TakingITMobile is a community-based research study conducted in partnership with the social network TakingITGlobal that examines how youth leaders across the globe use mobile communications to create social change within their local communities and internationally. As an e-PAR study, youth participants were encouraged to take the reigns as researchers through the online TakingITMobile Working Group, which comprised of 39 youth representing 20 different countries. TakingITMobile participants (n = 565) paint a picture of the diversity of mobile youth activism around the world.

It was found that the majority of youth reported using their mobile phones to generate Citizen Media to share their message globally, mobilize protests, fundraise, educate their peers and spread solidarity. TakingITMobile participants were passionate about a number of global issues, including the Environment (39%), Human Rights (36%), Poverty (28%), Health (24%), Peace (23.8%), HIV/AIDS (22.4%) and Violence (11.6%). While the most common mobile feature was Voice Calls (75%), TakingITMobile participants used a variety of mobile phone features, including Text Messages (46%), Web Browsing (38%), Social Media (27%), News (26%) and Photography (22%).

It was also discovered that youth who own smart phones are more likely to use their phones for activism (81%) than youth who don’t (71%).  As well, females are much less likely (70%) to use their phones for activism than males. Youth ages 25-29 show higher levels of activism (84%) than youth in their teens (67%), early 20s (75%) and 30s (75%). GDP per capita was an influencing factor on both monthly costs, monthly average number of minutes used, number of SMS used and internet data used. Overall it was found that participants from countries with high GDP per capita received cheaper services, with the exception of very high income nations such as Canada and the United States. A number of barriers were identified for mobile youth activists, including cost of services (32%) cost of mobile phones (10%) as well as network coverage (9%) were the biggest barriers to accessing mobile phones.

If you are interested in further exploring how youth activists are using their mobile phones for social change you can download the full report here.  As a participatory action research study, TakingITMobile aims to disseminate the results back to the community in order to share best practices in mobile activism and inspire others to take action. In conjunction with TakingITGlobal, we are hoping to produce a Mobile Guide to Action that can serve as a compass for youth activists interested in using their mobile phone for social change.  For those looking to help in developing this resource the TakingITMobile Working Group is always open to new volunteers! As well, we are hoping to partner with influential blogs in order to spread the results far and wide.  If you are interested in blogging about the TakingITMobile results feel free to contact lisa [@] mobilerevolutions.org for more information.

The TakingITMobile Survey is closed to new submissions. Thank you to everyone who contributed your information, as the results have been astounding. While the survey is closed that does not mean that our work is done yet! There is lots of work ahead including data analysis, writing and consulting with both youth and experts from the field about the results. While this is my masters thesis, really it’s a participatory project where all TakingITGlobal members have an opportunity to contribute. As anyone can join TakingITGlobal, that means anyone with an interest in mobile phones and youth activism can participate.

Very rich data that has been gathered by asking you the mobile youth leaders how you use your phones in your work. I am looking for TakingITMobile Working Group members who would be interested in responding to the data to see if you can find new themes. Currently I am finalizing the SPSS analysis for the quantitative version of the survey. If any of you are familiar with SPSS I would be happy to share my data as this is an open source project. I have coded the data according to both feature and issue but feel free to rearrange it as you see fit. If you want to share your feedback you can do it either on the TakingITMobile Discussion Board or by emailing me.

Of course in true Creative Commons fashion please do cite sources if you wish to further share the material. Another opportunity to volunteer with the TakingITMobile study is in helping to recruit volunteer mobile developers to the working group. Please share this group with your peers and spread the word!

Two burritos and many avocados later my time in San Francisco was inspiring to say the least.  The Sex::Tech conference was very inspiring and I was able to attend many sessions around using new media technology for sexual health promotion, from feminism to working with LGBTQ youth, to mass media campaigns partnering with MTV. The topic that I found the most fascinating was mobile communications, especially in relation to research methodology.

While marginalized youth do not always have private access to the internet,  across the board youth were accessing mobile phones from LQBTQ street youth in NYC to high school students in Nairobi.  Not only is there a strong case for sexual health information for mobile platforms, but the technology also lends strong to epidemiological researchers.  While at the conference I learned of a epi study in the Philippines were scientists loaded cheap Nokia handsets with open source EpiSurveyor software.  Hearing about these projects inspires me to integrate new media technology into my own research methods.

This project is a working group for TakingITGlobal members who are interested in mobile communications. The aim of this working group is to share innovation in the field of youth mobile innovation, and to brainstorm projects and solutions for the TakingITGlobal platform. By sharing examples of mobile innovation, we can examine ways of building mobile tools that are compatible with the existing mobile platform. As well this group aims to tap the larger community’s mobile practices by developing a global youth mobile survey. By sharing our practices we can start to brainstorm questions, and a survey will be distributed to the over 200,000 TakingITGlobal members. From the data gathered an environmental scan will be written up to document mobile trends among TIG users and create a list of recommendations for future applications and services. Click here to get involved!

