André Lemos is Associate Professor, Faculty of Communication, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. PhD in Sociology, Sorbonne (1995), Visiting Scholar University of Alberta and McGill University, Canada (2007-2008). Coordinator of Cybercity Research Group (UFBa/CNPq) and Researcher level 1 at CNPq. Member of Prix Ars Electronica, Wi. Journal of Mobile Media and Canadian Journal of Communication Board. This Carnet is online since March 1st, 2001.
Interessante artigo com números e vários exemplos mostrando a importância dos telefones celulares como mídia social e ativista em países emergentes. O texto Mobile Phones and Social Activism é de Ethan Zuckerman e mostra que, se para os países centrais as tecnologias revolucionárias são os blogs e a web 2.0, para os países emergentes e periféricos como a maiori da África, a grande tecnologia do século (junto com o rádio) é o telefone celular, que no limite é o rádio (em termos de tecnologia e papel social) do século XXI. Vejam a íntegra do artigo com muitos exemplos de smart mobs e outras formas de ativismo com os celulares. Como aperitivo, alguns trechos:
"(...) If you ask a U.S.-based activist the most important technical development of the past five years, they?ll likely tell you about the rise of citizen media, the use of blogs and Web community sites to disseminate information, organize events, and raise money.
(...) Ask an activist from the developing world the same question and you?ll get a different answer: the most important activist technology of the last five years is the mobile phone.
(...) The parts of the world where mobile use is growing the most quickly ? the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South, and Southeast Asia ? are markets where the mobile isn?t a replacement for existing landline technology, but is allowing people to have a personal communications channel for the first time.
(...) The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.
(...) In general, the anonymity of mobile phones is one of the key reasons they?ve been so useful to activists. In the United States, we consider most mobiles to be highly traceable ? generally, mobile users have a phone number associated with a permanent address and a credit card. But mobile phones in most developing nations are sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.
(...) Anonymity makes these protests unusually difficult for police or other authorities to block. ?Smart mobs? of activists, brought to demonstrations by text messages, have led to political change in the Philippines and the Ukraine.
(...)(Activists have discussed the wisdom of using SMS gateways, Web-based services which can send SMS messages to hundreds or thousands of phones. An argument against using gateways is the fact that they are single points of failure that could be blocked by a government anxious to stop the spread of a smart mob message.)
(...) In smart-mob scenarios, mobile phones function as an impromptu broadcast network ? if activists had access to radio stations with sufficient footprint, they could achieve similar goals by broadcasting information about rallies over the airwaves. Other activist uses of mobiles take advantage of the ability of mobile owners to create content as well as forwarding it. Activists with the pro-democracy Kefaya movement use mobile phones and their cameras to document demonstrations and other news events, including a government crackdown on Sudanese protesters in Cairo ? they call, text, or use MMS to send messages to the administrator of the Kefaya blog, which compiles reports into blog posts much as a newsroom turns field reports into finished articles.
(...) A dispersed group with mobile phones ? especially mobile phones equipped with cameras ? becomes a powerful force for ?sousveillance.? Coined by Dr. Steve Mann, ?sousveillance? refers to the monitoring of authority figures by grassroots groups, using the technologies and techniques of surveillance. The use of mobile phones to monitor the 2000 presidential election in Ghana is a good example of sousveillance ? voters who were prevented from voting used mobile phones to report their experience to call-in shows on local radio stations. The stations broadcast the reports, prompting police to respond to the accusations of voter intimidation.
(...)Mobiles are powerful because they?re pervasive, personal, and capable of authoring content. An intriguing new dimension emerges as they become systems of payment as well. Kenyan mobile company Safaricom has introduced a new system allowing mobile phone users to send money to other users of the network ? it?s called M-PESA and has moved from pilot to full-scale implementation rapidly. (...)".
Projeto na Universidade de Leeds discute a "geografia autônoma" (via Critical Spatial Practice), definida como:
"...those spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship, which are created through a combination of resistance and creation, and the questioning and challenging of dominant laws and social norms."
