BBC College of Journalism Blog - A vigorous and robust discussion about journalism from every perspective.

I'm not going to argue with my distinguished colleague Kevin Marsh's latest post denying that it was Twitter that did it for the protestors in Tunisia and Egypt.

I'm not going to dispute that the gatherings of hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square, that drove the final stages of the revolution, grew despite the restrictions Mubarak's dying regime inflicted on the web and mobile phones.

I'm not even going to disagree that some over-excited new media gurus have been over-claiming the organisational and political power of social media.

But I am going to take issue with the positing of the argument in a yah-boo-sucks, oh yes it was - oh no it wasn't (delete as appropriate) social media wot won it framework.

At the risk of enraging not just Kevin but a whole new bunch of academics and commentators, it's a bit like arguing that Gutenburg had nothing/everything to do with the Reformation.

Surely a more interesting, useful and creative framework is to ask: just what was the nature of its role? How (in)significant was it? What can we learn from that? How does the web/printing press influence real events?

One of the most powerful techniques that authoritarian regimes use to remain in control of a cowed populace is to fragment and isolate opposition; to make people feel alone, enfeebled and incapable of rising up together against their oppressor.

Just as the printing press enabled the sharing and spreading of ideas, so the web and its burgeoning offspring the social web's raison d'être is sharing - and that could be anything from your favourite cake recipe to (subversive) new political ideologies.

And that act of sharing might influence the process of revolution by empowering previously frightened individuals into collective action.

Yes, of course it was real people and real events - like market seller Mohamed
Bouazizi's desperate act of self immolation - that created a reaction that caused other real events to happen; that then caused other, bigger real events to happen.

Yes, of course it was the events in Tahrir Square as well as substantive actions elsewhere, perhaps by the Egyptian military or by the White House, that caused the defenestration of Mubarak.

And yes of course the social web in this part of the world is all about the educated, middle-class youth, not the mass of the 82 million people in Egypt.

But Maryam Ishani shows in her research for this month's Foreign Policy that the one thing the April 6 Youth Movement, a key group of anti-Mubarak activists, understood in Egypt was the value in and power of connecting online and offline activity.

Revolutions are highly complex phenomena that can't be reduced down to simple causes. Social media caused neither the Egyptian nor the Tunisian revolutions, but like conventional media it had a role to play. The real question is what was that role?