SMS Uprising (häftad)
Format
Häftad (Paperback / softback)
Språk
Engelska
Antal sidor
174
Utgivningsdatum
2009-12-15
Förlag
Pambazuka Press
Medarbetare
Ekine, Sokari (red.)
Illustrationer
1, black & white illustrations
Dimensioner
198 x 129 x 9 mm
Vikt
177 g
Antal komponenter
1
Komponenter
21:B&W 5.06 x 7.81 in or 198 x 129 mm Perfect Bound on White w/Gloss Lam
ISBN
9781906387358

SMS Uprising

Mobile Activism in Africa

Häftad,  Engelska, 2009-12-15
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SMS Uprising provides a unique insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa's many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technologies to facilitate these changes. This collection of essays by those engaged in using mobile phone technologies for social change provides an analysis of the socio-economic, political and media contexts faced by activists in Africa today. The essays address a broad range of issues including inequalities in access to technology based on gender, rural and urban usage, as well as offering practical examples of how activists are using mobile technology to organise and document their experiences. They provide an overview of the lessons learned in making effective use of mobile phone technologies without any of the romanticism so often associated with the use of new technologies for social change. The examples are shared in a way that makes them easy to replicate - 'Try this idea in your campaign.' The intention is that the experiences described within the book will lead to greater reflection about the real potential and limitations of mobile technologies. Edited by Nigerian activist Sokari Ekine, who runs the prize-winning blog Black Looks, the book brings together some of the best known and experienced developers and users of mobile phone technologies in Africa, including Juliana Rotich from Ushahidi in Kenya, Ken Banks of Kiwanja.net, and Berna Ngolobe of WOUGNET in Uganda.
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Recensioner i media

Preparing for a mobile phone uprising in Africa, The Guardian, 2 Feb 2010 Anne Perkins reviews 'SMS Uprising: Mobile activism in Africa' - a book that will help explain how mobile phones can be used in the field to anyone daunted by technology The trouble with people who know about mobile phone technology is that they are a lot better at good ideas than they are at explaining to non-techies what their good ideas are for. So I fell upon SMS Uprising: Mobile activism in Africa, a collection of essays by people who either write mobile applications or transfer them to the field, hoping that at last I would understand not so much what's going on as how. To begin even nearer the beginning than this book does - and in case I am not the last person in the world to know - let me point out that SMS stands for (thank you WikiAnswers) Short Message Service, which is "a communications protocol allowing the interchange of short text messages between mobile telephone devices." It adds, helpfully: "SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users." Mobile telephony relies on GSM, or Global System for Mobile Communications, access to which is controlled by individual countries whose approach - monopolistic like Kenya's Safaricom or open and competitive like that of Uganda - has a direct impact on airtime costs, which in turn affects how many people have access to the system. Among other key considerations are the age (and cost) of mobile handsets in Africa - mainly pre-2003 and, therefore, neither web nor data enabled - and the fees charged by handset manufacturers to operators trying to develop new applications. Most of this is covered in the first essay, on the economics of the industry. It explains how China and Libya are using monopolistic deals to capture national mobile telephony markets. The advantage to a government of monopolies, of course, is control - not only business control, but also control over content. Bad news for those who see access to a mobile as a powerful weapon in the defence of democracy. But the essay's author, Nathan Eagle, is particularly interested in the research potential of the information automatically collected by operators about the usage and location of every mobile handset. A force for good or evil? It could be a vital tool to understanding better the sociology of rural Africa, for example. But it might be just what a corrupt government is seeking to monitor citizens' behaviour. The mobile's capacity to stimulate, record and publish images of protest, for example, has already been established in places as far apart as Iran and Burma. As the Guardian's Tania Branigan reported recently, ChinaMobile, the state owned operator, shuts down texting at the first sign of trouble - a policy pursued by the Ethiopian government, which has only just legalised SMS. Optimistic outlook But the optimists - and the activists like Christian Kreutz, who wrote the second essay in this collection - believe mobiles can extend participation, monitoring and transparency, decentralise networks and provide opportunities for local innovation. Mobile has greater penetration than television (although not radio, with which it can work as a kind of poor man's internet, with radio broadcasts soliciting citizen journalism to report on local events and conditions). The essential element is not high technology, but universality - and people on the ground who can frame questions, find or write software and then recruit users. SMS activists are the sons and daughters of the first generation of internet users - passionate about open source technology and shared experience. Theory is one thing: but where these essays really come alive is in the descriptions of projects that have already worked. Take Amanda Atwood's account of Kubatana, a social and political action initiative in Zimbabwe that began on the internet, but to extend its reach adapted Ken Bank's F

Övrig information

Sokari Ekine is an activist with a multidisciplinary background in technology, education and human rights. She has a postgraduate degree in human rights and education and has worked in adult education and several online publications including Pambazuka News. She is the author of the blog Black Looks. Nathan Eagle is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves engineering computational tools, designed to explore how large-scale human behavioural data can be used for social good. He is the founder of txteagle. Ken Banks is the founder of kiwanja.net and the developer of FrontlineSMS. He specialises in the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world. He combines over 25 years in IT with over 16 years experience living and working throughout Africa.

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction - Sokari Ekine Part I: The context 1 Economics and power within the African telecommunications industry - Nathan Eagle 2 Mobile activism in Africa: future trends and software developments - Christian Kreutz 3 Social mobile: empowering the many or the few? - Ken Banks 4 Mobiles in-a-box: developing a toolkit with grassroots human rights advocates - Tanya Notley and Becky Faith Part II: Mobile democracy: SMS case studies 5 Fahamu: using cell phones in an activist campaign - Redante Asuncion-Reed 6 The UmNyango project: using SMS for political participation in rural KwaZulu Natal - Anil Naidoo 7 Kubatana in Zimbabwe: mobile phones for advocacy - Amanda Atwood 8 Women in Uganda: mobile activism for networking and advocacy - Berna Ngolobe 9 Mobile telephony: closing the gap - Christiana Charles-Iyoha 10 Digitally networked technology in Kenya's 2007-08 post-election crisis - Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich 11 Using mobile phones for monitoring human rights violations in the DRC - Bukeni Waruzi