Unlike when utilities are down, life doesn’t appear to go quiet when the Internet is down. Or cut off.

While on-ramps to social media sites are blocked, as we see in Egypt this week, something else gets to work. Call it the Internet effect. The connected world has learned to find its way around broken nodes, to bypass toll-gates, and evade any form of censorship — soft or otherwise.

This is what happened in Egypt on Thursday.

Foreigns journalists were being attacked and arrested, including two AP journalists and a Guardian reporter who were beaten up. (Listen to the Guardian’s Jack Shenker’s recording of this.) He was released and was able to blog about it:

“Along with nearby protesters I fled back down the street before stopping at what appeared to be a safe distance. A few ordinarily dressed young men were running in my direction, and I assumed they were demonstrators also escaping the oncoming security troops. Two came towards me and suddenly threw out punches, sending me to the ground. I was then hauled back up by the scruff of the neck and dragged towards the advancing police lines… All attempts I made to tell them in Arabic and English that I was an international journalist were met with more punches and slaps;”

Other voices are getting out, too, despite the bans and threats. The next few days will certainly reveal if such attempts can contain the uprising, or backfire.

While Washington wrestles with the right response, other countries (and not just those countries in the region) are obviously watching this live-action drama closely. “Authoritarian governments” observed Clay Shirky,  “stifle communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight.” But any attempts to promote social media as the tools for regime change are wrong, he warns. This is not what the Twittering masses want to believe.

Promoting access to media and social media as a basic human right is complicated from a foreign policy perspective. Consider what Wikileaks has just done!

But the lesson is clear.  The world is quite a different place now, with amplified communication and greater means of collaboration.

To “inform, sell, engage and support.” How much simpler could anyone have put it?

There are many questions that could be addressed with this answer. Such as:

• “Why in the world should we mess with social media?”
• “I hear Twitter is a total waste of time. Give me a few reasons why it isn’t?”

Lionel Menchaca has put up this schema that I wish I had a few days back. It’s outlines how Dell uses social media in Brand Reputation Discussions, Customer Service and Segment Discussions.

But here’s something that bears watching –and I am certain it will end well.

In a response to this post by Menchaca, a customer going by the name of Maria posts a looong comment. It’s very reminiscent but not as harsh as the infamous Dell Hell post. She goes on to state that:

I believe I have given Dell every reasonable opportunity to make this right, but I cannot afford to lose any more time and valuable productivity because of a defective product. I would like to send the computer back for a refund.

As a big fan of Digital Nomads, I’ve been watching -and dissecting –Dell’s engagement across many social media channels. I can be sure this is going to come to one more grand denouement.