The season premiere of The Good Wife had a sub-plot that implicated social media very tellingly.  Alicia, Zach and Grace were stopped on a Canadian-bound highway by an Illinois cop who trumped up charges to extort money.
Alicia used her legal training to fight the charges, including acquiring a copy of the cruiser’s dashboard video. She appeared in court severally and each time was unable to get justice for her son, specifically to have his record expunged of an arrest for recording a police officer. Her husband, the state’s attorney General and a gubernatorial candidate, also tried to use his influence to reverse the charges, but to no avail.
Zach took matters into his own hands by producing and posting a video to Youtube. The video remixed the official dashboard recording of the arrest with video Zach recorded at the scene with his iPhone and many other excerpts: a building being demolished, etc. which were visual metaphors assassinating the character of the arresting officer. The video received 500,000 views and the charges were dropped.
The narrative has a strong ideological message. Adult, old-school solutions (courtroom maneuvers, telephone and face-to-face conversations), even though ethically correct, were unsuccessful in calling out a corrupt police department. Media production and social media—one victim representing his plight in a humorous way and posting it online—succeeded. The old way of doing things is trumped by the new.
The narrative also provides opportunities for us to consider the power and ethics of online communications and social media.  In The Good Wife story, the Youtube posting is used to right a wrong, to call out a corrupt police officer in a corrupt system. It was a vigilante act taken because the legal channels were corrupted. But how often is this the case? And how plausible is it that someone might be maligned unjustly rather than outed deservedly? If any one of us with digital media tools and access can produce similar messages, what responsibilities must we exercise so as not to destroy the lives and careers of innocents?