What’s taking place right now is very similar to the Revolution of 1848 and there was no Internet for that one.

Beginning in France, 1848 saw a social revolution sweep across much of Europe, toppling most governments of the time. Monarchies and ministers alike fell with some like Metternich of Austria having been in power as long as Mubarak has been in Egypt. Yet there was no Twitter in Vienna in 1848. No telephone (that was 30 years away), no telegraph (invented in 1844 but not yet deployed in Central Europe), railroads were just beginning to be built, and even Reuters’ carrier pigeons were a dozen years in the future. All communication other than oratory or theater was written in 1848 and went the slow way, by ship, horse, or foot. And yet, in a single year, nearly the entire continent saw revolutionary change.

The simple explanation for 1848 was that people had been unhappy for a long time and were ready for a change. They were angry and the power brokers of the time like Metternich were old, fat, and too used to power. Doesn’t that sound like much of the Middle East today? These nations have old leaders, rigid bureaucracies, and very young populations that don’t really know what they have to gain or lose, but just want something different.

So Tunisia fell and then maybe Egypt. The King of Jordan fired his cabinet, trying to look like part of the solution, not the problem. It will be interesting to see if that works. And did you read Colonel Gaddafi’s lament for the passing of the Tunisian dictator on his flank? I knew Gaddafi in the 70s and his sentiments weren’t for Tunisia but for himself.

The literal old man of the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, where the royal succession is from brother-to-brother — a system that literally can’t continue with the youngest son of the country’s founder, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, now 67 years old. It will be interesting to see if the cousins are able to work that one out. I have my doubts.

Technology will play a role in all this, of course, but revolutions are conducted by people, not electrons, and even Twitter is just a tool.

If a typical month has 30 days that’s 720 hours, a third of which we’ll guess Echo spends asleep, giving her 480 hours of texting time per month.  Fourteen thousand texts (the number was actually higher, but we’ll round it down for simplicity) divided into 480 hours is about 29 texts per hour or about one every two minutes.  Since texting is usually a binary activity (the texter sends a text for every text they receive) we can guess that Echo writes about 7,000 text messages per month, with writing probably taking twice as much time as reading.  Half an hour at the mall with a stopwatch told me the average teenage SMS message takes about 20 seconds to type (if you can call it typing) suggesting that Echo is spending about a quarter of her waking time on texting.

According to both Neilsen and the Pew Internet Life Project, Echo is an outlier, a user of texting at prodigious levels beyond her peers.  A Neilsen study from the second quarter of 2008, for example, says that mobile phone users age 13-17 send or receive an average of 1742 texts per month, which would only require 7.25 hours by my reckoning.  So Echo is an outlier, but on the other hand her data is fresher and texting IS rising at a rapid pace.

So who cares?  Advertisers care.  Kids who are texting aren’t attending to TV ads while they are doing it, nor are they reading magazines or newspapers (what are those?). So advertising is coming quickly to SMS.

TV executives care.  Remember those words “standard text messaging rates apply” at the end of every American Idol episode?  Well for reality television, texting means revenue.  Idol averages 30 million voters per week of which a quarter are using SMS that reportedly yields a nickel per vote to the TV producers.  Seven and a half million messages per week and 12 weeks of voting yields another $4.5 million per season for Simon and the gang.

Educators care because texting competes with other activities like paying attention at school and doing homework.  Keeping kids from texting in school is almost impossible.

To really understand the Echo phenomenon, though, you have to appreciate that she’s a very pretty girl living in a semi-rural area where kids like to complain that there isn’t anything to do.  So they gossip. If teens twittered, which studies show they don’t, Echo would be a twitterer because her peers are interested in her life.  And THAT’s what really makes her an outlier, because Echo is an opinion leader and a trend-setter and SMS — generally a one-to-one technology — isn’t well-suited for that.  So the poor girl has to work really hard to keep all her friends informed, using an antiquated interpersonal communication technology as an ad hoc social network.