Recently I came across this ad for koodo mobile, a Canadian brand launched by Telus in 2008 around the time when Mobile Revolutions was born. koodo sports similar sans serif sexiness in it’s branding, targeting a gen y market craving a world free of contracts and unlimited text messaging packages (although the $5 one is a thing of the past). While koodo provides super cheap services, it lacks the ability of smart phone integration and it’s cdma phones are pretty useless if you decide to switch mobile carrier. In koodo’s campaigns feature bug eyes neon youth with nerdy glasses and braces with catchy phases including; koodo-munity, loose that chubby contract, ready to beat the bill budge, and koodo-lutionary.  While koodo’s eye-popping ads predate yours truely, I have noted a change in koodo’s tone from mindlessly ironic to psuedo-revolutionary. Using words like movement (see above) or adding “lutionary” to their brand seems to envoke that to purchase a mobile phone is in itself revolutionary, especially when you are saving money.

koodo is not the only Canadian mobile brand to be pushing itself on the streets as an activist accessory.  Canada’s mobile darling Blackberry produced by Research in Motion has released an ad (that plays all to frequently on CTV) called Blackberry Loves Bono:

While it seems kind of contradictory for Palm investor Bono to perform for Blackberry, I’m sure he got paid enough and felt justified in promoting that there is a new mobile generation that is going to make change.  The ad doesn’t tell us much, but once one arrives at the website it is clear that U2 (maybe an attempt to one up Radiohead?) is producing a mobile album in conjunction with Blackberry.  The mobile album seems more like a U2 application to promote their tour.  The essence seems to be if you want to capture the “mobile generation” (MG, yo!) you have to create an innovative way of distribution that can be reached anywhere.  Simply distributing music is not enough anymore– it must also be interactive.

More and more mobile revolutions have transformed from an underground movement to a full-out full scale corporate marketing campaign.  Mobile growth is touted as activist and Canadian companies are looking to harness that spirit, whether it’s promoting smart phones or discount phone plans.  Of course mobile phones are revolutionizing communications but to use revolution as a means of marketing products seems a bit off putting. As a consumer and academic I am beginning to become more and more suspect of mobile communications companies, as anyone should of any giant corporations.

Bono has been complicit in the past in collaborating with major corporate brands like Starbucks and Apple to raise money for AIDS.  In this case no money is being raised and consumers are told that the power to make change is in our hands.  It is no doubt that mobile phones are useful to activists, but promoting this notion just to boost sales seems contradictory.  If Blackberry and koodo were giving out mobile phones to marginalized youth activists like the million campaign I might feel a bit less morally indignant but this seems like straight up exploitation.

Through breakthroughs in Web 2.0 technology a new form of digital democracy has emerged where the divide between media producers and consumers dissolved and citizen media rules. While before citizens had to rally for mainstream media attention to catch the ears of politicians, now it is easier ever than before for citizens to launch awareness campaigns and get their message heard by the masses. Even more importantly, new advances in digital publishing mean that we now have advance systems of filtering and prioritizing data collectively. A new passion economy has emerged, that has put news production and distribution back in the hands of the people. Sites like Wikipedia put citizens in charge of fact checking and knowledge production. Online users can choose what news they want to receive through RSS feeds, and can easily forward newsworthy items onto their friends and share them over social networks like Facebook. While media conglomerates have long monopolized media production into an industry, online culture has reclaimed the news media in such a way that everyone’s voice counts, and the potential for wide scale participation and collaboration is greater than ever. The old feminist adage, “the personal is political” rings true, as online communication means that even what you’re having for breakfast can be newsworthy. Yet has this proliferation of online media been accompanied an influx of garbage and spam? How do we sort through all the voices, let alone know that they are credible sources? What does the increase in citizen produced media mean to the profession of journalism, and what are the possible limitations of de-professionalizing news? Does more voices necessarily mean more democracy? This eBook will answer these questions and more, specifically exploring how online culture has changed the face of the news and democracy.

In the past American and Canadian elections we have seen clear differences to the types of online campaigning parties are engaged in. A weak Canadian 2008 election was shadowed by a media savvy American election where celebrity candidate Barrack Obama became the first American Black President. Using a combination of social media strategies, President Obama engaged citizens through social networks, online video, micro-blogging, emails, mobile applications, and text messaging, encouraging citizens to join the movement. In contrast, the Canadian elections had much less hype, and the amount of online cultural production was much lower with very little corresponding participation in the polls. What has clearly emerged from the two campaigns is that a strong social media strategy plays an important role helping reach great results, that openness to engage and discuss in public is a better than being closed. This has transformed both the world of politics, media, and the way we organize our organizations. Tools like social networks, blogs, micro-blogging, and other tools for mass participation have now been embraced by mainstream media organizations, making social media mainstream. While sometimes traditional media can feel threatened by new media, large media corporate conglomerates such as Gobal Media, CBC, CNN, MNBC, and the Fox News Corporation have started to integrate new media into their broadcasts, transforming the way that the mainstream receive, create and exchange news.

User generated content, which is often created and shared through social networks, has begun to dominate the field of entertainment and news exchange. Although not replacing mainstream media entirely, new forms of learning, sharing and communicating where people actually act and search for what they are interested in has become a critical way of life for many in this generation. Whereas in previous generations the newspapers, radio and TV was mainly the biggest source of information and “link” to the world, the Internet and computers have become a different and way more advanced form of information intake, creation and sharing.

Now instead of turning on Fox News or leafing through the newspaper citizens can go on YouTube to see videos of uncensored content from around the world from the Taj Mahal burning to videos of American troops taken from Iraqi youth’s mobile phones. No longer do we need the media to mediate the way we receive news, as everyday citizens can now bypass the publishers and broadcast themselves, or in some cases, citizens have created such value in the content they’ve produced that publishers can actually support and bring more attention to the single voice of a citizen. More now ever than before citizens are able to self publish and get their voices heard through low technological solutions. This overflow of data coming from autonomous devices can be mashed up and networked to create a whole new experience of news, and a larger impact on the effects of democracy. The public has a voice and it can’t be ignored.

