Is mobile culture making human beings a whole lot worse or a whole lot better? It depends upon who you talk to: western psychologists or user anthropologists in the developing world.

ZOMG Noes!

According to an article called “Homo Mobilis” in the April 10^th edition of The Economist, linguists and psychologists at schools like American University and MIT think that Western youth culture is on a slippery slope, and that our mobile phones are pushing us overboard.

Why? Well, when people text each other we use short hand, and we don’t always follow grammatical rules, making mobile language as varied and variable as Middle English poetry. If language is the primary vehicle for thought, the argument goes, then what does mobile shorthand say for the way people think and reason?

The article quotes MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, who believes that gadget culture is changing us:

In the distant, landline-dominated past, she says, people thought: “I have a feeling so I want to make a call.” Young people today, including Ms Turkle’s teenage daughter, seem to be thinking instead: “I want to have a feeling, so I need to make a call.” What she means is that there is something inorganic, derivative and inauthentic about a lot of mobile communication. As a species, Ms Turkle thinks, we run the risk of letting the permanent wireless social clouds that surround us steal part of our nature.

The context here is obviously somewhat negative. We’re not evolving toward something greater. Rather, we’re becoming somewhat worse than our parents and grandparents. The medium is simply too just-in-time.

SMS FTW

But what does this say about the very positive role that mobile technology has played in the developing world?

In yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, author Sara Corbett wonders “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?” Corbett paints a strikingly different picture of the ways in which mobile culture is helping families across much of the world.

Corbett looks at mobile banking (Wizzit in South Afria and GCash in Philippines), farming cooperatives in Nepal aided by local sales agents who check market prices on their mobile phones (a project of International Development Enterprises), and phone ladies in Bangladesh, who function as mobile phone operators for their villages and change a small commission so that fellow villages can make and receive calls (a project of Grameen Phone LTD).

The same features that make mobile culture so threatening to scholars in the United States make it so valuable in the rest of the world. Corbett writes,

A “just in time” moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

Neways

So give a mobile phone to a 17 year-old American girl, and she’ll devolve into a prehistoric being who can’t communicate properly or engage in healthy relationships. But give the same mobile phone to a 17 year-old girl in Bangladesh, and she’ll become an innovative entrepreneur?

Something doesn’t quite connect.

With the greatest respect for my colleagues at American universities (and for whistle-blowers in general), whose knowledge I greatly value and whose expertise in their chosen fields of discipline well exceeds my own, I think perhaps the time has come to stop viewing gadgetry, mobile culture, and the media consumption patterns of young people through a frame of fear, within the context that just because my kids do something differently, then it must be wrong. Let’s watch and see what happens. I think we might all be pleasantly surprised by how innovative mobile culture can be.

Mobile Voter, the group that innovation voter registration by text message, recently launched a program to turn people with a few minutes to spare waiting for a train or in line at the grocery store into volunteers. The program is called Volunteer Now, and it connects volunteers with projects through text messages. The combination of technology and civic action fits neatly into Mobile Voter’s mission to use technology to empower civic life and political engagement, with a specific focus on youth

Ben Rigby, Co-Executive Director of Mobile Voter, filled me in on the details about Volunteer Now. (Rigby is also the author of a ne w book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0.)

What does it do?

Volunteer Now enables people to spontaneously offer their expertise via mobile phones. Missed your train? Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non English speaker. Identify craters for NASA. Give back in your spare time!

What inspired you to do it?

Projects like SETI@Home have showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data. This project will explore the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human “CPUs.” We believe that it will reveal a massive untapped capacity to do good.

How can people get involved?

They can contact me: ben@mobilevoter.org. We’re looking for programmers, designers, and creative people with great ideas to volunteer for the project. It’s an all volunteer/open source project.

That’s probably the question Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is asking his IT staff after word broke earlier this week that his pager outed his affair with Chief of Staff Christine Beatty. While mobile devices can help government officials be more responsive to the needs of their citizens, they can also cause quite a bit of trouble as the Detroit Free Press point out:

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff lied about their relationship last summer at a police whistle-blower trial that has cost the cash-strapped city more than $9 million, according to records obtained by the Free Press.

The false testimony potentially exposes them to felony perjury charges, legal experts say.

Kilpatrick and chief of staff Christine Beatty denied during testimony in August that they had a sexual relationship. But the records, a series of text messages, show them engaged in romantic banter as well as planning and recounting sexual liaisons.

