sms activism
Posted by MohiniBhavsar on Aug 09, 2010
Mobile Activism or Mobile Hype? data sheet 2399 Views
Abstract:
Based on two experiences using mobile phones in Africa to address women’s rights and social development, the author tries to understand whether mobile technology will bring social progress to the economically poor of Africa.
The author first examines mobile phone use in the campaign for the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, adopted by the African Union (AU)in 2003 and in need of ratification by 15 countries. The technical barriers to message transmission in the campaign and the message spamming that it attracted inhibited the success of this particular application of mobile technology but did not reduce the campaign effectiveness because the uniqueness of the cell phone campaign strategy drew a large amount of publicity for ratification.
In the second example, the UmNyango Project intended to promote and protect the rights of rural women in the province of KwaZulu Natal (KZN), South Africa, from domestic violence against women and landlessness amongst women. The project created "an SMS gateway through which messages could be distributed to all those enrolled in the project, and it enabled every individual to send messages to the organisers and to the local paralegal officers where they needed assistance with regard to any incidence of violence or threat to their access to land....In practice, the project found SMS to be prohibitively expensive, despite the fact that some level of subsidy was provided by the project towards the cost of SMS." The author states that, "Mobile phones, after all the hype, are like pencils, tools for communication.... Like all technologies, tools do not themselves do anything." He uses the example of SMS hate mail messages to support the position that effects of technology result from the underlying values and morals of its developers, not from the tools themselves, and concludes: "In capitalist societies, all technologies have the potential for magnifying and amplifying social differentiation. It is only through the imposition of the democratic will of citizens can this inherent tendency of technologies be overcome."
Posted by KatrinVerclas on May 09, 2007
Ethan Zuckerman has written a solid overview of mobile phones in international activism. It is re-posted here under its Creative Commons license. For additional resources, see also the mobileactive.org Strategy Guides on using mobile phones in elections, advoacy, and fundraising.
Posted by Bonnie Bogle on Jul 04, 2006
The UN World Food Programme recently received a different kind of text message – a direct plea for help from a refugee in northern Kenya. The message said, “My name is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilogrammes of food. You must help.”
In an article from the UN Refugee Agency about the SMS, reporter Greg Barrow asks what the impact would be if in addition to giving refugees food, the World Food Programme also gave them a few mobile phones and the numbers of all star donors like Bono and Bill Gates. Mohammed’s text message has been making the rounds in the international press so I don’t doubt that similar messages could draw further attention to problems in refugee camps. But I think a greater impact could be made if an organization, like the One Campaign for example, sought out SMS messages like Mohammed’s from people in refugee camps in need of urgent help and sent them to their network. I bet many people who receive such a personal message will want to help, and if they can help by making a small donation from their mobile phone or sending the sms message on to their political representatives, it could spur action to help alleviate problems such as Mohammed’s.
You can read the entire UNHCR article here.
Posted by justinoberman on Mar 28, 2006
Who would not want to save this guy?
As the seal hunting season opens, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) is launching a major campaign at stopthesealhunt.com and on cell phones all across the UK.
Starting yesterday, IFAW launched advertisements, like the one showed above, in the Sunday Mirror and has already received well over 10, 000 responses which, according to Jed Alpert, CEO of Politxt (the political arm of his Rights-Group media) the company responsible for the back end technology of the campaign, is a very sizeable response rate for a newspaper ad. IFAW will be displaying the add in various UK newspapers throughout the week and will be putting them up in the London tube some time in early April. In the UK, send the text message "Ban It" to the short code 60123.
More on the story is at Personal Democracy.
Posted by KatrinVerclas on Mar 15, 2006
From India: The "Justice for Jessica Lal" campaign is fueled by massive sms campaigns across the country.
In Mumbai, "TV news channel NDTV launched a "Fight for Jessica Lal" campaign to garner support for a fresh trail in the ‘Jessica Lal murder case’ where all the nine prime accused were "honoroubly" discharged by a Delhi sessions court this week. (Lal, a model, was filling in as a bartender in a posh south Delhi restaurant when she was shot in the wee hours of 30 April 1999 after she reportedly refused to serve liquor to Manu Sharma, the son of Haryana Excise Minister Vinod Sharma." Sharma was recently acquitted.
