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It is high time that such essays (see link) put the role of the modern means of communications in their appropriate relations to the human agency, who are employing them to struggle for their freedom.
In the Interaction of MIND – Human Agency, Structure and CULTURE, the driving momentum of any social transformation or evolution, in the history of mankind, be it today or in the past, has always been the Human-Agency and not the means of communications.
Otherwise; to mention a classical example; when workers (not the scattered peasants) stage a strike and get a better wage, it is as ridiculous as entertaining the notion that the workers succeeded in their struggle, since the firm provided them with the social context where they could work together.
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"To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.*
Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.
Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it, providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.
But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In any case, the internet was turned off at decisive moments in the Egyptian uprising, and it was ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime, not the hybrid youth of the global professional classes." (cf. The globalisation of revolution - Opinion - Al Jazeera English)
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