Feature Online Dialogue: Using Mobile Phones for Action
Table of Contents
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Using Mobiles | SMS (Short Message Service)
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Intro
Mobile technology is being used by citizens all over the world as the most affordable and massively adopted piece of technology. How can we harness this technology for advancing human rights and civil society participation?
Our outstanding resource practitioners for the November-December tactical discussion shared and discussed many ideas for "Using Mobile Phones for Action". You can still contribute your ideas, questions and experiences!
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Philippe Duhamel - in his interTactica blog - Harnessing new technology for new tactics provides some great examples to get our creative ideas flowing.
- Sending out an SMS -- Supporting human rights work and activism with text messaging, or SMS - Short Messaging Service - functionality
- Organizing demonstrations -- Such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine
- Coup de text -- Like ousting a president, it happened in the Philippines
- Protest Ringtones -- Highlighting corruption, it's being used in the Philippines
Links from the dicussion:
Well, not to be negative
Well, not to be negative about such a great resource, but I have heard of some concerns for mobile phones. One in particular being concerns about mobile phones being used to obtain and disseminate private information without any way to halt the process. I know concerns have been raised specifically in using camera phones and their SMS properties to send photos of potentially private events, etc.
Seems like this might be an important thing to keep in mind. Sometimes great tools can be appropriated by not so great people and then used for a poor purpose. Privacy is a big concern in our increasingly digitized world, and SMS can spread information like wildfire. What happens if that information is private or untrue and damaging?
Regardless of the minority negative effect, the uses we've been talking about in the discussion never cease to amaze me. So much innovation surrounds this topic, and I'm glad to be hearing personal experiences. Thank you all for sharing!