Archive for Politics
by Imran Ali
April 1, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, Openmoko, Politics, Android, Activism, OLPC
Last month - I had the good fortune to sit in on Ethan Zuckerman’s ETech 2008 session, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism, summarising his insights into global activism and his role at Global Voices Online.
Ethan’s a research fellow at Harvard and has spent the last few years exploring activist usage of the web, mobility and social media across the developing world; Global Voices is an aggregated manifestation of bloggers and citizen journalists across this community.
Ethan’s talk was oriented around the notion that tools built for activism generally remain unused whereas mainstream tools adapted and adopted by activists remain the most popular channels; particularly when mainstream services are censored, driving even apathetic users to activism when they can’t reach their favorite sites!
Perhaps Ethan’s key insight was the importance of mobile phones as a light platform for activism and blogging; echoed by another speaker, Joel Selanikio, on Africa as a hothouse for mobile development. Their observations included…
- Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fateh’s use of Twitter and SMS to periodically indicate his status, such that when he stops updating, supporters can surmise that he’s being detained and begin agitating for his release as well as ensuring his blog
- Again in Egypt, anti-government activists organised resistance to the arrest of Malek Moustafa simply by coordinating themselves via SMS to block the street at his place of arrest.
- As early s 2004 there were 82m mobile users in Africa in 2004, but even as recently as 2007 only 4.7m broadband users.
- SMS could and should be the principle media for communications and content - from medical information and healthcare records to banking and commerce.
- Limited bandwidth and limited computing power aren’t necessarily barriers for digital innovation.
Though such insights aren’t unique - we’ve covered them previously - they point to an increasing disconnect between the services designed and offered versus those lashed together by the ingenuity of end users - the activism for open government embodied by those such as Alaa Abdel Fateh isn’t echoed by the closed nature of most mobile platforms and networks…I suspect Android and Openmoko will have a more profound effect than OLPC on the democratisation of technology and culture.
[ Note: You can see Ethan Zuckerman’s full presentation at his blog ]
by Imran Ali
February 14, 2008 at 1:31 pm · Filed under Politics, Obama
Last summer, my inaugural post for Mobile Messaging 2.0 criticised the use of Twitter by politicians such as Barack Obama, John Edwards and the UK’s Alan Johnson, using emerging communication channels simply to talk, not to listen.
I’m not sure candidates are listening any more effectively, but mobile messaging seems to be playing a key role in turning out voters for the US presidential primaries.
Today Wired is reporting that the Obama campaign reminded registered supporters to vote by text message and included instructions on locating their local polling station, helping to tip the last four primaries in Obama’s favour.
I’m not so sure the official Obama ringtones or viral campaign recruitment text messages would encourage people, or turn them off with their cheesiness…but hey, I like that America can spend bilions removing a guy called Hussein from power, only to elect another 
Perhaps if Gordon Hussein Brown got into the ringtone business for the 2009/10 UK election, we could use ringtones as a sleep aid?
Brown certainly isn’t the new Black 
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by Imran Ali
January 18, 2008 at 10:47 am · Filed under Politics, Crowdsourcing
I last visited Pakistan in April 2006, to spend a couple weeks visiting family in Karachi and Lahore. Even as a British-born Pakistani, I’m constantly amazed by the generosity and warmth of the Pakistani people…
One of my strongest impressions during my last visit was the proliferation of mobile phones - most people I met under 30 had at least two handsets, and invariably a third. Upon further investigation, Pakistani users - like many others - utilise multiple handsets and SIM cards as a form of presence management and a means to mediate their various social relationships - whether friend, family, or coworker.
It comes as no surprise that the proliferation of mobile technology in Pakistan is increasingly playing a part in directing the country’s civil and political life. America’s hapless War On Terror has intersected twice with this proliferation, once with the capture of Al Qaeda’s ‘20th hijacker’ Ramzi Binalshibh as he boasted over a satellite phone that he’d indefinitely evade capture….one for the Darwin Awards!
Secondly, and more acutely, with the assasination of former PM and kleptocrat Benazir Bhutto last month, Pakistan’s military government didn’t understand how rapidly SMS, mobile video, voice calls and photomessaging would undermine their barely plausible explanation of the assassination. See this blog for a useful photo+video account of events. Collectively, Pakistanis had unwittingly shot a multi-dimensional Zapruder film,
As the nation’s 75m mobile subscribers overwhelmed Pakistan’s mobile infrastructure, the Interior Ministry began to concoct a narrative based on TV coverage. (I based this on some specious commentary from Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on the Daily Show!).
As the accidentally crowdsourced evidence - snippets of photo messages and mobile phone footage - emerged, the government was forced to backtrack and eventually agree to re-open investigations with the assistance of detectives from Britain’s Scotland Yard.
Though the focus of coverage has been on delayed elections, nuclear security, geopolitics and extremism in Pakistan. I believe something more subtle and fundamental has been overlooked - the empowerment of Pakistani citizens with democratising technologies. As successive civilian, and military governments have failed Pakistanis, perhaps this is the beginnings of a bootstrapped civic culture, carefully asserting influence over the country’s future.
It’s hard to silence 75m cameraphones.
