[cytokine_storm]

I agree with your argument. But I think the internet's strongest trait is not necessarily revolutionary changes (wikileaks and arab spring). The things that have been built on the internet have been incredible. Think of crowdsourced projects like wikipedia and how ridiculously trivial it is for a scientist (or someone like me; a student in a lab) to access information or search for experimental data (genes are the tip of the iceberg here).

I don't want to belittle the Arab Spring, but the NCBI database and Wikipedia have arguably had an even larger impact on society than social networking's capability for kickstarting revolution. It's just slower and less obvious.