More to come soon!

When looking at new media communication, it is clear that across class, race, and gender, there are inequalities in terms of access, influence and control. The digital divide is still apparent, yet everyday youth are working to bridge these gaps by seizing the means of communication and creating alternative networks for social change. TakingITGlobal is a prime example of this trend, a social network founded by youth social entrepreneurs Michael Furdyk and Jennier Coriero when they were teenagers.

Launched in 2000 as an effort to address the digital divide TakingITGlobal was the world’s first social network for social change. TakingITGlobal is also one of the world’s first multi-lingual networks with a team of youth volunteer translators that allow the site to be offered in 12 languages. TakingITGlobal was a central node for youth leaders around the world to plug in to a variety of networks, tools and opportunities.  TakingITGlobal has a number of member features including projects, groups, resources, forums, blogs, the global gallery, magazines, games and much more. TakingITGlobal’s community grew to over 200,000 members in 2008, and they are celebrating their 10^th anniversary this year. TIG continues to feature the voices of youth activists from around the world. TakingITGlobal is dedicated to bridging the digital divide and promoting ways for youth to use technology as a tool to facilitate social change.

While TakingITGlobal’s social network provides tools, information and resources for global youth leaders the digital divide prevents all youth from having access to the website. TakingITGlobal currently provides two versions of it’s website, one for dialup internet connections and another for high speed. In order to make TakingITGlobal more accessible to youth around the world who don’t necessarily have a computer or internet access, TakingITGlobal must branch out onto new platforms like mobile phones to help youth leaders access information.

Mobile phones have been used by youth around the world as a tool for political mobilization, from getting youth out to vote, to organizing protests through social networks, micro-blogging and text messaging. Much like the Internet, mobile phones have the potential to help young people improve their education, access critically important information and distribute information globally about themselves and the work they are doing locally. This is especially true in developing countries, where mobile phones are now the primary form of telecommunication. Mobile phones are playing the same role fixed-line phone networks did in facilitating growth in Europe and North America in the 20th century and the potential that mobile phones have in supporting young people to create better lives for themselves, and the societies they live in, is enormous.

In exploring the new ways that media shapes knowledge production and distribution, we can explore new possibilities for youth activism, as well as gain understanding on how new media transform group power dynamics. As youth activists are increasingly using media as a tool for increasing community participation in the collective encoding/decoding of community issues, it is imperative to develop theory around the different effects media have in allowing for community participation in knowledge production, sharing and collective problem solving. If “the medium is the message” as Marshal McLuhan posits (1964), then there is a direct relationship between the media that youth activists use, and the resulting group products and processes. Taylor (2003) reminds us that, “we might explore the relationship of embodied practice to knowledge by studying how young people today learn through digital technologies.”

For TakingITGlobal to engage with a diverse range of activist youth leaders from different socio-economic levels it must adapt to the new trends of youth in developing countries who are increasingly using mobile phones to access the internet. The results of the survey will be used to create a mobile platform, allowing TakingITGlobal to broaden and diversify their reach, offering relevant information, inspiration and community development tools through a medium young people are extremely comfortable with.  It will further enhance their relevance as the world’s largest online community for young people interested in creating positive social change. Additionally, by developing mobile services, TakingITGlobal will strengthen their position as one of the leading innovators in the use of Information Communication Technology for community development (ICT4D). My objectives are to find out the ways that youth use mobile communications to build critical discourse and communities for grassroots organizing. I hope to achieve my objectives and answer the following questions which guide my research inquiry:

• How are youth leaders across the world using mobile phones as a tool for social change in their community organizing?

TakingITGlobal’s online social network was the perfect platform for participatory data collection, and integrated a variety of information sources including stories from frontline activists, articles, blog posts and quantitative data. Since undertaking this research project I have been in touch with youth across the world from Ghana to Argentina who work in a variety of fields, from human rights activists to HIV/AIDS organizers.  The TakingITMobile Working Group guided the research, which included 30 members from Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Germany, Ghana, India, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, United Kingdom, United States and Venezuela. The survey results are as diverse as the working group, with over 531 respondents from over 200 countries.  The survey was translated by TakingITGlobal volunteer translators into 9 languages, including; English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Turkish, Dutch and Russian. An iPod was offered as an incentive to boost multilingual participation, with one given out for each language group. Through both participatory qualitative coding and rigorous SPSS evaluation I discovered key trends in global youth mobile use and creating a series of recommendations for future directions for TakingITGlobal in developing mobile features for their social network of global youth leaders.

In this paper I outline the transformative power of new media technologies in Latin American contexts as tools for social change, comparing examples of youth digital activism from both Costa Rican and Panamanian contexts. Focusing on two types of Social Media, both Social Networks and Mobile Communication are examined as tools for Central American youth activists. In my conclusion I summarize the effects of national media policies, the situation of the digital divide and its effect on media democracy. The powerful nature of Citizen Media illustrates how overcoming the digital divide can produce democratic access to the media and societies’ larger institutions for social change.

