Gyuri Lassan, then a 20-year-old construction worker, had seen flyers around university campuses in Budapest advertising meetings for the organization of a student revolution to fight the communists prior to Oct. 23, 1956. That evening, thousands of students met at the building of the Hungarian National Radio, linked arms and began a protest against the Communist regime. During his morning commute the next day, Lassan heard on the radio that the students had broken into the building. Given the unusual morning traffic, rumors of an uprising spread quickly through the city. “The whole of Pest knew what was going on,” Lassan said. “People were talking to each other on the street, the executives were coming down out of the office buildings.” In Iran, Ansara believes that the Internet and cell phones allow for a faster, less centralized movement, but “if Twitter’s gone, they’ll find another way to communicate, even if it’s going up to the rooftop” and shouting. While the technology of dissent may evolve, he said, “fundamentally this is all the same process, which is self-organization plus inspired leadership.” Historically, new technologies have consistently shaped collective action, said Paul Buhle, former professor of American Civilization at Brown University and scholar of social movements. In the 1920s, the radio stations WEVD and WCFL sought to exploit their new medium to bring the Socialist and Labor movements to wider audiences, he said. While these first stations, whose call letters referred respectively to Eugene V. Debs and the Chicago Federation of Labor, failed to significantly bolster their causes, pirate radio would later become invaluable to dissident movements throughout the world. But technology can be a double-edged sword for social movements. “The way strikes used to succeed was by stopping people from going across the picket line, and often that meant getting into fistfights with them. Then came video cameras and it became impossible to throw a punch” for fear of prosecution, Buhle said. More recently, technology has served movements by furthering accountability. “It’s much harder now for police to act horribly because of the threat that somebody will have a cell phone and record it,” Buhle said. Citing past abuses against protesters at political conventions, he said “if these had been recorded and made instantly available on YouTube it might have made a difference” And “what’s true for Chicago or Minneapolis or New York is true for Iran too,” Buhle said. “It doesn’t mean authorities can be stopped, but it makes it much more difficult for them to deny who is doing the violence.”