Just read an article in Technology Review about how the social media was used in the Arab Spring.
It's a good article, worth reading, but I can't help but to think that our need to always spot the next big thing has created this illusion that the recent uprisings are the first time new technology has played such a big role.
New technology has always been one of the main catalyst in political and social revolutions going all the way back to Martin Luther and the printing press.
More recently I was able to find a 1989 Time magazine article (Fax Against Fiction) on how faxes were used to get the word out about the Tienanmen Square massacre.