As media technology accelerates, new opportunities for public discourse emerge, altering the ways that we define media and power. When new media intersects with popular culture it in turn transforms societies’ hegemonic landscapes, as the power of who can speak, both when and where, is altered and multiplied (Luis Serna, 2007). Gramsci (1929-1935) defines hegemony as the way in which power is played out in society, which consists of both coercion, and consent, allowing the dominant society to control the masses through cultural persuasion. Through the media industry, hegemony is maintained, thus justifying the acts of those in power and concretizing the consent of the masses. dian marino (1998) adds to our conception of hegemony by defining it as a “rainforest of shifting relations,” a power structure which can change with every day and every new action.

With the advance of new media technology a range of new methods of communication have unfolded, providing the average citizen with a myriad of options for publishing and distributing independent work (Langlois & Dubois, 2005). This signals an increase in the biodiversity of the media ecosystem, as the media is flooded by an ocean of pluralisms; new stories being added every day, multiplying and reshaping our conceptions of truth (Halleck, 2002: Langlois & Dubois, 2005 ). New technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones are changing how we conceptualize hegemonic media landscapes. These technologies manifest themselves differently according to the hegemonic structure of the country, and the economic power it has to invest and develop new communication networks in these new technologies. While the personal computer has swept across much of North America, Central and Southern American countries have been slower to adapt, having instead adopted cheaper alternatives such as cellular phones and public Internet Cafes.

At the forefront of this new media revolution are youth, the first adapters of technology (Corriero, 2004). Often times, communications technologies end up being used in new ways which companies never dreamt possible, and in many cases it is societies’ youth who are experimenting and creating new systems and ways of organizing. While youth are marginalized in mainstream society, the Internet and cell phones act as a private domain for youth to communicate and organize free of parents’ supervision . As the Internet is a central node for global youth culture, transnational movements emerge out of this online discourse. A series of tools have surfaced allowing people to communicate across borders right from their very living room. These new developments have created a new paradigm shift; dissolving the power of major media networks, record labels are dropping profits, people are turning on to YouTube and turning off their TV (Sanchéz, 2008), and instead of learning about world issues through news papers youth are instead reading blogs written by people their age who is directly experiencing the situation.

Largely embraced by civil society and the NGO sector, these new types of media democracy have been joined under the term Citizen Media; media which is decentralized, user friendly, and easily sharable for the average citizen. Citizen Media include such new developments as blogs, vlogs, podcasts, SMS messaging, participatory video, digital storytelling, and social networks. Unlike traditional media, Citizen Media is not normally produced by journalists, yet there are many cases of mainstream media, politicians, and corporations are copying these forms of communication and adapting them to serve mainstream interest. While some object to the term Citizen Media as it refers to “citizen” as a member of a nation-state, the terminology still remains widely used and accepted. Yet with the new movement towards fostering Global Citizenship, it can be posited that these new media tools help to further stretch our definitions of what it means to be a citizen, as they cut across borders and amplify transnational discourse. While Citizen Media is a widely accepted umbrella term in the NGO social marketing world, Social Media is more popular across industries, as it more generally captures the nature of these media tools as media for social interaction.

While these types of changes are having a concentrated effect among those with disposable incomes to invest in these technologies, low-income populations around the world are now also experiencing increased access in the form of Internet Cafes and cellular phone networks equipped with Internet capabilities. Multilingual online content is increasing exponentially as cultures from all over the world are tapping in to these new forms of cultural discourse. Media access is arguable stronger than ever before, with cellular coverage reaching 90% of the planet by 2010. New media communications technology melts borders, and as anthropologist Jan Chipchase says “bends space and time.” This creates a Pangaea effect, uniting world cultures and embodying notions of Global Citizenship and a global knowledge commons.

Globally 1.5 billion people have access to televisions, and 1 billion to the Internet; yet overall the most actively used electronic gadget is the mobile phone, with over 3 billion users worldwide. Reaching the 4 billion mark before the end of 2008, that equals to approximately one cell phone for every two human beings. Under 30-years in existence, cell phones are one of the most rapid developing technology the world has ever known. According to Touré, Secretary General of the ITU, “The fact that 4 billion subscribers have been registered worldwide indicates that it is technically feasible to connect the world to the benefits of ICT and that it is a viable business opportunity.”  According to Touré, “Clearly, ICTs have the potential to act as catalysts to achieve the 2015 targets of the MDGs.”

Mobile phones are the first telecommunications technology to be more popular in developing nations, than their developed counterparts, far outnumbering internet coverage (Zuckerman 2007). More and more people are using their phones to access the internet instead of computers.  Soon there will be more cell phone users than literate people on the planet. This signifies a shift into a new age of digital literacy, where avatars, emoticons, pictures, sounds and videos often hold more power than names and numbers.

Economists around the world are hailing cell phones as the solution for ICT development and a ray of hope in bridging the digital divide. At the London Business School it was found, “for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) rises 0.5 percent.” With the power of decentralized networked communication, fisherman are able to monitor market prices in the next village over, and new applications are being brainstormed from the grassroots up.

Once again on the front lines of this new revolutionary technology are youth. According to the MSN/MTV Circuits of Cool report, “The mobile phone is ingrained into young people’s everyday lives, with 42% claiming it’s the first thing they look at in the morning and they last thing they do at night.” Mobile phones have been used by youth around the world as a tool for political mobilization, from getting youth out to vote, to organizing protests through social networks, blogs and text messaging. In Howard Rheingold’s book Smart Mobs, we are reminded of the incredible social ramifications of crossing hand held mobile devices with networked technology, allowing activists to communicate instantly through a variety of media.

