Qualifying Exams for Sasha Costanza-Chock

Area 1: Communication and Development

Question 1

In January 2008 there are about 3.2 billion subscribers of mobile phones in the world. Since

small children are not users (yet) and in poor countries families and villages usually work with one

phone, even accounting for inequality in access, this represents a dramatic expansion of the

communication capability distributed in the developing world. Do you foresee any significant

consequences for the development process? Is there any evidence that wireless communication has

helped economic growth, entrepreneurialism, income generation, education, health, access to public

services, or cultural development? If yes, please specify the mechanism for producing such effects. If

not, explain why not, and also explain why such a fast diffusion of mobile communication could

happen in the absence of significant benefits for people at large.

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The Implications of Mobile Phones for Sustainable Equitable Development

Introduction

The widespread, if uneven, diffusion of mobile phones in both overdeveloped and

underdeveloped areas of the world has significant potential as one tool among many to aid sustainable

equitable development (SED). By SED I mean human development integrated with environmental

sustainability, gender parity, increased equity, and a shift towards participatory democracy. At the same

time, following previous patterns of technology diffusion and use, we can expect mobile phones to be

used in ways that contribute to existing patterns of structural inequality, unchecked consumption,

environmental devastation, wealth concentration, and increased surveillance and control by State and

corporate actors. In the first section of this text I locate my own position in the ‘development’ debates

and clarify my view of the relationship between technology and social change. In the second section, I

outline the existing state of research on the use of mobile phones for SED, especially by civil society

actors. The conclusion contains a brief summary of key analytical points.

I. Sustainable Equitable Development (SED)

A brief summary of the main lines of thought on the crucial questions ‘whose development, to

what ends, measured in what ways?’ will help us clarify how the use of mobile phones can contribute

to SED.

Roots of Development

To begin with, we can find traces of developmentalist thought, as well as critiques of

development, during the age of Western colonialism and imperialism. Resource extraction from the

colonies and the ‘civilizing mission’ involved significant investments in telegraphy, railways, and other

infrastructure, as well as (in some places) public health and educational systems (Headrick, 1988;

Cooper and Packard, 1997). However, the emergence of ‘Development’ as a set of specialized

knowledge, professional practices, and powerful institutions is usually located as a post-WWII project

expressed in the newly formed Bretton-Woods institutions of the United Nations. UN development

bodies were imagined as an extension of postwar reconstruction efforts to the (former and still existing)

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colonies of the US/European core economies (a ‘Marshall Plan for the Third World’), which acquired

urgency in the standoff with the state capitalist (‘communist’) system in the Soviet Union and the

growing heat of national liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Cooper and Packard,

1997; Escobar, 1995).

Modernization Theory

In this context, modernization theory, developed in the institutions of the North, posited a

developmental ‘ladder’ leading from agrarian society to industrialization, with later variants adding a

third step ‘up’ to the ‘information society.’ In this view, all each nation-state had to do was follow the

path of the West, guided by knowledgeable advisors and professionals from Western institutions, pass

through the difficult moment of industrialization, the transition to mass production and urbanization,

then reap the rewards of unlimited economic growth. Industrialization and growth would

(automatically) produce a higher standard of living for everyone, increase health and life expectancy,

decrease family size, spread literacy, and even lead inevitably to democracy. In modernization theory,

science and technology are seen as universals, their application wherever possible is self-evident, and

the results will be increased efficiency, higher rates of productivity, larger GDP, and the automatic

benefits that result (Watts, 1993). Communication technology (especially radio and, later, television) is

used, in modernization theory, to deliver ‘developmental’ messages to target populations, who after

exposure to correct information will modify their behavior in order to produce the desired outcome: use

of higher yield agricultural technologies, healthier sexual behavior, and so on (Gumucio-Dagron and

Tufte, 2006).

Dependency Theory

Against the universalizing assumptions of modernization theory, Latin American scholars

influenced by Marxist analysis (with a key hub at the Economic Commission for Latin America under

Prebisch) developed an approach that emphasized the need for specificity in understanding the

economic development of Latin American (and other Third World) countries, based on their positions

as primarily exporters of raw materials and agricultural produce to the former colonial powers

(Cardoso, 2001; Sikkink, 1997). Key concepts included the continuity of the Latin American political

economy with the previous colonial situation and the declining terms of trade: the falling value of raw

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materials relative to the processed, consumer, and capital goods that moved from the core economies

out to the peripheries. The policy proposals that emerged from this school of thought became known as

Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), in which peripheral countries could only industrialize if the

State took strong steps to create national industries through tools including tariffs, quotas, subsidies,

partial or direct State ownership, and various regulatory mechanisms (Escobar, 1995; Santiso, 2006;

Sikkink, 1997). Although there were a range of positions within dependency theory, in the English

speaking world it was popularized by Andre Gunder Frank, who insisted that development in the

peripheries would take place only through delinking from the core (Gunder Frank, 1970; Cardoso,

2001). The idea of delinking was seen as a limited distortion by other key figures in dependency theory,

most notably sociologist (and later president of Brasil) Henrique Cardoso.

