It’s easy to point to the problems with social media: lost productivity from employees checking Facebook at work, new “personal branding” responsibilities to tend online, and a general deluge of information that’s impossible to keep up with. When we do hear about the benefits of social media, it’s usually in a business context (praising the rise of “viral marketing on steroids”) or focused on a macro, societal perspective (NYU professor Clay Shirky has famously cited the “cognitive surplus” resulting from online tools like Wikipedia, which allow people to contribute small amounts of time or effort, but in the aggregate create vast new informational resources).