What is “social media?” Put simply, it is a new wave of organic, influential and rapidly developing communication tools that connect us to people, brands and other niches of our lives that are important to us. They allow us to share photos, videos, random thoughts, interests and just about anything else. (Someone on Twitter asked during last month’s South By Southwest Interactive Festival if anyone would consider sharing their genome—yes, your human genome—on Twitter. I think that goes a bit too far, but that’s just me.) It has been a subject of a lot of underground discussion among social media nerds (like your columnist), but has not really emerged into the mainstream until just recently.

Part of this emergence  has to do with the rise of Blackberries, iPhones and other web-enabled phones that let consumers take the Internet with them wherever they want. If you can get a cell phone signal, you can get the Internet. This phenomenon has not only widened the venues for communicating on the Internet, but it has also expanded the accessibility of features like RSS, podcasts and especially other social media like Twitter and Facebook. People have begun making social media a major part of their lives, giving rise to what Forbes recently called “The Social Nervous System.”

Social media, Forbes says, is essential communication because the Internet—off of which all social media runs—is an important communication network. For those who are less familiar, the Internet began as a method of sending information from one computer to another, and, with a little help fom a thing called the World Wide Web, it became the massive information sharing network we have today—the same one that is threatening to put newspapers, radio stations and traditional media organizations of all kinds out of business.

If we take a basic definition of communication to be the use of symbols or language, the Internet is clearly a highly sophisticated communication tool. That, at least, is the thesis put forth by Forbes and many others on the Internet and in mainstream media.

The idea of the social nervous system is that all of these new and unique communication tools are creating a way for people to “coordinate action and render services based on human action.” But what does that mean? Does it mean that as soon as we throw out a tweet or post a link on Facebook that we are automatically being targeted for some new advertising campaign or having our every move watched by Corporate America? In some ways it does, I suppose, but the much cooler upshot is far less evil.

There is no steadfast or empirical way of demonstrating how exactly social media is transforming human communication, except to see where it fails. Recently the airline industry (no surprise really, they fail at so much else) showed the world how to fail to respond to the human input they receive from social media. A few weeks ago RyanAir called Irish blogger Jason Roe an “idiot” on a blog entry about a flaw in the company’s website. Roe’s claim ended up being wrong, but instead of tactfully explaining how he was wrong, the RyanAir employees who responded treated him like a hack, when in fact he was a blogger who found a plausible and serious hole in the company’s web security.

The story exploded on both new media—especially Twitter and other blogs—and the traditional outlets (including The Economist, Wired and CNN, which actually traced the snarky comments back to a RyanAir corporate IP address), and the controversy turned into one of the biggest communication crises in the airline’s history.

The second example comes from Jet Blue, an airline that a few years ago stranded two planes full of people on the tarmac. Dave Peck, social media guru and South By Southwest Interactive Festival attendee, was on that plane and on his way home to San Francisco. When Peck attempted to get information via Twitter about the status of his flight and whether he would be spending another night in Austin, he was stonewalled by both the Jet Blue gate attendants and the Jet Blue Twitter account. While being ignored by his airline, the more Twitter-savvy Southwest Airline picked up on his crisis and offered him a fight to Oakland.

Peck eventually got off the ground, but flight problems like these, which five years ago would have stopped at neighborhood legends, now circulate to hundreds of millions of users instantly. While social media actively can transform minor problems into full-scale communication crises, it also opens the door for opportunity to provide better services more efficiently.

Jet Blue could have easily saved face by at least communicating with Peck about his flight problems, giving him a phone number to call or telling him the information he wanted was not available. Instead he was ignored and, consequently, Jet Blue was lambasted across the Internet. Instead of potentially losing the business of a few friends of Dave’s, the company stands to lose the business of his entire Internet following.