O projeto busca entender como:
"activists make and remake these types of spaces in their everyday lives by exploring their core ideas, beliefs and visions, how they are translated into action, what kinds of spaces for participation and identity are created and what it means to live in-between the overlapping spaces. We are currently participating in three UK-based Case Studies and are guided by an Advisory Group. By engaging in such research, our aim is to critically explore and support autonomous spaces in the UK and the ideas, struggles and practices that bring them to life, as well as help to introduce them to new audiences."
2. Social Centres: Resisting, Creating and Embedding Alternatives. This is about moving from community resistance to creating autonomous spaces that help to facilitate the exchange, development and praxis of alternatives to capitalism. We have been documenting the progress of activists attempting to launch a new social centre in Newcastle and developing important insights into the struggle for radical space.
3. Sustainable Living and Living Autonomously: the Lammas Low Impact Settlement Project. The final study examines the practicalities of trying to live autonomously using examples of Low Impact Developments, such as Lammas in South West Wales. The ways in which autonomous sustainable living can be practiced with regards to land, housing, food, and energy help us further understand what has been achieved and what is possible.
Helpline que funciona por SMS ativa rede de organização não-governamentais, assim como agências governamentias para ajuda a Filipinos em situação de risco. Vejam post do MobileActive.org para detalhes.
Trechos:
"A single computer, hooked up to a modem in Bobby Soriano's house in the Philippines, receives a steady of stream of text messages begging for help. There have been messages from Philippine seamen, who, after being accused of the murder of a Korean captain, were forced to confess by Omani police. There was a Philippine domestic worker in Lebanon who was forced to flee to the mountains to escape Israeli bombings, and a message from twenty Philippine sailors who were evicted from their ship by police near Denmark. In each of these cases, a single SMS message with the keyword "SOS" was sent to a hotline in the Philippines, activating a network of nonprofits and government agencies to come to the workers' rescue.
The hotline, called SOS SMS, is a project of the Center for Migrant Advocacy (CMA) in the Philippines and its partners in Saudi Arabia. This Valentine's Day, SOS SMS celebrates its two year anniversary since its initial launch on February 14, 2006. 'It was our gift of love to the migrant Filipino workers,' said Bobby Soriano, an IT volunteer who maintains the system in Manilla."
Global Voice lança um guia para o grande público sobre "Citizen Media", ou mídia cidadã que significa formas de produção de informação livre, feita por qualquer um com fins informativos, políticos, culturais usando blogs, podcasts, fotos, videos... Vale a pena conferir o "An Introduction to Citizen Media". Mais informações no Global Voices Online. A primeira edição está disponível em Inglês, Espanhol e Bengali:
"Rising Voices proudly announces the first in a series of outreach guides meant to explain the fundamentals of citizen media to a non-technical readership.
The first guide, An Introduction to Citizen Media, offers context and case studies which show how everyday citizens across the world are increasingly using blogs, podcasts, online video, and digital photography to engage in an unmediated conversation which transcends borders, cultures, and differing languages.
From the introduction:
'A change is taking place in how we communicate.
Just ten years ago we all learned about the world around us from newspapers, the television, and radio. Professional journalists would go to faraway places and bring back stories, photographs and videos of the situations they witnessed and the people they met.
Sometimes at dinner we talk about these stories with our friends and family. But ten years ago we rarely, if ever, communicated directly with the journalists themselves. Leading members of society wrote editorials expressing their opinions about various issues, but the rest of us could only share our opinions and thoughts with a small group of friends.
Over the last few years everything has changed. Thanks to new tools like weblogs, it is now possible to easily publish to the Internet. From Turkey to Kenya to Bolivia, everyday people like you and me are starting to share their stories and opinions with the rest of the world.
While this new form of communication is now freely available to anyone, most of the people participating still live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban cities.
The purpose of this guide is to show that anyone with an internet connection can participate in the emerging global conversation. Our understanding of the world is now shaped not just by the newspapers and television, but also by each other.' (...)"
