internet boasts more than 200 million blogs.

This spring, we witnessed the political power of social media. Many credit viral videos of protests prompted by the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi with triggering the Tunisian revolution, just as many credit the Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Saeed” with launching the Egyptian revolution.

Did these tools actually help to organize the revolutionaries, or were they merely used to keep the outside world apace of what was going on? Does digital media offer some promise for action against mass atrocities? In a world in which Facebook is king, can violent dictatorships survive?

Experts recently addressed these questions and others at a conference hosted by the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies titled, “The Promise of the Media in Halting Mass Atrocities”. There the CIC interviewed conference speakers Mona Eltahawy, Gordon Smith, Roméo Dallaire , Rick MacInnes-Rae, and André Pratte.

During the Egyptian revolution, at least 65,000 people heard every hashtagged statement Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy shared on her popular Twitter account. And yet, in an interview with the CIC, Eltahawy objects to the idea that the ousting of Mubarak was somehow a “Twitter revolution.”

Gordon Smith, in contrast, believes in the contemporary promise of digital media.

Roméo Dallaire turns the clock back ten years to consider the hypothetical existence of digital media in Rwanda. Without electricity, he wonders, what could smartphones really achieve? When a quarter of the world’s population with Internet access is affected by online censorship, can digital media really influence change?

Dispatches host Rick MacInnes-Rae is even more skeptical: the vast majority of people, he suggests in an interview with the CIC, do not want to hear about genocide.

André Pratte, editor-in-chief of La Presse, makes the case that the death of the newspaper will in fact diminish the coverage of mass atrocities.

Photo Courtesy Reuters.