Yet despite the range of global examples from Asia to Africa, little research has been produced about the potential of mobile phones as a medium for social change within the Latin American region. One of the only available resources online is MobileActive.org’s ¡Acción Móvil¡ Guía de Móvil Activismo para Latino América, highlighting a series of efforts from both NGOs and grassroots groups to harness the power of mobile technology for social change.

Yet what is missing in this document is the ways that everyday youth outside of formal social organizations are using mobile technology in their own lives.  There is a vast difference between Greenpeace sending out mass SMS campaigns, v.s. a Costa Rican youth recording riot footage on his/her cellphone, or a Panamanian youth blasting a banned reggaeton song calling out government corruption as a ringtone.  These are examples that fall beneath the radar of the mainstream; those which have no representation in peer-reviewed journals, nor newspaper publications. In the following paper I will expand on the activist potential of mobile technology, focusing on how mobile phones can be used to increase media democracy in Latin America and beyond, creating access for a new generation of young global citizens.

The mobile phone is now approaching the functionality of a computer; yet unlike a computer, users keep their mobile devices by their sides powered up 24/7. This provides unheard of access for marketers looking to target users with commercial messages, yet also creates opportunities for NGOs and grassroots activists to interact in meaningful ways with their supporters.

A cell phone is no longer just a phone, it is a multimedia tool used for social communication. Users can interact with music, pictures, videos, games, Internet, email, text messaging (SMS), and so much more every day. Globally 82% of youth use their cell phones to take pictures, and 66% of youth send pictures and videos to their friends. As well, 20% of youth globally are interested in viewing “Clips From Other
People on Sites Like Youtube.” Cell phones are now multimedia mini-printing presses, capable of authoring and sharing content.  Engineers and programmers are quickly developing new applications, such as solar powered smog indicators, as well as social network tools for providing sexual health peer-education, or reminders for HIV+ patients to take their anti-retroviral drugs. Grassroots activists are combining SMS technology with internet applications, creating mashups that can map election violence, as well as distribute text messages to multiple users at a time. They have been used to monitor elections from the ground up, as mobile phones have turned into the next handicam for human rights monitoring. Governments are aware of the power of this new technology, and a new anti-protester tactic has been to cut off cell phone signal during protests.

Taken from a Latin American perspective this resistance by activists lays manifest over the public domain of the internet, as videos are uploaded to computers of activist events, or alternatively forward to friends.  As well, the world of ring tones goes political, as youth blast out censored reggaeton or safe sex messages.  Twitter has turned into a portal for Costa Ricans, and has even been hacked to work on the local ICE Networks, in order to enable mobile micro-blogging.  According to a Standford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design, “Telecommunication products and applications have great influences on the ways people behave, perceive and construct their social identity and relationships.” Mobile phones are paths which youth often use to carve out identity, and express cultural resistance.  According the MSN/MTV Circuits of Cool report, “private form of connection and communication as it helps youths feel safe and is seen as a sign of being allowed more freedom from home.”  Youth around the world use mobile phones as both a private domain, as well as an expanded network which gives them autonomy over their communication networks as independent broadcasters.

Mobile phones are revolutionary in that they are not just a one-way channel of communication, as they provide users with the tools to both produce and consume media right from the palm of their hands. Traditionally media was captured on devices like handicams, transferred to a computer for editing, and then uploaded to the Internet to be shared.  Now mobile phones have the capability to bypass the computer and to do everything with one device. Networked, this mobile media can draw on Metcalf’s law and the power of social networks by aggregating data, allowing users to utilize the power of collective data. Zuckerman refers to the power of cell phones as leveraging capabilities that are, “pervasive, personal, and capable of authoring content.” These are just a few of the reasons that attract global youth into the mobile world, offering privacy away from parents, and allowing access to a multimedia world of social networks. In terms of relating to activism, ideas tend to spread rapidly.  Campaigns by youth critiquing political candidates, or lobbying for electoral candidates spread like wildfire as people rapidly exchange and share information, passing along videos, pictures, and other campaigns.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, “80 percent of the world population lives in cellular network range, which is double the level in 2000; and 68 percent of the world’s mobile subscriptions by the end of 2006 were in developing countries.” Many remote regions do not have access to regular home phone services, so a cellular phone is the only option. This technological trend is not reserved for those with higher economic resources. Prices are dropping on handsets, and many of the cell phones on the market are used and thus cheaper. Software developers are creating ways to create cross platform solutions that provide meaningful services for everyday users. Director of IBM India Research laboratory Dr. Daniel Dias reinforces the socio-economic potential of this new technology:

The world is entering the ‘Era of the Mobile Web.’ In many countries, the mobile phone has become an electronic wallet, the window to the World Wide Web, an education device, and more, and globally, mobile devices outnumber PCs, credit cards, and TVs.

Mobile phones are sweeping across the planet, and Latin America is no an exception from this trend, boasting 230 million active cell phone lines in 2005, representing 40% of the population. It is predicted that this number will rise to 80% by 2009.  Mobile phone services now extend wider than regular phone lines across the region of Latin America. One can easily bare witness to how widely mobile phones have infiltrated the region in such a short amount of time; from indigenous women pulling out their phones from their traditional dress, to gum-popping teenagers texting back and forth with their friends on their way to the mall.