I wonder if this will have any impact on the wide scale adoption of mobile technologies by governments across the country. At the very least I’m sure people will be a little more careful about what they text…..

It took awhile for us to catch up, and by “us,” I mean American consumers.

When IPDI started looking at the intersection between mobile technology and politics in 2005, mobile phones and text messaging were starting to be an addictive communications staple in American life. By that time, mobile phones had become a critical communications appendage for most of the rest of the world, and people in some countries were using them in a very political way to organize mass protests and in several cases, overthrow the government (note: Justin Oberman and I have an upcoming chapter on why this occurred in the Routledge Handbook of Political Management in 2008).

We haven’t seen mobile phones used in quite that revolutionary way in the American political context, and we probably won’t see a movement akin to People Power II anytime soon in Washington, DC. However, we are starting to see smart mobile strategies emerge in the American political space.

Yesterday, Rock the Vote and AT&T announced that they were teaming up to conduct a mobile strategy to encourage voter registration and turnout among young voters. The duo plan to use text messaging to push election news and reminders, voter-registration updates and tools to facilitate increased registration. The campaign will also give out exclusive celebrity ringtones, run text-polling, and use mobile to organize reports from student journalists.

From AT&T’s official release:

“The AT&T and Rock the Vote campaign will engage young people where they are — through a device that nearly never leaves their hands — and encourage them to actively participate in the democratic process,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO for AT&T’s wireless services.

I’ll be watching to see how the RTV/AT&T campaign pans out in the primaries. We’re still not entirely “caught up,” but things are certainly starting to get interesting.

Truth in Advertising: I just recently ended a six-month internship with Verizon’s PolicyBlog last week, so now I can write about them without having a major conflict of interest.

Today, my former boss, John Czwartacki, sent me a facebook message informing me that an idea I had for Verizon to create a Facebook application which allows people to send SMSs to their friends straight from their profile came to fruition (Note: I do not believe I was the one who spurred the application into reality, but did come up with the idea independently).

While being absolutely no expert on SMS and mobile politicking, I think that iterations of this allowing friends to send political text messages to friends via Facebook, could have positive implications for campaigns- specifically in the field of mobilization. However, I say this with one MAJOR caveat; that is, that any application such as this must only work with users who opt in.  For virtually all cellphone users, unsolicited text messages are just as much of an annoyance as sales calls and in many cases even more annoying due to the high cost of texts without a specific text message plan. However, for those who do allow it and have unlimited texting, this can be a good easy and non-invasive way to make brief announcements. Even with those who opt-in I imagine that text messages from any organization should be kept to a relative minimum.

For those interested in Verizon’s Text-a-Friend app: http://apps.facebook.com/vzwtextafriend/application_added.aspx

There’s a creepy scene at the beginning of the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which Charlie and a strange man stand outside the gates of the chocolate factory. The man, referring to the factory, says “nobody ever goes in; nobody ever comes out.”

This is all well and good in factories. But what’s a government to do when information about the goings-on instead its borders appear to threaten state security? The same thing: shut down the gates.

That’s what the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) did in Burma a few weeks ago when the less than 1 percent of its citizens who do have Internet access used it to post camera phone pictures and blogs about protests in Rangoon. The power of citizen media, the stirring images it produced, and the growing support for the protestors within the global community, led the government to shut down the country’s two ISPs, Myanmar Posts and Telecom (MPT) and Bagan/Myanmar Teleport (BaganNet) sporadically, then completely, then sporadically between September 29 and October 16. The idea was to prevent citizen coverage of the protests from reaching outsiders and outside signs of support and solidarity from reaching its citizens.

Now, the OpenNet Initiative tells you how the government did it in its latest report, Pulling the Plug. Author Stephanie Wang writes,

Burma provides a rare example of a government also taking extreme measures to keep information from escaping its borders. In pulling the plug on the Internet Burma became only the second country to resort to such drastic action; in 2005 King Gyanendra of Nepal declared martial law and briefly shut down the Internet, along with international telephone lines and cellular communications networks.

Like any factory with a security threat, the government didn’t stop at shutting the gates. It also started identifying protestors using protest footage. Wang reports that security forces in Mandalay checked motorcycle registrations against footage of the protests, pinpointing and cracking down on protestors using the same medium as the citizen journalists.

The point of the crackdown might have been to prevent nothing from coming in and nothing from going out, but that doesn’t mean that something wasn’t circulating from within. Wang alludes to the incident as an illustration of the power of citizen journalism to share up a nation and a global community.

