The news media and internet social networking media are largely crediting the internet and social networking for the political upheavals occurring in Egypt these days.  But just listen to a more sane assessment:

Lack of cell and landline phone service could prove to be a bigger obstacle to demonstration organizers than the internet disruption. Many of Egypt's impoverished citizens don't rely on the Web in their day-to-day lives anyway, said Parvez Sharma, a documentary filmmaker on Middle Eastern culture.

"These people," Sharma said of Egypt's low-income population, "are not Twittering and Facebooking and e-mailing. They've never even heard of the damned internet, most of them."

Calling and text messaging is how most Egyptians keep in touch and where most of the organizing has been done on the ground there, said Sharma, who has kept in contact with dozens of friends in Egypt during the protests.

 -CNN

So while high-profiled Facebookers and Twitterers are congratulating each other and slapping each other on their backs, the social-media-uniformed masses are at the heart of the insurgency. 

I actually have another point of view altogether.  I believe that if those masses were sitting in their homes Twittering and Facebooking and e-mailing that they wouldn't be protesting much at all.  They'd just be venting through social networking.  Social networking today is just a bone that world-powers-that-be are glad that us dog-people chew on to placate our yearning for face-to-face socializing.  Keep the kids, their parents, and other citizens off the streets by transforming society into a social network based upon the home computer and  the streets will stay calm.  For now.  Until the day when social networking can be conducted through the ubiquitousness of non-held (not hand-held--one needs one's hand to fling stones and bombs!) personal social-cyber interfaces.  Imagine a mass of people commingled in the streets of the capital of a major country  and protesting face-to-face while remaining social-networking informed through tightly body-integrated personal social interface gizmos.  That day - grows near.  Of course, as long as governments keep control of the communications infrastructure and can shut it down when they feel threatened, the new technology can be neutralized.  And that is why a People (as in We, the People...) must strive to grow with technology without ever becoming completely dependent upon it.  Know your streets.  Always be prepared to walk, to run, to huddle and whisper with your neighbors in the shadows of backyards and alleys.  If you ever lose the ability for meaningful face-to-face interactivity, as a People you are in peril.