Midway through October, when the Occupy movement was at its peak and the New York police department was keeping its distance from Zuccotti Park, I was in Berkeley, California. Outside a branch of Bank of America, a compact local Occupy camp had sprung up, apparently drawing on a mixture of battle-scarred lefties, students and the sizeable local homeless population. Their line of argument was captured on A4 flyers that were pasted on to every available surface in the surrounding streets, the most direct of which read: "Are you pissed [off] yet? You should be! No taxation of the rich. Endless war. Bankers not held responsible. Corrupt politicians. Destruction of the planet due to politicians' and corporations' greed. Can it get any worse than this?"

On a table lay small piles of a leaflet credited to the "Bureau of Public Secrets", which quoted Kalle Lasn, the editor of the Canada-based countercultural magazine Adbusters: "We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab spring recently. We are students of the situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world."

Looking at the shabby camp in front of me, any talk of Paris in 1968 seemed absurd – but then again, subsequent events in nearby Oakland, where thousands of Occupy supporters took to the streets on 3 November – perhaps suggested that such reference points were not completely misplaced. The 1968 reference also chimed with an article, not from any anarchist leaflet, but from the Financial Times, titled 2011: The Year of Global Indignation, and written by the paper's foreign affairs columnist, Gideon Rachman. "Many of the revolts of 2011 pit an internationally connected elite against ordinary citizens who feel excluded from the benefits of economic growth, and angered by corruption," he wrote. "The creation of a global mood is a mysterious thing. In 1968, before the word 'globalisation' or the internet were even invented, there were student rebellions around the world. The year 1989 saw not just the fall of the Berlin Wall but the Tiananmen Square revolt in China." And then a tentative question: "Perhaps 2011 will come to rank alongside 1968 and 1989 as a year of global revolt?"

This year has so far seen convulsive events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen. Mass protests against economic breakdown and austerity in Greece, Italy and Spain. Marches and protest camps in Chile and Israel. The arrival of Occupy Wall Street – which was cleared by police, though it will surely return in some form – and a movement-cum-meme that quickly arrived in London and beyond. And all the time, from Arab dictatorships, through to the world's banks and the Murdoch empire and now the vast edifice of the EU, the sense that interests and institutions that once seemed invincible are either cracking or being questioned as never before, while mainstream politics is left looking bereft not just of answers, but even ideas.

But what connects the crowds who are making all the noise? What could link a student camped outside St Paul's Cathedral to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vegetable-seller who, having set himself on fire, died on 4 January, and thereby set in motion the events we now know as the Arab spring? How to draw lines from the Spanish indignados to the student protesters responsible for the so-called Chilean winter?

Sometimes, the answer seems to lie in actual links between the people at the centre of events. On 26 October, for example, Occupy Wall Street was visited by a group of activists drawn together by the Egyptian Facebook-based 6 April movement, who blessed the camp with the spirit of Tahrir Square; then demonstrators outside St Paul's conducted a live video linkup with pro-democracy activists in Syria. Such moments highlight the kind of people who have taken the lead in spreading the message of protest and dissent: a new political breed, unlike their politicised predecessors in some respects, but in others, remarkably similar.

"They all looked alike. They would immediately recognise each other. They seemed to possess a silent but absolute knowledge of certain issues, but to be totally ignorant about others. Their hands were unbelievably skilful at pasting up posters, handling paving stones, spraying on walls … all the while calling for more hands to pass on the message they'd received, but not completely deciphered." So runs a passage from Chris Marker's documentary A Grin Without a Cat, about the rise and fall of the forces let loose in 1968. It popped into my head back in February, when I was reading a brilliant blog by BBC Newsnight's Paul Mason, titled Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere, which remains among the most incisive analyses of this year's events.

"At the heart of it all are young people, obviously: students; westernised; secularised," he wrote. "... a new sociological type – the graduate with no future ... With access to social media, they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyranny … They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies … They all seem to know each other … I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL [in London] occupation blogging from Tahrir Square … The common theme is the dissolution of centralised power and the demand for 'autonomy' and personal freedom."

Speaking from an international summit in France, Mason has expanded on that thought, which he has now poured into a book to be published in January. His travels this year, he explains, have hardened his belief that what ties together 2011's tumultuous events is tangled up with new(ish) means of communication, and a new sense of what it is to be politically organised. Once you're networked via social media, he says, you are open to profound changes in "who you are and what your personal space is". The idea of any seemingly arbitrary authority standing in the way of all that can easily become an affront – and at the same time, your means of communication offers you a method of opposition and resistance: online, in the real world, or both. This is the essential story of, say, the hundreds of thousands of people who responded to the 2010 death of the young Egyptian Khaled Said by joining the massively influential We are all Khaled Said Facebook group, or the summer's Direct Democracy Now! protests in Athens, said to have been organised solely through social media.

For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in the tent community: this year's most iconic archetype, which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. "One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it," he says. "In one sense, it's a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you've lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you're a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde? It's probably sitting in a square, in a tent."

And what of all those historical comparisons? Might 2011 be another 1968, or 1989? Mason's favoured comparison is a much more distant year, when abortive revolts spread across Europe at speed, and two fired-up German radicals wrote The Communist Manifesto. "I think it's going to be seen more in terms of 1848," he says. "1968 was a cultural thing: it only came to street fighting in Czechoslovakia, the black ghettoes of the US and Paris. In 1989, apart from Romania, there was as much coming from above, through diplomacy, as there was from below. Only in 1848 have we had an explosion that goes from one country to another as fast the mode of communication of the time, and then doesn't stop, and feeds off a zeitgeist that is about freedom, which crosses borders, and involves people identifying with each other from very different cultures."