October 29, 2006
Mobiles, protests and pundits
The Economist has a great article on the use of mobile phones to organize collective action and how they are changing political landscapes. [via Smart Mobs]
"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.
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."
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