What’s most interesting to me about this phenomenon is the part about teens not twittering.  All the studies show that’s true but don’t seem to look for causality.  They miss the simple point that twittering is public behavior (one-way at that!) and texting is private and bi-directional.  An adult or a teen celebrity might twitter but most regular kids see what they are communicating as too private to share with anyone other than the person for whom it is intended, much less any old creep who chooses to subscribe.  And divas like Echo, who might happily embrace a more public channel, are trapped by the tools of their audience.

Girls age 13-17 are interested in relationships (who likes who) and boys age 13-17, who would normally be interested more in things, also happen to be generally obsessed with girls age 13-17, effectively dragging boys into the sway of SMS, too, sustaining an industry.

There’s clearly a new product opportunity in here, somewhere.

Andy Hertzfeld tells how Steve Jobs used to argue for a faster-booting Macintosh citing the man-years and lives it would save.  But that’s nothing compared to the impact some twitter-like hybrid SMS product would have for a girl like Echo.  It could change her life.  Maybe even free up enough time for her to get into Duke.

And as the central node in an Idol-like SMS network, her popularity might even cover some of that Duke tuition, too.

This week more than 20 million people watched on YouTube and other video sharing sites a single performance from the ITV show Britain’s Got Talent in which a frumpy spinster from Scotland sang like an angel. You can see her astonishing performance here.

It’s not the singing that makes me write this, though the singing was good. I lived as a boy in the north of England and knew ladies like this Susan Boyle. What makes me write about it is the effect she and her singing had on the Internet and the Internet in turn had on the performance and its aftermath.

The video file as presented on YouTube is just over seven minutes and 26 megabytes long. Twenty million (and counting!) times 26 megabytes is 520 terabytes or approximately half the size of the Internet Archive. That’s 520,000 gigabytes or the equivalent of maxing-out in a single week the monthly bandwidth allotment of 260 co-lo servers at Rackspace.com. Running at top speed for a week would require 1040 such servers to do the job and we haven’t even made it to a week yet. That’s 520 million-million bytes.

Okay, so it was a nice lady singing a nice song, but what’s astounding is the performance had been round the earth twice or three times before the broadcast in the UK was even over. It was one of those seminal moments of mass-communication that showed the world was different than it used to be and thank God it didn’t require a wardrobe malfunction to do so.

What resonated with audiences about this performance was that it hit everyone – everyone – the same, as a long-coming reward for a life of good cheer and choir practice. I make documentary films from time to time and this performance is one of those emotional moments that every documentary director dreams of. It’s not the facts, you see, or even the stories that matter, it’s the emotional state of the people on-screen and how the viewer relates to them that matters. Real feelings count.

And thanks to the Internet in this instance such feelings count everywhere, it seems. For one happy moment we’re drawn together as a single audience to share a single emotional high that involves, for a change, no losers at all.

Think how rare that is, which explains its power.

Marshall McLuhan, who seems smarter every day, called it The Global Village. He said communication technology would link us together in ways we couldn’t imagine and those ways would lead to common experiences and shared values. McLuhan didn’t know about the Internet when he wrote that and he sure as Hell didn’t know about Twitter. But his prediction came true.

This Susan Boyle experience doesn’t come along very often, but with the growth of broadband technology it can’t help but happen more and more. It’s not the Super Bowl or the World Cup — it’s better. That’s because it is personal – a moment we all can share, well so far 20 million of us, one at a time.

Now the folks at Google are no doubt scratching their heads, as are the TV producers back in the UK, trying to figure how to put this effect in a bottle and make a living from it. But it can’t be done.

This is an event that was created for TV but not really anticipated by its creators, I’m guessing. They couldn’t reliably repeat it if they tried.

If they did try, it wouldn’t work.

That’s the beauty, because every time this happens, every time our Global Village comes together in this way, it’s because of a shared delight that makes us feel more alike and less apart.

We could all use more of that.

And the next time it happens, now we all know what to do.