Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was on-line, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversa-tions among people who had never been on the site.
There's some definite connection to this to network theory of those like Stuart Kaufmann. You don't need every node to be directly connected to create a robust network, particularly when there are other layers--here interpersonal connections, cellular, etc.
