Join a discussion about the intersection of mobile technology and politics from the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival.
One of several interesting mobile panels I experienced at SXSW was “Mobileactive: How Mobile Technology Impacts Politics and Vice Versa.” The panelists this time were Justin Oberman of the blog MoPocket.com; Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive (who lend their name to the panel), a resource for people using mobile tools for political activism; Chris Muscarella, co-founder of Mobile Commons; Douglas Busk of SinglePoint; and James Eberhard, who is the chairman of Mobile Accord.
Verclas opened up the discussion with an overview of some recent events at the nexus of mobile technology and politics. She began by showing a video that has been circulating like mad around Egypt as people forward it from one MMS-capable device to the next. You can read more about it on the MobileActive blog if you want full details. Verclas brought up the phenomenon as a way to point out the somewhat hidden power of mobile devices as media channels. When 40 percent of Egyptians have devices capable of MMS, this is potentially very powerful.
She then extended this point: About 3.5 billion people - over 50 percent of us alive today - have mobile devices. And there are more and more examples of mobile devices being used for political ends. In Burma, for example, mobile technology was instrumental in organizing the September 2007 anti-government protests, so much so that the government actually shut down mobile service to many people. (More info about that here.)
Another example of the impact of mobile on politics happened in Sierra Leone, which had its first peaceful election after many years of turmoil due in part to the sophisticated protocol for monitoring polling places using mobile devices. Verclas also brought up another example, closer to home: In the 2004 United States Presidential election, young people who were text messaged with a reminder to vote were 3-4 percent more likely to actually go do it - which might seem small, but in an age of such narrow political victories could decide the outcome of an election. SMS-based get-out-the-vote efforts were much more successful that either e-mail-based ones or standard voice call efforts.
As a user of Dodgeball, for example, this makes total sense to me. One thing SMS messages have proven very useful for is sending and receiving quick bits of news about what’s going on right in the moment - without the intrusiveness of a phone call (or the annoying anti-personal nature of a pre-recorded phone call). There are many examples of this - and more happening each month - so suffice it to say that the impact mobile devices are having on global politics is huge. And it’s going to become even bigger as time goes on, and more powerful devices reach the hands of larger groups of people.
Much of the rest of this panel took place in the form of a Q&A, so I’m just going to hit on some of the highlights. The first audience member to ask a question asked about carrier restrictions. How do companies such as Mobile Commons, SinglePoint and Mobile Accord that provide these sorts of services get past carrier restrictions? And do they get any flack from carriers about their activities?
Busk noted that once you receive carrier permission, this really isn’t such a problem. The carriers get most concerned when premium charges are added to people’s bills. (As far I can tell, none of these companies do that - it’s a reference to, say, ringtone downloads or those $5/month horoscope or joke-a-day text message services.)
Eberhard added that the carriers are also very wary of spamming their subscribers with hundreds of text messages a day. An important thing for them in preserving that SMS channel and keeping it clean of everything but just what their subscribers want.
Muscarella told a brief anecdote from his experience with Mobile Commons. One of their clients (he didn’t mention which) wanted to do a mobile public service campaign so they passed the materials in front of Verizon as a casual request. Verizon turned them down, which surprised them. The New York Times picked up the story, apparently, and after receiving over 250,000 phone calls from irate customers, Verizon relented and the campaign went through. So, Muscarella noted, you can get carriers to be flexible. It’s just a complicated eco-system.
Another question: How does voice fit into all of this?
Verclas pointed out that first we needed to remember that unlike in the United States, for most of the world voice is expensive and SMS very cheap.
Muscarella added that while Americans are used to having more multimedia experiences with their phones, many people the rest of the world, like, say, India or Africa, are not. In fact, there are services in India that parse webpages into SMS messages and deliver them to people that way. There is gravitation, though, towards bringing together voice, SMS and WAP media in mobile campaigns, especially in the United States. John Edwards did a fund-raising campaign in 2007, for example, which used voice calls featuring his wife Elizabeth to connect people with fundraising services online.
Busk said that it’s important to remember that these political campaigns desire complete control. They need to have control over the message at all times, so they sometimes come late to these new technologies. I’m too young to remember this, but he brought up how Jerry Brown’s campaign used 1-800 numbers in the 1988 Democratic primary campaign as one of his fundraising tactics. It’s like that now with mobile tech. Busk thought the George Allan / “Macaca” video of the 2006 campaign season may have been an event which really demonstrated to political campaigns the power of mobile media in distributing a message - positive or otherwise.
If you’d like to know more about these issues, I would strongly recommend checking out the resources at MobileActive and MoPocket.com, as well as the other companies represented at this panel. This is a huge field of development, so I’d love to hear other experiences you may have had or resources you’ve found about these issues, if you’d like to write about them in the comments.
Also check out Part 1 and Part 2 of my SXSW Blog if you haven’t already.
Language: English