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Twenty years ago, almost to the day, the world witnessed the protests of nearly a million Chinese in Tiananmen Square. On June 5th, 1989 the military moved in to clear the square and as many as 2,500 protesters were killed, with ten thousand or more injured. Back then, the dissenters reportedly rounded themselves up by sending faxes around the country, calling for the union that was eventually broken in such dramatic circumstances in the centre of Beijing. I'm not sure of the last time I sent a fax, but it's been a while, and what I recall about the process is that they often tended to get lost at the receiving end (or so the receiver tended to say to me).

In June 2009, nowhere is it more clear that the networked world has moved on than the unfolding scenes from the so-called "Twitter" Revolution in Iran. Images of street protests and beatings by government empowered agents are making their way out, and then back in, fuelling a combustible political scene that Iranian authorities want to cover up.

This isn't the first uprising to tap the Internet, but it's the latest to test the limits on controls and to use new ideas to evade government censorship. Iran is almost the perfect place to perform such an experiment - there is a lively blogger culture in a country where two-thirds of the 70 million population are under the age of 30. Some 45 million of the population have cell phones and 23 million have Internet access. Pretty good demographics for such a test. This youthful population are what the IT savvy call "digital natives". Around the world this group, who have grown up online, will force businesses and governments to operate differently and more openly, whether they like it or not.

In the UK, the cringe-worthy image of Gordon Brown "connecting" with his electorate on You Tube and performing the most comic of false smiles, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Iranian situation. Gordon Brown gets it - the importance of social IT that is - he just doesn't "get it". While understanding the power of these tools, he is the wrong sort of politician to engage in this way - awkward and dour.

In the US, on the flipside, Barack Obama is currently the undisputed champion of both understanding and implementing the power of social IT - his election campaign pulled together the "network" in a way that showed the true power of tools such as Facebook and YouTube. Exit polls revealed that Obama had won nearly 70% of the vote among Americans under 25 - the highest percentage since US exit polling began. It's no coincidence that one of Obama's key strategists was 24 year-old Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's co-founders. It was he who crafted the Obama campaign's highly effective use of social networking sites as well as podcasting and mobile messaging.

And his government continue to embrace these tools while in power. This week, with the chaos spreading in Iran, the US State Department wanted a way to influence events on the ground without overtly getting involved. Hearing the news that engineers at Twitter were planning to take the website offline to perform some maintenance, officials in Washington made a call to ask them not to. For almost a week, the Iranian election has been the most discussed topic on the microblogging site, and it's not just the usual guff, like Paris Hilton's take on the Supreme Leader (poor dress sense/ headgear): there are plenty of intelligent reports from eyewitnesses in Tehran as well as links to photos and videos of events, reported almost in real time. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are the new soapboxes and organizing centres. As Thomas Friedman asked in the NY Times: "Is Facebook to Iran's Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran's Islamic Revolution? Is Twitter to Iranian moderates what muezzins were to Iranian mullahs?"

As soon as Iran's leaders had launched a crackdown on public protests, there was an almost immediate switch to digital protesting - Twitter became a "virtual" town square. Its avatars - the small, identifying pictures used on its pages - turned green to match the campaign colour used by the disputing challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi. Twitter had become a way for those outside Iran to learn about the turmoil inside the country and then beam back the information to protesters cut off from the news. Similarly, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr are stocked with photos and videos that the mullahs would be keen that the world doesn't see. These new uses showed that censorship and Internet controls had the main effect of producing ingenious ways of evading the crackdown. It's very hard, if not impossible, for a government to control all of the swaths of information that flow internationally through the internet.

China continues to try to do it, but with less and less success. This week authorities in Beijing ordered Google to stop users of its Chinese language service accessing overseas websites. According to state media reports on Friday, Google was being "punished" for linking to pornographic content. The sense is that the crackdown was likely to be a mixture of the government's recent hardline approach on censorship and increasingly bitter rivalry with Baidu, a domestic search engine, which holds 59% market share. Although the authorities accused only Google of allowing links to lurid content, similar material could be found on Baidu.

What's clear is that it is harder for a dictatorial regime to operate its censorship policies in the light of these new social networking technologies. The situation in Iran and China may well tell an interesting tale for a host of other governments and businesses around the world. Either embrace and understand the power of this new world order, or you are going to run into some serious problems. In a business context the positive and negative power of social IT are increasingly evident. Using these tools is now a critical part of brand management, and also a very effective way of connecting with clients and consumers. On the negative side, if a disgruntled employee or customer has an axe to grind he or she can do some real damage to a business using these networking tools. As an example, a US jet manufacturer that I know quite well, has been publicly damaged by a disgruntled former employee taking his grievances to the airwaves via a well read blog that discusses the uglier internal side of that business. If you do a Google search for this company, this blog appears 2nd in the list of options, and is undoubtedly read by stakeholders and other employees of the company, which can't be good for business. This example is certainly not unique.

It's clear that a successful organisation, whether it be a military dictatorship like Iran's, a pharmaceutical company in the US, or a sidestreet hairdresser, needs to operate in a much more refined and subtle way, which for some could mean fundamental changes to "business" models. This will probably entail more listening, watching and being in tune and in touch, engaging with interested or agitated parties, being responsive to communities - which for an aggro, insecure dictator may be akin to "an old dog being taught new tricks".

This gathering storm is changing the environment in which businesses and all types of government will operate. Some leaderships - like in China, or Iran for example can attempt to delay the process, but it will become increasingly difficult. It will affect these leaderships in different ways. The US car industry, for example, might have suffered less if it had tapped into online social networks discussing motoring trends; perhaps the banking world could regain some public trust by engaging with interested digital communities. They could read my blog for example...