Passive social media VS offline insurgency

"The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.
Apparently even during a revolution."

"... the opposite of what many have taken for granted about the role of social media in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak; that the disruption of the regular functioning of social media may have contributed to revolutionary organizing more than its utility. Then-President Mubarak's decision to shutdown Internet and cellphone service may have shifted cognitive and social processes in favor of revolutionary change."

""We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don't — on a mass scale that has interesting implications," he said."

"When the French tried to block their transmissions, Fanon wrote in his 1959 book, "A Dying Colonialism," the rebels had even more power, because the listeners were no longer passive."

http://beyondthechoir.org/diary/95/limits-of-social-media-in-revolutiona...