Maybe The Revolution Isn't On Facebook

Dovetailing on We're History episode about the "revolutionary" impact of social technologies on political uprisings, Ed Schipul and Daniel Keeney peeled back the reputation of Twitter and Facebook on the Middle Eastern events of this spring.  In many cases, they reveal that in spite of Wael Ghonim of Google's claims, the numbers of users just didn't support the claim that Facebook was critical to the Egyptian uprising. The authors echo our historical perspective:

"Nobody puts his or her life on the line because he or shee was invited to a tweet-up. They are mobilized after concluding that the only way out of their despite is to rise up."

Schipul and Keeney broke down the impact of social tools and tend to agree with our point: every generation uses it's accepted means of communication to spread revolutionary word; this generations is just faster and able to have broader reach.

Along with some key points on how these things expand (link out), they talk about the "findability" of social tools, or as author said, the ability to defeat time and space by bringing together groups of similar interest. They point to Peter Morville's term "ambient findabilty" and couple that with the virtual community can scatter leadership, preventing the ability of the ruling authority to isolate and cripple an organization by removing it's head. They use Nelson Mandela's imprisonment as the retardation of a movement. I'll go with V for Vendetta - when everyone becomes V, there is no way to stop V.