The thought was triggered by something we haven't seen in the recent uprisings: the storming of state television networks -- even if in Egypt there were some late moves to assemble in front of the network headquarters. In historical terms, control of a broadcast medium has been critical to revolutions. Because most of those broadcast media have been infrastructure-heavy, to contest state control of them, a revolutionary movement needed to have either the resources to build and defend parallel infrastructure or the force necessary to seize existing infrastructure from the state. 

But with social media, popular movements now have access to low-cost, easily accessible, one-to-many broadcasting tools that make contesting classical broadcast media like television and radio unnecessary. 

I understand that within Egypt, television is more broadly accessible than online social media. But the success of the uprising was due to the way in which social media facilitated organizing the movement within Egypt combined with the way it facilitated broadcasting information to shape opinion beyond Egypt, and in particular in Washington.

I hesitate to say that Twitter, Youtube and Facebook represent the first time in history that such powerful broadcast tools are so easily and widely available to popular uprisings. But I'm having trouble thinking of another example.