You're not just watching a revolution

As you've probably seen recently, the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have had the Social Media 'experts' around the globe saying "I told you so".

Yep, Social Media has been given the credit for the biggest political events in the last few years. From toppling dictators through to funding the campaign for the first black American President, you can find the Web 2.0 gurus claiming the credit.

But as some technology and social commentators such as Malcolm Gladwell have stated "the French didn’t need Twitter to overthrow the monarchy and the American Revolution happened without Facebook".

Now, I'm not going to state who's right, wrong or missing the point here , as I think there's another important aspect that needs to be covered...

Social Media isn't just changing the political landscape. It's now changing everything from the way people consume media (e.g. try watching live tv events without following the back-channel of Twitter, once you've started things are never the same) or the way they shop (e.g. try asking a teenage girl not to Facebook her friends from the fitting room of TopShop).

So to those who say we're now seeing a revolution unfold in several North African countries using the different social platforms... I say think bigger.

You're not just watching a revolution, you're participating in one!

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