Posted by Andrew Edwards on February 16th, 2011 at 4:35 pm

A couple of weeks back when Egypt was in uproar, folks were saying it was because of Facebook. I was saying it was not.

People are still saying it was at least partly because of Facebook. I am still saying it was not.

But when I saw the now-famous protester in Tahrir-square say into the MSNBC microphone "This is our Facebook!", I knew one thing were true:

The revolution may not have been on Facebook, but Facebook was on the revolution.

There's an important lesson in this.

Revolutions get started because people are deeply unhappy. And when they get word that others have it better because they are not ruled by eighty-two year old autocrats, autocratic regimes get all wobbly and weak and then sometimes they fall. Revolutions get started when people whisper in the marketplace; when they phone each other; when they text each other; yes, and even when they post to Facebook. But revolutions really take off when everybody is suddenly in the street making demands and there are too many of them to beat down with nightsticks and when they in fact outnumber the bullets in the regime's arsenal.

For those of us who watch from the digital sidelines, the victory is not Facebook's. The victory is the Internet's in general: and by that I mean a victory for I.P. addressable devices and the way people use them. This means web sites, text strings, Facebook pages, Twitter, and the general aura of worldly awareness that accompanies the global cloud to wherever it digitally spreads.

That said, Facebook apparently has taken on a meaning of its own. Perhaps when that Egyptian protester said of the revolution itself "This is our Facebook", he meant something worthy of note. What he seemed to be saying was that for him, the very notion of Facebook represented an intoxicating sense of freedom, of democracy, of western-style expressiveness entirely removed from the closeted world of straitened, conservative religious authoritarianism.

I find this rather more profound than the mere notion that Facebook technology enabled a few early meetings of the revolution, which would have been done another way had there been no Facebook.

Because what "This is our Facebok" means is cultural, not technological. I believe Facebook became the recognizable stand-in for all that is different about digitally enabled, democratized publication and the way it cannot be controlled because it has no headquarters; no "press"; no steering committee; no boss.

"Facebook" becomes a stand-in for a huge generational shift, in which digitally literate youth, deeply aware of what is possible (via media) if they are able to grab their freedom before they are too old, decide that enough is enough and that it is time to re-think the entire structure of society.

"Facebook" somehow came to mean liberation itself, at least to one protester (and where there is one, there are many). And whether Facebook deserves this accolade becomes irrelevant. It has taken on a cultural life of its own that far exceeds its importance as a technology and beyond anything that might actually be done with Facebook. The sense of oppenness and possibility engendered by the advent of a full-blown Internet became conflated with the relatively narrow offering of a private company called Facebook. But that's fine with me if it helped knock down an oppressive dictator.

Finally, this Egyptian revolution was a youth revolution: carried out by those who have grown up with interactive technology; with the personal empowerment that brings; with the skepticism common to those with access to more information than the powerful might prefer; with a sense that all limits are really artificial boundaries set by those who have already sought to stake a claim.

Youth everywhere inherits a certain injustice, in the sense that "all the good stuff is already taken"; but with youthful energy and new ideas (like "information wants to be free") that the elders barely can grasp, they at some point are bound to prevail--in Egypt, in Libya, in a swing state somewhere in the Midwest of the U.S.A. Anywhere, everywhere.

So I stand by what I said: the revolution was not on Facebook.

But Facebook was definitely on the revolution, and that may be even more important.