bytes and ballots

This week's Economist has a nice story, "Liberation Technology: Mobiles, Protests and Pundits", on how mobile phones are influencing politics. The subhead of the story, though, lays out the dilemma for social scientists and technologists: "Mobile phones are changing politics faster than academics can follow." The story presents a variety of examples of situations where mobiles are being used to influence political behavior:

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.

The story closes by noting that four "eggheads with links to California's Annenberg School of Communication" have a book coming out next month on the use of mobiles in politics!