Since the Appearance over 40 years ago of Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, some observers of Middle East regional politics have ascribed great, if largely unexplained, societal significance to the role of information and communications in this rapidly changing and invariably hard to read region. Those persuaded by the profound if uncertain sociopolitical role of communications were both rewarded and analytically challenged by the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979. This upheaval may be characterized as the first political revolution in the Middle East, or anywhere else, that might not have succeeded had it not been for the information revolution. Although those of us who witnessed this cataclysmic event first hand did not as yet have the term “information revolution” as part of our conceptual tool-kit, we did document in rich if unsystematic detail the crucial and central role played by the accoutrements of communications in Iran’s upheaval.