[itistoday]

I think the events in Tunisia and Egypt show just how wrong that perspective is. Twitter and social media in general are in their infancy and yet already are having such a massive impact on social change around the world.

The ability to communicate thoughts, events, instantaneously, as they happen, and from the people actively involved in those events around the world, is unprecedented in human history.

The revolution has been tweeted. It does not depend solely on twitter and the like, but these are not tools to be underestimated.

Just compare the quality of the content you're getting by following people actively engaged in the revolution on twitter, with what you see on CNN. This is revolutionary.

[loire280]

I think the revolutionary effect you are seeing can be better attributed to the fact that these populations have access to the Internet, especially through mobile phone. These people aren't leveraging the unique features of social media (the web of interpersonal relationships) so much as they are leveraging the ability to quickly get text, pictures, and video out of the country and onto servers hosted in countries sympathetic to the protestors. It just happens that Twitter and Facebook are currently the fastest ways to get something published and seen.

[brc]

I disagree - because the ability to get text pictures and video out of the country reliese on the fact you're putting it onto a network where plenty of people are linked together. Just posting it onto the internet - with no social network apps - it's much less likely to catch and go viral.

The networking capabilities of these appliations is what makes them useful to protesting organisations. Otherwise there woudl be a deluge of emails going out to notify of each individual update - rather than a simple, distributed notification which people can jump on at any point.

[itistoday]

Btw, I should add an anecdotal example of what's possible.

Near the start of the uprising, parts of the protest pamphlet were leaked online (http://j.mp/hZf7uY) before the protest was set to take place. The pamphlet explicitly requested secrecy so that the details of the protest would not get into the hands of the government.

I was lying in bed in San Francisco, watching as news of this broke out on my iPhone twitter stream. Many people, myself included, were able to convince the author of the piece to delete his tweet with the link to the post, and while the post itself wasn't taken down, I wasn't able to find it from the publication's front page, and the post itself was edited to include a link to a video submitted by a twitter user of a man being shot and killed by the Egyptian police.

And that's just a small incident I happened to stumble across. I think that illustrates how profoundly the world has changed, where individuals, anywhere on the planet, can influence people and events in ways that can have significant consequences. All that, through a few tweets.