Revolution and New Technologies

Based on the quote from this chapter, "Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technologies- it happens when society adopts new behaviors," do you agree or disagree? Cite examples to support your position.

I completely agree with Shirky's statement "Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technologies- it happens when society adopts new behaviors". Chapter 6 of Shirky's Here Comes Everybody talks about how technology has enabled society to communicate more and better than in the past, and new technologies to communicate arise almost daily. The one point Shirky makes, though, is that all of these new inventions of how to communicate more effectively and all the cool new tools we have on our cell phones, etc. are based off our basic need to communicate with others; we've just jazzed them up a little bit. As he says, "It is a curiosity of technology that it creates new characteristics in old institutions," so society being curious on how to send a letter to more than one person and maybe even in a faster way than postal mail ultimately lead us to email and part of the reason for the invention of the telephone was so people could communicate over lengthy distances and faster since mail would take even weeks to reach its destination, and so on. All the technologies that have been discovered today have been based off of many and many people's curiousities put into real life, but ultimately are based off the basic communication skills people are innately born with already. Also as Shirky says, "Seen in that light, social tools don't create collective action- they merely remove the obstacles to it," so again the tools we have to use to communicate today haven't appeared out of nowhere, they are instead useful tools to make it easier to do what humans were made to do- socialize. For these statements above and reading Shirky's chapter is what makes me agree with the quote above. Behaviors of society that are foreign to existant ones are the things that are revolutionary, but new technologies just stem from current or even old practices that already exist in society.