Social Media and being sociable

It's interesting that, in this era of Web 2.0, we tend to get caught up in statistics. Statistics about how many people read our blog, how many friends we have on Facebook, how many followers we have on twitter; and I'm not immune to this.
This past week or so I have been watching numbers of views on one of my videos since it got embedded in the homepage of my local church. Vimeo tracks not only views on your Vimeo channel, but views of the embedded videos too. This has given me an insight not only into the number of people who view my video, but because the video is set to play automatically, it also tracks how many visitors to the church website there are.
With all this information at our fingertips we should aim to put faces or names to the numbers, to try and understand what the effect of these numbers means to us, and to those who have now become a statistic. We've got to try not to let them make us vain in the pursuit of bigger numbers, more frequent views, more "friends" but to help us shape the way we communicate: to better inform people, to spread a feeling of community, to push the world into a more understanding and tolerant state.
We've seen recently in Egypt how the power of the internet has been harnessed an all levels, how it can be used to rally around a cause and to make a difference. It was used as a social and political tool and not an ego-booster, it wasn't about trying to create a huge group on Facebook, or for a single person to take charge and create a following, it was the voice of the people, and the voice of the world, amplified.