Technology and revolutions

Interesting story in today's Washington Post about how text messaging is the tool of choice for democracy advocates in the Gulf states.

Demonstrators use text messaging to mobilize followers, dodge authorities and swarm quickly to protest sites. Candidates organizing for the region's limited elections use text services to call supporters to the polls or slyly circulate candidate slates in countries that supposedly ban political groupings. And through it all, anonymous activists blast their adversaries with thousands of jokes, insults and political limericks.

Remember how technology put a stop to the 1991 Soviet coup?

When Gorbachev found himself under house arrest at his Black Sea dacha, he resorted to a high-tech twist on time-honored Russian dissident tradition by creating a samizdat account of his plight using the family camcorder

all the world eventually saw it on CNN;

According to the Washington Post, the city of Togliatti "tuned in" to the events in Moscow by accessing MCI Insight (a US database) over a telex connection;

According to the Economist, Russian president Yeltsin, besieged in the Russian Parliament building, used fax to transmit communiques to Western colleagues for release to the mass media;

According to numerous press reports the RELCOM network, tying Russian academics and businessmen to the Internet - carried both news of the attempted coup to outsiders, and words of encouragement and news of foreign governments' responses back to those in Moscow and elsewhere in the fragmenting USSR.

And then of course, there's the role printing press played in the Reformation.