Ivanna, a young woman living in New York City leaves her three hundred dollar sidekick (T-Mobile's version of the IPhone) in a taxi. Over the course of the next several days, the story of the 16 year old named Sasha who had found but refused to return the lost phone to Ivanna so mobilizes New Yorkers that the New York City police arrest the 16 year old, recover the stolen Sidekick and return it to Ivanna.

Ha, you say?

No way would one of the busiest police departments in the country involve itself in such a trivial problem; 10 years ago, maybe even 5, you would be right but not today.

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This is a true story albeit a remarkable one. Without the persistence and zeal of Ivanna's friend Evan Guttman, a programmer in the financial industry, the story would not have made it to Digg and then to the front page of the New York Times.

And Ivanna would not retrieved her phone.

Clay Shirky, in his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, uses the story of the lost phone to illustrate several points:

• There is no more social animal than man.
• Due to the emergence of social media, the barriers that once prevented the average man or woman to galvanize astonishing numbers of people to accomplish the unthinkable are gone.
• Collective action can now be achieved on an unprecedented scale.
• Sociology has long taught that one cannot apply the psychology of individuals to group behavior; people in groups behave in ways which cannot be predicted by studying individual minds.

Many theorize that the so called Arab Spring began with the overthrow of long term Egyptian dictator Mubarak. Furthermore, many young Egyptians are named Facebook apparently because their parents believe that it was ordinary people like themselves, talking, planning and organizing on Facebook which brought down Mubarak and his government.

Over 50 years ago, we witnessed the effects of young people banding together in order to change the world.