Now available: Skype (News - Alert)-powered blues guitar lessons for all ages and skill levels by Miami guitar deity Dyce Kimura.

Get a microphone, a webcam and a Skype account; you'll be tearing the fret-board up before you know it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can sign up for lessons. As a first generation American himself, one of the most appealing aspects of teaching online, for Kimura, is the opportunity it provides him to make connections, to influence, and to be influenced by musicians from a variety of cultures, regardless of their skill.

With more than 26 years of experience, Kimura is a predominating figure in Miami music culture. A true instance of the musician's dream realized, he teaches guitar full time online and performs regularly.

The 1980s and 1990s developed an anxiety over the long-term consequences that proliferating communication technologies would exert on global culture. David Cronenberg’s film, Videodrome, immortalizes many of these controversies.

We seem to have cleared the initial hump with regard to our fears of what these new technologies would do to humanity, and now the tenor of such arguments is rapidly changing. Eclipsing the question of how much damage these technologies are capable of doing, the new interest is how much, exactly, we stand to benefit from them.

Kimura, with his innovative approach to guitar lessons, represents just one example of the numerous ways in which social media is changing the way the world works. And the change is positive.

Not only does social media technology like Skype open up new venues of commerce, but it represents a powerful political tool for the populous. Young activists in Syria use Skype to co-ordinate with each other. The Times of India points out, central governments have a tougher time tracking and censoring video communications than text-based methods of communications like Facebook (News - Alert) or Twitter.

Depending on your political bent, you could choose to view such turns of circumstances as either positive or negative. What remains more difficult to debate however, is the fact that these current controversies have little, if anything, to do with the dystopian speculations and the naive technology worshipping we remember from the late 20th century.