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After having watched and listened to the press conference by President Barak Obama and reports on The Huffington Post on the situation in Iran I was left wondering: is Facebook and the digital world in general really helping?

The question I guess should be better rephrased: what is the digital world really helping with? Are social networks assisting in changing the reality of the situation on the ground?

The situation in Iran in these days, with its cultural complications and political games, is not what I would like to focus on.

What I am interested in is the equation that is culturally established between the importance and usefulness of disseminating information speedily with that of helping and assisting civilians in distress on the other side of the globe.

There is an increasingly bad feeling of déjà vu as the images from Iran unfold. Everything reminds me of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing to which I assisted and bared witness from the TV screen in Italy. More recently are the repressions in Tibet, I watched those from my computer screen in London, and in Burma, from my computer screen and iphone in Istanbul.

I increasingly do not believe that the blogosphere creation of an instantaneous news cycle is helping in the short term. A different issue is the long term validity of documentation of these atrocities.

The political and material pressures that can be exercised upon undemocratic and non-participatory regimes are limited. There is little that can be done in the immediate, but also on the long run, what I feel is left is a documentation of an event, that is becoming more and more accurate, that can be instantaneously disseminated across the world, that can outrage and incense, but that does very little to assist those who are suffering and bearing the brunt of a repression.

From the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 to today arguably is business as usual: the Chinese establishment has not suffered and the public outrage has vanished. Yet we keep on bearing witness to those events while we buy products that are manufactured in China. The Burmese junta of dictators has not collapsed and they are still enjoying the same privileges and control.

The social networks appear to have created a new media circus of information that is functional and pandering to the West concepts of democratic freedoms while leaving those in distress on the ground to die.

Perhaps there is no democratic change without strife, struggle and self sacrifice and the ideal world that one would imagine of powerful new media and social platforms shatters against the reality of what we can and cannot do.

Perhaps bearing witness is all we can do. And remembering - at the shelves of a store or at an oil pump, or when buying Nokia and Siemens’ products that are built with censoring devices and are sold to dictatorial regimes to crush freedom of expression and human rights – ten days or ten years from now, that may be a bit too much to ask.