One of the best things about Newsnight in recent months has been its economics editor Paul Mason. His reports, especially from Greece, have blended concise global analysis with sympathetic news from the frontline, revealing angry and scared people staring into a bleak future amid the wreckage of shattered certainties.

So his analysis of global unrest was one I looked forward to immensely, especially having myself spent chunks of last year watching revolutions unfold in Africa and the Middle East and protests grow in Europe. What was it that suddenly propelled a generation on to the streets in search of social justice? And how real are the claimed connections between technology and protest, between the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square and their pale imitations in tents by St Paul's Cathedral?

Sadly, there are few answers to be found in this book, which has Mason flitting from Athens to Arizona to Cairo searching for answers to why it's "kicking off everywhere". For all his undoubted reporting skills and passion for the cause, this collection of essays is little more than a jumble of often questionable generalisations, tendentious assertions and impressionistic sketches. Ultimately, Mason is let down by his desire to force the messy mosaic of last year's amazing events into the straitjacket of his own ideological leanings.

So when Lehman Brothers crashed, it became possible to imagine "the collapse of capitalism"; last year was all about "a revolt against Hayek and the principles of selfishness and greed he espoused". Mason claims the present system offers the poorest a route out of poverty but only by impoverishing the workforces of the west, ignoring the fact that recent decades have seen global rises in living standards, health and lifestyles unmatched in history.

Huge urban slums, meanwhile, are supposedly "the hidden consequence of 20 years of untrammelled market forces, greed, neglect and graft", not the highly complex communities they have always been, offering rural migrants an often brutal entry point to a more prosperous life. And his claim that the deprived half of humanity, those struggling to live on $2 a day, are impervious to the internet age ignores the transformative power of mobile communications he himself witnessed in Kenya.

From the opening pages, the evils of capitalism and neoliberalism are presented as one of they key causes of the Arab spring. This ignores another uncomfortable truth for Mason: the spark was lit by the self-immolation of a fruit vendor who was a repressed entrepreneur, and this is why it reverberated so strongly around the region, where so many people's attempts to earn a living were hampered by corrupt officials and governing kleptocracies.

Even in Egypt, which Mason uses as a key example, these are false targets. One analyst told me last month his biggest worry was that market-based reforms just starting to deliver results before the revolution would be choked off now, because of their association with Gamal Mubarak and the corporatist stranglehold of a military dictatorship that still controls perhaps one quarter of the economy.

The seed of this book was planted with an impassioned blog that went viral, which Mason wrote following a discussion about the Paris Commune with 60 students in a Bloomsbury squat. This sets the tone for the whole book, sprinkled as it is with references to Chomsky and Debord. Mason claims the subsequent Millbank student protests were "one of those unforeseeable events that catalyse everything", while on the "flame-lit" face of protesters "you saw the look of people who had discovered the power of mayhem". There is lots of this sort of stuff.

And rather annoyingly, many of the students  and others  are repeatedly referred to by their Twitter tags. It is all a bit Dad dancing at the disco, an impression reinforced by bumbling forays into pop culture, such as calling hip-hop artists "black dudes with diamond earrings" and muddling up dubstep and "the grime".

As one would expect from a journalist with Mason's pedigree, there are some sharp ideas lurking among all this. His take on technology is often acute, examining the impact of networked individuals, the power of collaboration and the challenge horizontal social networks pose to repressive states, corporations and hermetically sealed ideologies. And he is right to identify the rise of the graduate without a future as a potent force in many parts of the world along with the impact of rising food prices. But unfortunately, this book does little justice to either the magnitude of its subject or the reputation of its author.

How do you write an instant book about something as fast-moving and diffuse, as half-finished and unpredictable, as historically pivotal or, possibly, trivial, as the sudden surge of protest around the world since 2010? The most up-to-date pages of this slim, ambitious volume are dated 26 October 2011  almost three months ago; a small eternity in some of the feverish and ongoing political stories it covers.

Even the use of the present tense in the title is a risk. The protest wave has had its lulls: in recent weeks, the Occupy movement in London and New York, for example, has begun to seem a little becalmed. One day, these lulls will turn out to be terminal. Revolutions, if that is what the protests add up to, as this book passionately argues, can make fools of excited writers as well as complacent politicians.

Paul Mason, as an experienced BBC Newsnight correspondent and the author of one of the best instant books on the financial crisis, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (2009), is shrewd enough to accept  or at least to seem to accept  the limitations of this volume at the outset. "This book makes no claim to be a 'theory of everything,'" he writes with disarming, conversational directness on page two. "And don't file it under 'social science': it's journalism." Yet, a page later, he summarises the protests in terms that suggest a much less modest study: "We're in the middle of a revolution caused by the near-collapse of free-market capitalism," he writes, "combined with an upswing in technical innovation"  he means mobile telephony and the internet  "a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means."

The 10 concise chapters that follow alternate  sometimes seamlessly, sometimes more jumpily  between reportage and more analytical sections on the history, economics, technology and philosophy behind the protests. The reportage comes from Egypt, Greece, Britain, the US and the Philippines, a handful out of the dozens of countries affected. Covering himself again, Mason explains: "Some theatres of the conflict have been ignored, simply because I couldn't get there."