But there is something else, something just beneath the surface, something about a government watching and adopting the tactics of a dissident citizen force. If a government wants to keep up with techno-powered dissidents (even in a country with one of the smallest Internet populations in the world), it behooves the government to quickly, nimbly and quietly (or not so quietly) think and even act like a dissident.

During the last couple of elections, there was a big push towards e-voting. I think that is the right way to go in the long run, but we are definitely late to the e-voting party. Besides late adoption, another issue is the general lack of trust we have for e-voting systems, though to be fair, they have brought this upon themselves.

While we try to get an e-voting system in place, Estonia is leaving us behind. According to this article the ruling Reform Party in Estonia is planning an amendment to allow people to vote via mobile phone, m-voting. They hope to have a viable system in place for the 2009 local elections, which is no doubt ambitious.

Hopefully e-voting will become the de facto method here soon, but even when it does, we still might be playing catch-up to other nations when it comes to voting technology.

What do you do when suspect that the chairman of your Commission on Elections received bribes to support a bid from Chinese company to provide your country’s broadband network?

If belong to Filipino group TxtPower, then you post a catchy protest video on YouTube and produce a ring tone. And you produce them in record time – placing your message in the phones and the screens about as quickly as the news hits the media.

This week, President Gloria Arroyo announced that investigations into allegations of a bribery scandal involving Chinese company Zhong Xing Telecommunication Equipment Corp. (ZTE) and Benjamin Abalos, Chairman of the Commission on Elections in Philippines turned up nothing.

Arroyo had previously suspended a $330 million contract awarded from the government to ZTE to provide the country’s broadband network pending the outcome of these investigations.

TxTPower was more than a little skeptical of Arroyo’s decision, and posted the video ZTE Scandal on YouTube a few days ago.

They also launched a ringtone on the TxtPower website, which we were unable to access.

That’s the score when it comes to the number of presidential campaigns employing text message-based mobile outreach strategies. (We’ve counted Edwards, Clinton, Obama and Kucinich.)

Last night, Kevin Bertram spoke at Mobile Monday DC’s September event. The topic was success factors for mobile marketing in a presidential race. Kevin’s company, Distributive Networks, runs the Obama campaign’s mobile program, which launched this summer.

Kevin gave us his Top Ten Lessons for running a mobile campaign for political candidates:

1. A dedicated short code is imperative. You don’t want your supporters to accidentally receive messages from companies who might be assigned the same shortcode. Splurge on the extra cost ($1,000 vs. $500) for your own shortcode.
2. Timelines and relevance are key. When the Obama campaign used text messaging to remind its supporters about a debate at Howard University, some of the recipients told the campaign that even though they attended Howard, they didn’t know that there was debate.
3. People like to feel empowered, so use mobile technology in a way that allows them to talk back to you and take action. One example Kevin cited was asking your volunteers to text you about their experiences canvassing.
4. People like free stuff, like ring tones, bumper stickers, and wallpaper. And when you ask them where to send their loot – like bumper stickers – you can collect their mailing addresses as well.
5. Segment your lists by zipcode/area code, events, and issues. People should only receive text messages about events in their area and issues they care about.
6. Stay away from complicated.
7. Tests your assumptions. Sometimes what you believe about mobile technology, such as the myth that only young people use text messaging, is proven inaccurate.
8. Dedicated customer service is important. Make sure work with a company that has a dedicated staff ready and able to answer your supporters’ questions.
9. Knowing and following the Mobile Marketing Association’s rules is imperative. Check out the MMA website.
10. Don’t ask for money. Early gratification equals retention, and mobile is still a tricky medium when it comes to fundraising.

Kevin also left us with a delicious tidbit about using text messaging for get-out-the-vote. In a study conducted by Allison Dale and Aaron Strauss (we found it on MobileActive), the authors found a 4% increase in voter turnout when text messaging was used. There was no backlash, and each vote only cost $1.56, compared to $19 per vote using a phone back.

The New Politics Institute just launched the second batch of its New Tools Campaign, highlighting three new tools for progressive political campaigns.

The toolkit includes memos on mobile tech, video and microtargeting:

Go Mobile Now by Jed Alpert and Chris Muscarella

How You, Too, Can Get Video Online by Dan Manatt

An Introduction to Microtargeting in Politics by Mark Steitz and Laura Quinn

The site also hints at a memo on social networking, but we weren’t able to find it online . . . yet.