Yet while mobile phones have been adapted all over the region, each country involves a different set of players in the telecommunications sector.  Not all countries experience the same levels of access, yet in many countries where access to broadband is double North American prices (around $50-180), cellphone prices are dirt cheap.  Where universal broadband internet access is a pipe dream for many regions, the low cost wireless internet access through mobile phones is becoming more and more popular as prices lower ($4-20).  While one-laptop per child is a noble goal worth fighting for, a more practical solution for bridging the digital divide might be adopting the current version of the internet to work in sync with mobile browsers, as well as new networked applications which provide services to remote populations, such as health care and banking. As well, lowering price baskets for both mobile and internet services, as there is a great gap between countries which high mobile penetration rates and low price baskets, and countries which face the opposite (Barrantes et. all, 2007).

In Central American countries where the government has recognized the power of ICTs and development, mobile phones and internet access is much more accessible.  For example, Costa Rica’s Institute of Electricity (ICE), is a national telecommunications firm which provides subsidized access to mobile services, with some of the most affordable rates in Central America for electricity, mobile phones, internet, and other telecommunications services.

Costa Ricans currently have one of the highest rates of media access in Central America, with a Mobile Price Basket $6.30 below the average in Central America.  This translates to Mobile Subscriber Rate of 227 out of 1000 people, 28 points above the national average for Central America.  Costa Rica has the lowest mobile rate in all of Central America at $4.20, with a Mobile Subscriber Rate only second to Panama at 227 out of 1000 people (Statistics gathered from MobileActive.org).

In Costa Rica telecommunications access to telecommunications services is seen as a patriotic right. Yet this right falls under threat by the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).  The Central American Free Trade Agreement is known in Spanish as TLC, and serves as a regional free trade agreement with the United States. According to one participant on a debate about a Costa Rican YouTube video on TLC and telecommunications:

Seamos claros, con todo y los defectos del ICE, uno encuentra a un chofer de bus, niños en las escuelas públicas y empleadas domésticas con celular. ¿Dónde en centroamérica ve algo similar?. Mejoremos al ICE. No al TLC.

Let’s be clear, with all the deficits from ICE, anyone can find bus drivers, kids in public school, and domestic employees with cell phones. Where else in Central America can you see something similar?  We’re better with ICE.  No to CAFTA.

TLC for Costa Rica means massive government economic reforms; the privatization of ICE, education, health care, and other social services. With TLC, national environmental legislation could be in danger. Costa Rica is around one third national parkland, which is part of it’s attraction as an internationally recognized eco-tourism destination. When TLC was announced by the Arias government, protests and strikes erupted across the country.  Protest numbers where downsized by the mainstream media, which the larger blogger community picked up on.  Ultimately, the country put TLC to a national referendum on October 7th, 2007, which drew out 73.6% of the electorate.  TLC was passed with 51.6% approval rating, but that did not stop the protests!  What the mainstream media did not pick up on, citizen media brought to life. With the upcoming CAFTA/TLC agreement passing, this means big changes for Costa Rica’s telecommunications nationalized industry in the upcoming years which will effect Costa Rica’s access to citizen media.  It is also clear that Costa Ricans have used their access to citizen media tools provided cheaply through ICE as a means of expressing their dissent as citizens through both mobile phones and the internet.

According to the case study done by mobileactive.org,

In the following years, the cellular phone has the power to become the most chosen form of electronic media by activists in order to create public mobilizations, and to become a medium for social reclamation.

There is no doubt that Costa Ricans have not taken advantage of their increased access to citizen media to protest the slashing of these rights.  From blogs to SMS messages to online videos, Costa Rican No TLC activists have increasingly expressed calls to action both pre and post the national referendum.

One of the most popular and affordable functions of a cellular phone is text messaging (SMS). Cheaper than a regular call, and much faster than using the Internet, 500 million text messages are exchanged around the world per year. Text messages can be used to vote on reality TV shows, report crimes, or get information quickly, from your horoscope to what’s playing at the local cinema. In Costa Rica national media establishments like La Nación have used text messaging to delivery the news straight to their customers.  They also provide free text messaging services to Costa Ricans through their website.  Similarly, Costa Rican credit franchise El Gallo más Gallo uses SMS messages to deliver messages to their customers.  As mobile phone usage rates continue to rise, there is no doubt that services will increase over the next decade.

While larger public organizational uses of mobile phone technology are easy to chart, the majority of mobile usage is largely personal, away from the public domain.  This is beginning to change, as some of the top visited Costa Rican websites are beginning to go mobile.  Just in the past month of writing this article Hi5 has announced its new mobile version, m.hi5.com in 26 languages.  Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have long been mobile enabled, and search engines like Google and Yahoo both have Mobile versions.

One example of a mobile social network that has swept Costa Rica is Twitter. This social network has been around since October 2006, and is well known for engaging members by asking them “What are you doing right now?”  Users post their updates in under 140 characters, which are called tweets. Since its launch, Twitter has rapidly taken over the world as a micro-blogging portal.  Twitter is best known as an activist tool from American student James Karl Buck who sent out a one-word tweet “Arrested,” while in Egypt attending anti-government protests.  With in minutes of his post from his mobile phone friends and colleagues from home and abroad came to his aid.  This butterfly effect is what Twitter has become famous for, spreading ideas and alerts like wildfire.

Capable of mobile updates in Canada, the USA, and India, users can receive their friend’s tweets straight to their mobile device.  Yet mobile updates have proven costly to Twitter, and as such the social network has had to cut down on its services in foreign countries. Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone publicly apologized to users explaining the cuts to services:

Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers for updating via SMS are on the way.