Is there much value in describing again the demonstrations, encampments and activist movements already covered, seemingly exhaustively, by the traditional and new media over the last two years? The quality of Mason's observation and storytelling quickly dispels any such doubts. This is from Athens during one riot last summer: "In the side-streets  abandoned by police, shops shuttered  you see isolated individuals, masked, texting; some people are hammering at a piece of marble, breaking it up to make rocks. A few yards away, couples who have been protesting walk hand in hand  shambling wearily  Two young lads take their shirts off, wrap them around their heads and dance in front of a fire they've lit  just out of projectile range  they hope  from a platoon of police."

Such disorder has become so familiar, and yet also remains so dizzyingly at odds with the seemingly steady, semi-tranquilised state of things in much of the west from the end of the cold war until quite recently, that there is great value in the journalist who can simply make you register how much the world has changed. Yet Mason is also much more sophisticated and thorough than most reporters in explaining exactly how the new protest cultures came into being and developed.

In Egypt, he anatomises the hastily built coalition of slum-dwellers, union activists, unemployed graduates, faith groups and even football hooligans that drove Mubarak from power. When history is being made on the streets of his chosen countries in 2010 and 2011, Mason, it seems, either sees it happen himself, or can always locate the key witnesses and participants. The writing style of this reportage is compact, urgent, present-tense, declarative, addictive. There are one-sentence paragraphs, a hint of machismo in the fondness for military and other muscular metaphors ("why it's kicking off"), and frequent, breathless digressions that charge off like a breakaway group from a student march. The fast-talking, economically encyclopedic Mason familiar to Newsnight viewers is very much present, but let loose from his BBC shackles. Towards the climax of a particularly fizzing chapter on the political power of social networking, Mason asks whether the truly empowered citizen envisaged by Karl Marx in the 1840s can, thanks to the internet, exist simultaneously within capitalism and in fundamental conflict with it  the anti-banker activist with the Apple Store habit. "I don't know the answer," he writes, "but merely to pose the question is exhilarating." Occasionally his descriptions of the world's discontented "youth" (his favoured term) are a little star-struck.

Yet Mason also effectively deploys his less sexy knowledge of modern western business culture and free-market economics, and their possibly fatal flaws. Pithily and authoritatively, he describes how globalisation, assumed by many supporters and critics alike to produce economically vigorous, politically docile societies almost in perpetuity, has in fact since around 2000 increasingly produced societies that are neither, whether in the dictatorships of the Arab world or the democracies of the eurozone, Britain and the United States. Yesterday's upwardly mobile graduates have turned into today's angry unemployed, he says, with their networking skills intact and suddenly politically potent. The expansion of higher education means that they can no longer be dismissed as an unrepresentative elite, as they often were in the past. And once-obscure theorists of protest have made their way from the margins to the mainstream of academic life. At last year's London student actions, "Many students were familiar with [Guy] Debord and his situationist movement, for the simple reason that he is taught on every art course."

Unlike in the 60s, and in subsequent periods of crisis and opportunity for the young and politicised, he says, this time a dire economic situation has coincided with the exhaustion of conventional political ideas and a whole new array of organisational tools for activists. Perceptively, he suggests, protest no longer feels as old-fashioned in the west as it often has done in recent decades, when it still revolved around 19th-century-style activities such as leafleting and massing in public places to hear speeches. Crucially, the new activism goes instead with the grain of modern life: freelance projects, fluid switching between electronic and physical space, informal alliances, little emphasis on hierarchy or ideology.

The historical parts of this argument are fresh and persuasive, but the technological ones are slightly less so. For a couple of half-chapters, his usual wiry, empirical style gives way to the airier assertions of digital evangelism. Should it really be claimed without reservation, for example, that the smart phone has "expanded the power and space of the individual"? That might come as news to the employee electronically chained to their desk or the protester intimately tracked by police. Elsewhere, there are also a few sections that read more like a diary of Mason's fascinating assignments than scenes from a global revolution. "A Journey Through Jobless America" and an anatomy of slum life in Manila feel relevant only in the broadest sense, as economic and social context for the political upheavals. The book also touches on phone-hacking and WikiLeaks too briefly to incorporate them convincingly into the overall thesis. Meanwhile, last August's English riots, and how much their participants, tactics and general atmosphere had in common with the more obviously political street happenings in England and elsewhere, is left tantalisingly unexplored.

Mason does briefly refer to the riots as "uprisings" and "an insurrection", and emphasises poverty as a cause. From that stance, and his enthusiasm for socialist thinkers and protest in general, he could be taken as a leftwinger. But intriguingly, there are other political currents swirling round this book. "The plebeian groups that kicked things off," he writes on the concluding page, "possess  skill, ingenuity and intelligence. Info-capitalism has educated them." The failings of the free market  from the malfunctioning of the graduate job machine to the lethal spike in world food prices  may have given the protesters their cause and opportunity, but the free market has also given them some of the means to take political advantage. It is a paradox this book is grown-up enough to examine.

Where do the protest movements go from here? Mason zigzags between euphoria and doom. Sometimes he sees the protesters as all-conquering, the wave of the future; sometimes as confused and vulnerable. Sometimes he portrays the world they are changing as approaching an abyss, like 1914 or 1939, rather than some new plateau of prosperity and social justice. "Right now the future hangs in the balance," he writes. I'm looking forward to the updated edition.

 Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies is published by Faber.