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Hello all, I saw this post on the
telecom-cities list. It discusses some of the impacts of mobile communication
on the political system. It makes some interesting points. At the
same time, there are some missing elements in the discussion. While the
mobile phone allows for the mobilization of political movements (like in the
case of Estrada) it also results in the possibility for internal
fractionalization that is the anathema for protest movements. Rich L. From:
[email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of C.J. Gabbe Interesting general article on mobile phones and community mobilization
in this week's The Economist: Oct 26th 2006 |
BUJUMBURA AND LONDON
UNTIL
recently, killers in Burundi found it easy to cover their traces; they just
tossed the bodies into a river where crocodiles would eat them up. But in
August residents of Muyinga province acted fast when they saw fresh corpses
drifting downstream; they used their mobile phones to contact NGOs, who in turn
tipped off the United Nations, whose soldiers got to the scene fast enough to
recover some forensic evidence. The use of mobiles as a tool of "empowerment",
even in the poorest and worst-governed parts of the world, is not always so
grisly. The cruder kinds of electoral fraud, relying on poor communications between
the capital and the boondocks, are now much harder. Even with minimal
resources, monitors can count the voters and conduct exit polls—and then
phone their findings to a radio station before the authorities stuff the ballot
boxes. Such methods have helped make elections a bit cleaner in places like
Ghana and Kenya. Meanwhile, in Europe's darkest corner, Belarus, text messages
call youngsters to surreal acts of resistance, such as (to take a recent
example) gathering to eat ice cream. Howard
Rheingold, an American technology guru, has devised the pun "smart
mobs" to describe the way mobile telephony—and especially
texts—make it possible for aggrieved groups to act and react in an ever
more nimble way. Chroniclers
of cellular people power identify two big landmarks: the rallies that toppled
President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines in 2001, and South Korea's
presidential election a year later, when text messages among the young brought
a surge of support for President Roh Moo-hyun. In both those countries protests
are still convened by text message not just at critical times, when national
leadership is at stake, but to highlight almost any sort of grievance. For
Europeans "mobile democracy" came of age with the Spanish election of
March 2004, immediately after a terrorist attack in Madrid: the Socialists rode
to power on a wave of text-driven anger with the ruling conservatives. In
America some claim the same happened at the Republican convention in 2004, when
text messages helped protesters play cat-and-mouse with the New York police. It
is also true that modern telephone technology has its uses, for sophisticated
armies, as a weapon of war. The Chechen leader, Jokar Dudayev, was traced and
killed by the Russians through his satellite phone; and the Israelis used an
exploding handset to assassinate a leading Palestinian bomb-maker. But
in the competition to use mobiles in a more benign way, ordinary people often
prevail over their masters. When governments try to crack down on the mobile
phone as a popular tool of communication, their efforts usually go haywire.
During the SARS epidemic in China, for example, the authorities tried to censor
text messages that mentioned the disease, but their attempt proved easy to
circumvent. In
the run-up to this year's elections in Congo, all the parties used mobiles to
summon the faithful. That prompted the security services to shut down several
numbers used by opposition leaders. But in such a mobile-savvy country, the
effect of such clumsy repression was short-lived. In
short, the use of mobiles in protest and politics and even banking (see article ) is evolving faster than governments' efforts to
control it. Academics also find the phenomenon baffling, though they are
studying it hard. Four eggheads with links to California's Annenberg School of
Communication will publish next month a book based on a two-year study of
mobile phones and society. Their punchy conclusion? "When the dominant
institutions of society no longer have the monopoly of mass-communication
networks, the dialectics between power and counter-power is, for better or
worse, altered for ever." True enough, though the average teenage texter might
put it better: "whn u cn fon u r in chrge 4vr".
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- [mobile-society] FW: [telecom-cities] Mobile phones and "... richard.ling
