What you notice about the things that bug you says a lot about you. For instance, when there are people making a lot of noise in the library, what do you immediately observe about them? Does their loudness, rudeness or unruliness occur to you first? Or is it their race? For Alexandra Wallace, the University of California, Los Angeles student who posted a YouTube video about her library troubles earlier this month, cell phone conversations in quiet spaces can only be chalked up to the individual's racial background, specifically if he or she is Asian. The video was, frankly, mind-boggling; Wallace discussed her belief that Asian families don't teach their children to fend for themselves, mocked the sound of Asian languages with a string of utterances straight out of 1940s propaganda pieces and suggested that all Asian UCLA students need to learn "American manners." The video's explosive content immediately earned a range of responses. There were calls for the University to terminate her attendance, demands for an apology and, very shortly, the publication of much of her personal information. Those lucky enough to have Southern Californian friends most likely recall the sudden surge of responses on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that has only now started to abate due to Wallace's announcement that she will no longer be taking classes at UCLA.

Yet now, in retrospect, discussion has begun of the actions of the many parties who responded to Wallace. The debate over whether or not the community response was appropriate seems to be divided into two parts, with one half believing Wallace deserved to be castigated and ostracized, and the other half feeling that her freedom of speech was brought under attack.

In my opinion, the very opposite of the latter happened. At no point did any government agency ever cause Wallace to retract her statements; therefore, her freedom of speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment, was never violated. What happened was instead far more inspirational-rather than demanding that her message be silenced, people listened and responded to Wallace. She was made quite aware, very shortly after the posting of her video, that her community does not approve of racism in any form, even the insidious "non-politically correct" observational type that sometimes passes for bluntness or honesty.

The real stars of this show were, however, not the individuals who answered and argued Wallace's claims with such impressive immediacy but rather the media through which those debates took place. If this situation is evidence of anything, it's of the increasingly important role social networking and media websites are taking on in the political sphere, especially among youth.

The ability to create groups, join groups, plan expertly organized events and reach vast numbers of people in an instant turned what could have been a shoddily thrown together picket a few days after the posting of the video into an almost instantaneous show of solidarity among the grieved parties in this instance, and has aided in recent protest efforts around the world. In the case of quick responses to all sorts of problems, the power they place in the hands of their ordinary users cannot be doubted.

Still, I feel the most important thing to recognize about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and all other hands-on, user-friendly social-networking and media sites is not their propensity to enable protest efforts. Rather, it is the extremely important role they play in the ongoing support of free speech. In a country in which the bad things-the disgusting things, the cruel things and the hateful things-are not censored by the government, they must be responded to by the free public. What once could have been either a dangerous gathering of mobs or tedious process of writing letters to newspapers has now become fast, portable and, in this case, relatively peaceful. It is our obligation, after all, to decry racist speech the moment it is added to our environment-with social-networking sites at our fingertips, we can do that better than ever.

I don't feel sorry for Alexandra Wallace. I'm not even angry at her anymore. Instead, I feel a strange sense of pride at what we were able to do and say as a youth community in such a small stretch of time using only the time-wasting websites we fiddle with all day and our sheer force of will.