New media technology inhibiting political participation?

As Annie responded to my last blog post about how the advances in new media technology have taken political participation and mobilization of the masses to a whole new level, she asked, "do you think the new media technology can inhibit political participation?".
This got me thinking, after I had looked at many of the positive effects of new media on Political participation, how on earth this same technology could hinder it at all. I realized that if you were to take the new media out of the equation, how we were even able to mobilize and organize protests, marches, or demonstrations of any kind?
I think that a possible hindrance that new media presents is that new media becomes the "crutch" that everyone comes to depend on. If thousands of millions of individuals didn't have cell phones, blogs, e-mail accounts, or facebook profiles, it would be a daunting and incredibly hard task to participate politically in such events like a gay rights advocacy march or something of that nature.
In Bugejas article on the divide on interpersonal relationships due to social networking sites online, I believe that the same effect can be placed on political participation due to new media technologies. If you were to put together a rally for a cause that you strongly believed in and you had no way of communicating it to the community technologically, how would you go about doing it?
I recently rented and watched the movie "MILK" and there is a scene where one of the characters is setting up a march, and uses a pay phone to call friends to tell them to call friends, etc. It took an intense amount of dedication and work to put these types of events together, not that it doesn't now, but we are at such an advantage with theses new technologies, that I think we have maybe become a bit lazy with our participation and wait for it to come to us over a facebook event in invitation rather than going out and searching for the events to attend and support.
I still think that new media technologies are an advance in the political participation realm, however I believe this is the beginning of a shift of lackadaisical behavior regarding the initiative to actively participate rather than simply joining an online group.