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You have to look no further than the Middle East to see just how powerful social media has become. It's frequently being hailed as the key tool used by protestors to share their views on government and organize their plan of action to enact change.

That very use of services like Facebook and Twitter is just one of the hundreds of topics being discussed at the annual Social Media Week.

Groups in New York, San Francisco, Rome, Paris, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Hong Kong and Istanbul are exploring how this 21st-century phenomenon has, is, and will continue to change the world and our everyday lives.

“We're particularly interested in getting perspectives from different societies around the world to formulate a much broader perspective, broader view of how social media is impacting the global society,” says Social Media Week founder Toby Daniels. “We have events and programming that's focusing on politics, news, government, publishing, advertising, marketing, film, television, music.”

Many of the discussions during the week have been focusing on how social networking is becoming more social in the traditional sense, not just people sitting at home alone behind a computer being "social." An example of social, social networking is the location-based social networking service Foursquare, which launched just around when the first Social Media Week was being held. Two years later, it’s hard to find a person with a smart phone who doesn't know what it is.

“It is a social network, but one that brings you away from your computer and out in the real world, meeting other people and making new friends, meeting up with old friends, and having conversation in the real world instead in IM or over email,” says Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.

Another popular topic at this year’s event was how social media can help give the common person more say – within their company, their community, the nation and the world. At the very least, social media can open up communication between citizens and their elected officials, says Tom Lee at Sunlight Labs, who helped create Stream Congress, a real-time ticker that tracks all social media entries from those elected officials.

“I hope it'll make it possible to empower more people to make their voices heard,” Lee says. “I hope it'll make it easier and cheaper for government to process that input, and I hope it'll lead to better outcomes, both in terms of policy and service delivery.”

To learn more about the issues being discussed or to even catch some events live or pre-recorded, head over to SocialMediaWeek.org.