Human Rights First honored a young Egyptian activist last week who helped bring down the Egyptian regime. He said that the Internet was a driving force behind the movement, but it did both good and harm. It helped organize the country and bring down a dictator. But it also led to mass mob backlash and violence.

That sums up my view of the two sides of the Internet today.

We can aspire to change the world by giving a voice to the voiceless, providing transparency and creating open dialogue.

But we can also succumb to what Jaron Lanier described as “Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.” This is basically mob rule masquerading as democracy. It is group-think and majority ideology.

We confront this issue every day at our company, Interactive One.

For the first time in American history, it is easier to raise issues that were once hidden or obscured. Black Americans can now find news and conversation that aren’t just network news or Fox or CNN. I believe that the election of our first Black president was in large part because of his ability to mobilize his base through new media and get conversations started that never would have happened in traditional media.

So where is the harm?

Do a search on Google for “prisons” and you get Wikipedia, the Washington Post, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons as the top three results. Google drives the majority of all traffic on non-portal sites now and most of that traffic is from top results. Our story on prison policy and its impact on African Americans will never appear in top Google results. Ever. Google rank is based on the mob.

Where once a multitude of social experience proliferated, now Facebook dominates. I love Facebook — but it only reinforces what we already know and want and feel comfortable with. Unless your friends are already in the know about the prison issue we are exposing, you won’t get this story either.

Mainstream mob is in danger of becoming the Internet’s new operating system.

There are a lot of reasons for this change. People are tired of the Internet’s complexity and endless choice. They want easy and reliable “results.” Just as millions of Americans turned to Walter Cronkite for the comfortable, reliable perspective on news 40 years ago, now we turn to Google and Facebook in the face of this complexity.

I am hopeful. As always, waves of creativity will re-emerge. The Internet, here, as in Egypt, has a way of finding its way into crevices, unleashing energy and tapping into new voices.