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Many in the Twitterverse are transfixed today by the uprising in Iran following the contested presidential election there. Suddenly, an online platform has become a window into national drama with international implications. Twitter – a technology invented in the U.S. – has become the reporting channel from within a dictatorship out to the rest of the world.

A similar information wave rose up in China around the protests that peaked in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. Then the technology being used was USENET, a pre-Web messaging network that a few academically based computers and modem-connected computers could access to reach the world outside of China.

It’s when leading edge technologies play key roles in world-changing events that we tend to notice the power they have in affecting human life on the planet. This was also the case immediately following the tsunami of 2004 when photos and videos of the event and its aftermath were distributed around the world.

We are amazed and grateful when our digital inventions plug us in to big events and movements. In between those episodes, many of us may find the latest communications technologies to be useful, helpful, handy and entertaining, but we don’t seem to be able to use them to generate change on the scale that we see in crisis-driven usage.

The technology is more difficult to employ impressively in the causative direction than in the effective direction.

We face what could prove to be a global scale crisis from a combination of economic and political trends combined with the impacts of global warming. We could mobilize millions of people to a degree of intensity comparable to that happening in Tehran for the purpose of preventing or at least mitigating these crises. But the social use of technology has not reached that level of sophistication.

Crisis first. Then exemplary use of technology. We need to learn how to reverse this order of things.