In the past two years since its founding, Twitter has also made quite an impact on Costa Rican users, although technically not available through mobile updates during its growth period.  Community similarities are Costa Rican culture and politics, as well as high tech networked culture.  Twitter allows tech-savy ticos to forge a unique national identity.  To get a sense of the Costa Rican Twitter micro-blogsphere, look no further than Twittervision.  Micro-blogging encompases the things you do in between major blog posts, from the mundane to the profound merging locative technologies with social networks.  Blogger, web designer, and the first Costa Rican user of Twitter Josue Salazar comments on Twitter’s locative feature of creating virtual locative communities.

Personally, what brought Twitter to my attention was how easy it was to publish anything, to communicate with so many people, and to see what other people are doing.  The truth is that it wasn’t until this year that I found other ticos on Twitter, and I was always noticing how other communities used Twitter to interact with people from the same place, sharing more things, and in general relating to others from the same place (debating the local news, etc.).  Specifically, my Chilean friends took Twitter and they made it their own huge community, and had great conversations.  I was always jealous because it was all in Spanish, and because they were getting the most out of it.

Personalmente lo que me llamó la atención fue esa facilidad de publicar tonteras, de comunicarme fácilmente con tanta gente, y ver lo que todos hacen. La verdad, no fue hasta este año que encontré a algún tico en Twitter, siempre estuve viendo como muchos en Twitter eran del mismo lugar y compartían más cosas, en general relacionadas a que estaban en el mismo país (discutiendo noticias locales, etc), lo que fuera. En especifico, amigos chilenos tomaron Twitter y lo hicieron suyo hace tiempo, la comunidad chilena es grande, y tienen muy buenas conversaciones, siempre estuve celoso, porque hablaban en español, porque estaban sacandole el jugo a Twitter.

Many Twitter users don’t fit in on virtual or physical world, as their references don’t translate.  A video produced for a local Twitter Costa Rica meet up quotes scenarios where Twitter users swap comments that serve as a secret language that only they can decode:

Messages like “Have you written SMS messages that seem like they’re 140 characters or smaller?”, “Have you tried to explain how Twitter works to a group of non-users and they still don’t get it?”, “Have you converted atleast one friend to Twitter?”, “Have you run to your house with the urgent need to tell the world what you’re doing right now?”, “Have you tweeted from a party/concert/meeting/graduation/communion/church/batmitzva/mass?”, etc. Costa Rican Twitter users are marginalized on the web as it is dominated by English, but within their home circles their online social network culture is also misunderstood. While the Costa Rican Twitter community is still small, at around 150 people within the country, their is a strong movement of Tico Twitter users that is growing day by day.

Now that Twitter has been hacked to work with mobile phones, and that sites like Hi5 have been mobile enabled it is sure that the activism that has permeated public domain online social networks and private mobile communication will soon emerge.  That said, what we share in public and private are clearly different, and it is important that we not generalize mobile media and the internet as one in the same.  Further studies must be done to examine how mobile phones are being used globally by youth as tools for resistance so we can better understood the effects. It is clear that mobile phones have clearly made their mark in terms of revolutionizing the ways that society lives, works, and communicates, creating previously unheard of access to networked communication and information transfer.

While Costa Ricans have a nationalized telecommunications network, ICE (The Costa Rican Institute of Electricity), Panamanians have to rely on private networks in order to participate in the digital commons. According to MobileActive.org’s section of International Mobile Data (See charts below), Costa Rica has way higher access to the Internet, and but Mobile phone use is higher in Panama. This data draws out the realities of the countries economic structure, with Panama having a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and Costa Rica having a more middle class economy.

The average Costa Rican cellular phone plan is $4.20, while the average Panamanian is $18.10. The Internet is on average $10 more expensive for Panamanians than Costa Ricans, even though the level of poverty in Panama is over 5% higher. While Internet use in Panama is popular in urban context, the majority of the country remains without access. While mobile phone subscriptions in Panama are at a rate of 28%, Costa Ricans are only at 22%. Yet in Costa Rica personal computer rates remain at 22%, with Internet use at 29%. In contrast, Panamanians have a personal computer rate of 0.4%, and an Internet use rate of 0.78%.

This data challenges us to look at the deeper structures to national media hegemonies. Costa Rica’s public electricity corporation ICE was created in 1949 as a part of a larger movement for national sovereignty, as well as a means to protect against the harmful effects of hydro electric energy. In the year 1963 ICE went into telecommunications. ICE boasts a 97% coverage rate for electricity, and a telephone network that covers 95% of the population, most of the connections home lines. ICE has a mission for the environment and to create access to marginalized populations.

The contrast for the telecommunications industry in Panama, a free market monopoly which is run by two main companies, Cable and Wireless, and MoviStar. Much like the Canadian situation of telecommunications, the lack of competition between companies motivated by a for-profit mandate drives prices up. The Internet, and computers in general are unaffordable for a country that has a 7.2% poverty rate.

With these statistics in mind it is important to postulate what are the implications of new media technology in constructing a functioning democracy:

1. * How does access to digital networks on computers, and cell phones allow people to act as citizens, creating community media that is instantly shared across the world?




2. * How can governments work towards providing their citizens with access to these new forms of citizen media?




3. * How can youth utilize these technologies to gain agency in society and participate in activism and advocacy?

