Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan
These things were previously possible, and were previously accomplished. There was no Facebook during the fall of Marcos in the Philippines, or during the popular revolts in Poland, Romania, et al. No Facebook during the French Revolution.

People use the tools they have. Now that we have mobile phones and internet it's hard to believe that people ever lived or rebelled without them... but they did. Focusing on Facebook and Twitter as enablers makes it all seem very modern, 5G, and open source, but they were and are only tools, and looking too much at the tools can distract from equally important factors....
The Economist, 17 Dec 11: How Luther went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation
Modern society tends to regard itself as somehow better than previous ones, and technological advance reinforces that sense of superiority. But history teaches us that there is nothing new under the sun. Robert Darnton, an historian at Harvard University, who has studied information-sharing networks in pre-revolutionary France, argues that “the marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the internet.” Social media are not unprecedented: rather, they are the continuation of a long tradition. Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.