I think more importantly it gave us real time access to what was occurring and in doing so we erred in its power. I think the youth in these countries had just had I it and reacted. Social media may have assisted but just like Martin Luther King and Lech Walesa had movements pre social media/networking so will many other movements.
While we must use these tools to assist in organizing, old fashion people interaction is likely more important for a lasting movement. People of like minds or simply changing minds over a cup of coffee is a must and it should be multiplied and grown geometrically.
In that light for all our movements we must remember when we make contact (e.g., Enough Is Enough, The Intervention) we must make personal contacts and educate these contacts to personally engage. Social media may or may not be there as if it really gets traction, unless we garner political power it may be shut down just as Yahoo made delivering emails difficult for the Wall Street protests.
I think the Wall Street protest shows a defect in action that we will have to mitigate. As large as social networking was, I did not see the critical mass in messages that forced the mainstream media to carry the story out of share shame. Again, if so many of us were not so programmed to believe in unfettered capitalism, like in Egypt, that “Wall Street Protest Movement” would have been unstoppable and put the fear of the masses into our robber barons and financial thugs.
Wall Street Protests: Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? – Speakeasy – WSJ
There have been many political actions whose emergence or nature has been tied to new media—the most-discussed seem to be Iran’s 2009 “Twitter Revolution” and the “Facebook Revolutions” in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. When I’ve been asked to speak or write about these various “social media revolutions,” my response has always been the same: These were not really social media revolutions. With the current Wall Street protests, though, I might have to admit that social media has a real and substantial role to play in grassroots political action. Facebook and Twitter played a fascinating role in the Arab Spring, but the tendency to characterize these political events through association with these websites is both silly and inaccurate: silly because the technology is obviously neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for pro-democracy desires and actions; and inaccurate because insofar as technology enabled and catalyzed these political movements, these websites played a prominent role only due to network effects. In other words, Facebook and Twitter were important primarily because that’s where there was a large audience, not because these websites are empowering in some other, more specific way.
If we’re going to point to any technology as being a real catalytic force in the Arab Spring, it has to be the cellphone. It’s not as exciting to talk about, I know, but they are amazing and politically historic things. Cellphones become more ubiquitous in areas where landlines, and often infrastructure in general, is underfunded and unreliable. Driven by competition to cater to consumers in wealthy nations looking for luxury features, cellphones have become ever smaller, and still and video camera capabilities have become cheap, near-standard features. As a result, a great many in less wealthy nations with less well-supported infrastructure have gained common access to small, powerful devices to transmit text messages, photos, audio, and video. The vast networks of communication, including websites like Facebook and Twitter, would have been useless without the ubiquitous mobile digital devices used to connect to those networks. […CONTINUED…]
Wall Street Protests: Will the Revolution Be Tweeted? – Speakeasy – WSJ