These questions will serve well for further study of this topic, as academics work on creating measures. For this research to happen there must be collaboration between both public and private domains, as telecommunications companies can benefit from this data as much as social activists can. On June 4th, 2008 Costa Rican President Oscar Arias passed new legislation in accordance to Central American Free Trade Agreement, making it legal for private companies to offer cellular phone and Internet services. This signifies a breaking of ICE, as corporations can use Wal-mart style tactics to drive out the state competition, and then raise prices once a monopoly is established. It is imperative in this time of change to examine the periphery effects affecting access to Citizen Media.

Today the Globe and Mail came out with an article iQUAKE, going over some basic wireless statistics; 10.1 billion text messages sent in Canada in 2007, 81% of worldwide mobile phones will be equipped with cameras by 2010, and 1.15 billion phones sold worldwide last year, up 16% from the previous year.

There is no doubt that cellphones have rocked the world, but with the launch of the iPhone yesterday in Canada the media is signaling this as a revolution (or quake) in Canada’s wireless market. As a Canadian wireless user I have seen cellphone services decline over the years. This data is fully qualitative– a personal ethnography per say– as I have noticed more and more dropped and failed calls as networks are overwhelmed with the amount of activity happening. With this decline of service, I’ve also noticed that no matter what price plan I pick my bill with Rogers is almost always over $100. In order not to be sued I have to admit there have been a few exceptions (when I was out of town I put myself on the minimum plan and turned my phone off for around $25/month). There is no doubt that prices need to be maintained at a certain level so that telecommunications companies have enough capital to keep up with the rapidly changing technology. But there are a number of flaws in the services that Canadian companies are unveiling as they tap into the new world of mobile web. There are lessons to be learned from the global market.

Service fees that rely on setting limits do not provide freedom for customers. Most Canadian telecommunications companies sell packages that function in a range of limits. You can use x amount of minutes, you can call x amount of friends unlimited, or you can download x amount of data. The new Rogers iPhone plan does not break this philosophy with it’s data plan, and the danger is that this standard that has been set within the mobile web market could leak into the world of broadband internet service plans. Of course, AT&T takes an opposite approach, going for unlimited data service plans. As well, there are no limits when it comes to state boarders and roaming / long distance. Instead of charging unwieldy long distance and roaming charges you can just pay $69.99-129.99 with no hidden fees! I am actually thinking of paying whatever I need to pay to break my Rogers contract and get an American wireless package. You know your countries telecommunications market is in shambles when you have to cross the boarder to get a good price plan.

Canadian telecommunications companies are already talking about selling broadband internet plans with data limits in order to discourage illegal downloading. While the iPhone breaks the boundaries of what websites you can look at on your phone, there is no doubt that this tradition of having unlimited access to the web has inspired the Net Neutrality movement. According the the website neutrality.ca:

It is our belief that the Internet is more than just the physical infrastructure over which it operates. It is a vibrant marketplace and an entirely new format for free expression, even a political landscape and a tool for free organization. Some ISPs in Canada however, are overstepping their role and cannot separate their participation in this network from their component ownership and commercial interests.

Costa Rican cyber-activist Josue Salazar states that for him Net Neutrality is about,

…that if you want to use whatever, you should be able to and no one should tell you not to. you should be able to publish anything read anything from anywhere in the world share etc and no one is supposed to take that away from you. It’s to avoid ISPs blocking traffic in any way (blocking websites, throttling bandwidth (they make torrents impossible to use in some parts of the us (i.e., comcast), or search engines from blocking anything (google blocking Chinese sites etc).

The Net Neutrality movement is growing, and as the original article points out, it’s the tools themselves that Rogers are selling that are forcing them to cave to consumer demands for pricing and other services.

Recently I have been diving into the work of Nokia’s Open Studios research team. Jan Chipcase and Younghee Jung are masters of global ethnographic research, visiting urban slums to capture glimpses of how technology affects the lives of everyday people. Just as fishermen are using cellphones in African villages to negotiate better prices, young activists are starting to use these technologies for social change. Through capturing and exposing human rights abuses, organizing spontanious smartmobs, youth are using mobile devices as a form of what academic/yborg Steve Mann calls sousvielsnce. While survielance signifies watching from below, sousvielence signifies from below, i.e., the grassroots. 

This phenomenon is fairly recent as the field is ripe for study. I am looking for other interested parties that will be interested in collaborating on research. It would be very interesting to do a study with data from TIG users on how we integrate mobile technology into our organizing.

MySpace itself is an eye soar to the world of web standards, as everyday users mangle code in every direction using theme generators and posting flash-ap upon flash-ap. Don’t get me wrong, I think that pages like MySpace are actually much more empowering to the average youth as there is much more room for creativity and experimentation with code compared to sites like Facebook.

Facebook does everything for you, where as to get your MySpace page looking pimp one must seek out solutions, experiment with CSS, and gain a basic understanding of html. This is no doubt cool, but of course results in an array of messy code which is hard to adapt to multiple platforms. Will you get to see all the cool videos that artists embed code to, or will it only be MySpace videos and MySpace music? This will encourage artists to adapt their content to the cellular platform, hence giving MySpace more control over independent media.

Once your stuff is on MySpace, do you really own it anymore? MySpace can use it for anything, and with the recent corporate Fox takeover, that means that you’re song could be on a sitcom with little royalties rolling out to you. But does that really matter? *insert sarcasm*

You’ll be a MySpace superstar!