Is the medium still the message?

While reading the articles for class, my mind kept drifting back to another college class, in Canada  over  thirty years ago.  As an english major at McGill,  Marshall McLuhan, often revered, sometimes disparaged was often discussed.

The two questions that arose from the readers were:

1.  What is the purpose of technology? Is it a question of context over content?

2.  Who drives who? - as McLuhan more eloquently wrote; "We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."

Technology certainly is a powerful tool, and we need to be careful  that the context does not overwhelm the content.  Technology is an agent for communication, but again as McLuhan would say it should not overpower the conversation.
Technology does not drive history, certainly it has an increasingly important role in shaping history, as witnessed in the Middle East.
But it is important to understand the difference between a "tool" such as twitter allowing the conversation to happen, and underlying root causes for historical events.