Post do Blog | MobileActive.org chama atenção para artigo da BBC monstrando como os telefones móveis e a disseminação da internet permitem aos cidadãos monitorarem violações dos direitos humanos:
"Mobile phones and global internet dissemination are important tools in citizen "sousveillance" and reporting of human rights abuses, notes an article in the BBC. Reporting on a panel at the UN in honor of Human Rights Day on the significance of new media in human rights. I, as a representative of MobileActive.org was part of the panel. The article notes rightly some of the potential of mobiles in documenting abuses through video and audio..."
Artigo do The Economist, Mobile phones and protest, a partir da conferência sobre ativismo móvel em São Paulo, aponta para a importância das SMS para mobilizações políticas mostrando exemplos já clássicos como o das Filipinas, as tentativas de bloqueio no Paquistão, Bielorússia e Burma, o uso de ring tones, como o caso Chavez e Juan Carlos ou o uso de imagens contra violação dos direitos humanos como no caso de vídeos mostrando tortura no Egito.
Summoned by cells: the Louisiana march (photo AFP)
"BACK in September, protesters from many parts of the United States poured into the small town of Jena, Louisiana, to express their anger over the over-zealous prosecution (as they saw it) of six young African-Americans on charges of assault. Mobile-phone text messages played an important role in pulling in the crowd.
But for pioneers of mobile telephony and texts as tools of protest and dissent, simply summoning people to demonstrations?a technique first deployed in the Philippines as long ago as 2001?is old hat. The search is on for ever more creative ways to use this ubiquitous device.
At a recent conference in São Paulo on 'mobile activism'- a term that embraces humanitarian work as well as protest - there was much talk about how to 'go beyond text' when using mobile phones. And it became clear that exuberant practice was galloping ahead of theory. One recent craze has been the use of political ringtones. Once again, Filipinos are in the vanguard. Since 2005 that country's best-known tone, especially among youngsters exasperated by corruption, has been 'Hello Garci' - a snatch of taped conversation in which President Gloria Macapagal - Arroyo seems to be chatting with Virgilio Garcillano, her election organiser, ahead of the 2004 poll that confirmed her in office. In Hispanic countries, meanwhile, the latest fashion is a royal voice saying 'Why don't you shut up?' - the recent outburst of Spain's King Juan Carlos to President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela at a summit in Santiago, Chile.
Mobiles are also being used in more sophisticated ways, to capture and disseminate images that were never supposed to see the light of day. Witness, a non-governmental organisation that aims to record and denounce human-rights abuses, is one pioneer. Instead of merely posting verbal reports, it invites visitors to its website to the 'Hub'- a collection of harrowing video clips, often uploaded from mobiles, which depict cruelty in action. On the 'Egypt' country page, there are grainy images showing torture in a prison.
For now at least, expense and technological problems make it hard to organise any international mobile-based protest. The lack of full interoperability between mobile systems means that borders are still difficult to cross. But efforts are under way to get round that problem. For example, FrontlineSMS, a laptop-based (and thus portable) technology has been designed for use almost anywhere. Early this year it was deployed in the monitoring of elections in Nigeria. Voters texted complaints to a computer where they could be processed and cross-checked by monitors from international bodies such as the European Union.
More recently FrontlineSMS was used in Pakistan to get round curbs on information flowing in and out of the country. Both there and in Myanmar (Burma) recent disturbances have produced some interesting insights into the cat-and-mouse games of protesters and political masters.
In Pakistan the equipment used by local authorities was too cheap to block the flow of text messages. This helped Pakistani protesters to stay informed about sympathetic rallies taking place in America and Britain?and to give the outside world a glimpse of ordinary people's reactions to the state of emergency.
During the recent protests in Myanmar, the authorities temporarily suspended text messaging altogether. That did not stop activists from using expensive satellite phones, which are harder to shut down. The political, and above all, economic cost of blocking text messages was relatively low in Myanmar, because not many people use mobiles. But in many other developing countries, shutting mobile systems would be economically disastrous and politically costly, because so many small businesses depend on them.
In some places, like Belarus, the authorities have refined the art of blocking mobile coverage in specific places?such as protest venues. They have also turned text messages to their own uses: by using the state-owned network to spread warnings that a rally is likely to end in bloodshed.
