Sometimes an event that you hoped would be insightful, engaging and full of practical suggestions turns out a bit differently. I could say that of the social media event at the Hansard Society, which formed part of The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Social Sciences week. Okay, so there weren't too many practical suggestions but, as Meatloaf famously said, two out of three ain't bad.

Hmmm, I wonder if Meatloaf is on Twitter? @RealMeatLoaf

Anyway, insightful and engaging it was. The event started by smashing some commonly-held misconceptions about the use of social media in the so-called Arab Spring.

With the rise and rise of Twitter, you might think that the revolutions convulsing the middle east were a direct result of this new activity, subverting the authorities and elevating the people to a previously-unknown status. And you would be wrong. As long ago as the Egyptian revolution of 1919, telegram was used as a way of getting news to the outside world. It worked in exactly the same way as modern social media in that it was merely a tool for getting the news out to an unsuspecting world. Nothing new there then.

The premise seemed to be that Twitter and its cohorts, Facebook and mobile messaging, merely amplify what is going on already and bring news to the waiting media, who then take the story on and make sense of the ‘noise'.

Some paranoid States have tried to counter potential revolutionaries by censorship. We learned that where the Chinese close everything down, the Russians employ a different approach by flooding the blogosphere with fake blogs, spreading disinformation and massively increasing the ‘noise'.

Luckily, if you're a revolutionary, Twitter seems to bypass this. As the excellent Alberto Nardelli, creator of Tweetminster, told us - the truth or otherwise of a first Tweet makes no difference either way. Even if it is a fake, it is the reaction to it that counts. And this, he said, was a universal truth throughout history. It was always the reaction to messages or rumours that determined if something would happen or would not happen.

Various members of parliament were on hand to tell us, on a more parochial note, that mass email campaigns were now so ubiquitous that MPs and Lords were struggling under the weight of thousands of emails a week, impossible to process without an army of staff. As Baroness Deech told us: "If you want an answer from me, write to me!"

The Baroness also said politicians should be wary of investing too much time online which garnered the skewed demographic of the views of those who use the new social media against the views of those who don't.

On the supply side, a nice young lady drafted in from California by Facebook to advise politicians how to use the social networking site more effectively had one big piece of advice for them - "Don't be boring!"

Amen to that.

Tony Hillman