For hard-pressed activists in search of new techniques, help may come from an unlikely quarter. Google, the internet giant, has offered $10m for the most innovative new application for mobile phones. The offer extends to ideas that bring humanitarian benefits or contribute to economic development. Mobile activists have never lacked imagination, and many of them are already hard at work, thinking of clever new uses for those little devices?mostly rather crude, five-year-old models?that have become part of daily life in the poorest parts of the world."
Segundo o ArsTechnica, a China está bloqueando os RSS Feeds. Essa era a única forma de acessar conteúdo de sites bloqueados na China (vejam o site Great Firewall of China e confiram se seu site está bloqueado...o meu está!). Agora nem isso. Vejam o post completo, China's Great Firewall turns its attention to RSS feeds:
"Savvy Internet fans in the people's republic have known for a long time, however, that there have been simple ways to get forbidden information. One of those ways was the magical gift of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. The Great Firewall can block specific web sites all it wants, but as long as there's an RSS feed, many Chinese surfers can use feeds to access otherwise forbidden information. Unfortunately, China appears to have finally gotten wise to RSS as of late?reports have been popping up from our readers and around the web of not being able to access FeedBurner RSS feeds as early as August of this year. More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with "feeds," "rss," and "blog," thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites?including ones that aren't blocked in China, such as Ars Technica?useless".
Descrição do "MobileActive Releases New Strategy Guide: Guía de Móvil Activismo para Latino América"
"Esta guía de estrategia en español tiene información detallada sobre el uso de los teléfonos celulares en América Latina y estudios sobre los celulares usados por el activismo social en varios países latinoamericanos.
La industria celular ha crecido rápidamente en América Latina. En el año 2005, más de 40% de latinoamericanos tuvieron los teléfonos celulares, y se pronostica que este número va a aumentar a 80% para 2009. El uso extendido de los mensajes de texto SMS, el comercio móvil (m-commerce), y otros medios de comunicación celular han hecho los teléfonos celulares una parte integral de la sociedad latinoamericana.
Con la proliferación de los celulares, han sido una herramienta indispensable para los movimientos sociales latinoamericanos y los activistas. La guía de estrategia describe Brasil, Argentina, México, y Chile, discutiendo los usos típicos de los celulares, el potencial por el crecimiento celular, y los ejemplos de los celulares usados efectivamente por las ONG y la sociedad civil.
Dos de los ejemplos más inspiradores ocurrieron en la Argentina y en México. La campaña de Greenpeace llamada GreenSMS usó los celulares para alcanzar la "Ley de Basura Cero." La ley reduce la cantidad de desperdicio urbano y prohíbe efectivamente la incineración de desechos en Buenos Aires.
En México, el Frente Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (FZLN), que originalmente organizó mucho con el Internet, usó la tecnología del Wireless Internet Protocal (lo que permite que los celulares puedan conectar al Internet) para diseminar la información sobre la historia del movimiento, los contactos internacionales, y los comunicados y escritos del Subcomandante Marcos."
O site Free Burma! convoca a blogsfera para se unir na luta pela liberdade de expressão e democracia na ex-Birmânia, sob domínio de uma ditadura militar e há vários dias, palco de revoltas populares iniciadas por monges budistas. Assinem a petição e juntem-se ao movimento. O dia de hoje, 4 de outubro, é o dia de lançamento da campanha:
"International bloggers are preparing an action to support the peaceful revolution in Burma. We want to set a sign for freedom and show our sympathy for these people who are fighting their cruel regime without weapons. These Bloggers are planning to refrain from posting to their blogs on October 4 and just put up one Banner then, underlined with the words "Free Burma!"."
"The shutdown of communications in Burma has slowed information to the outside world to a trickle, with the number of reports to one exile group cut by half and websites with the .mm Burma suffix being unavailable, campaigners said yesterday. "It is difficult to get information out because the internet has been closed," said Moe Aye, an editor at the Democratic Voice of Burma, a media group set up by exiled Burmese students."