According to Cardoso, dependency theorists were successfully able to, first, open a debate on

modernization theory, second, focus attention on the various forms of capitalist expansion in the

peripheries, and third, help define the relevant classes, groups and shifting coalitions both locally and

externally. However, Cardoso divided dependency theorists between those (like Gunder Frank) who

thought that dependency was inconsistent with development and those (like himself) who thought that

rather than only generating unemployment and marginality, dependency accelerated the production of

surplus value, goods, and technological transfer, producing "an effect similar to capitalism in the

advanced countries, where unemployment and absorption, wealth and misery coexist." (Cardoso, 2001:

83). Even in his sharp critique of the consumption of dependency theory in North American

universities, Cardoso never distanced himself from its broadest claims: the persistent international

division of labor; the monopolization of the most dynamic technological sectors by the central

countries; the existence of central and dependent economies; the retention of capital goods production

and technological development in the "central nuclei of the multinational firms," and the importance of

the external debt of the dependent countries (Cardoso, 2001: 84). However, Cardoso posited the

possibility of dependent development, where dependent economies could link to the hegemonic

economies in one of four ways: as industrial platforms for cheap production of products for export; as

enclave economies controlled by MNCs (for example, in tropical food production); as producers of

more sophisticated technological parts within a chain of transnational production, which would bring

the advantage of heightened technological knowledge to a local economy; or finally, as producers of

consumer goods, under the control of MNCs, for domestic consumption. As finance minister and then

President of Brazil, he would pursue opportunities in each of these areas, especially the third, and

combine policies emphasizing financial stability (the famous Real Plan) to attract and retain foreign

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investment with social redistribution focused on health and education (Cardoso, 2001).

Nevertheless, both in ‘crude’ dependency and in dependent development, in general the goal

remained the same as that of modernization theory: industrialize and grow GDP as rapidly as possible.

To some degree, the role of technology was retheorized, since there was an effort to understand the link

between scientific and technological institutions in the North and their use to further the project of

domination by the core economies. However, for the most part dependency and dependent development

alike saw technologies as ‘neutral’ and universal, the only ‘problem’ being the unequal distribution of

technology between core and periphery. In the field of communication, the main dependency-linked

critique was the denunciation of cultural imperialism, or the core’s deployment of a vast machinery of

cultural and information production that dominated and swamped cultural production on the periphery

(Mattelart, 2000, Schiller, 1992). This critique led to a raging debate within UNESCO that came to be

knows as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), anchored by the famous

MacBride report that quantified the vast inequality in information flow between North and South and

called for a range of measures to establish parity (Mowlana, 1985; Preston, Herman, and Schiller,

1989). NWICO, predictably, was attacked by the US information industry as a communist plot to

censor journalists, a critique that at least in part was available because of NWICO proponents’ failure to

move beyond the State-led developmentalist paradigm and seriously include demands for

decentralized, community based, horizontal forms of cultural production and distribution (Chakravartty

and Zhao, 2008).

Rethinking ‘Development’

Thus far, all major theoretical approaches to development (capitalist modernization theory,

soviet state capitalism under the sign of the ‘workers’ state,’ and Third Worldist ‘national autonomy’

strategies guided by dependency theory or dependent development) shared the teleology of modernist

‘progress,’ as well as a belief in neutral, universalized technology as an instrument of industrialization

leading to ‘development’ (read: economic growth). However, in the 1980s, the Developmentalist state -

modernizer, socialist, or Third-Worldist - would come under attack from both the right and the left,

while the Development field would be internally reconfigured (Cooper and Packard, 1997; Watts,

1993).

Neoliberalism

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By the late 1980s, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, dependency theory and ISI

came under heavy attack from the neoliberal school, whose acolytes (the ‘Chicago Boys’) traversed

Latin America and the rest of the developing world, spreading the gospel of privatization, deregulation,

liberalization, and relaxed controls on foreign ownership. Javier Santiso (2006) has described this

period in Latin America as akin to a ‘religious conversion’ from Marxist ideology to market

fundamentalism. At the extreme, market fundamentalists saw any attempt at state intervention in the

name of development as an unnecessary and inefficient distortion of market forces. For the most part,

however, Santiso argues that Latin American governments implemented neoliberal reforms alongside

interventions to build up public infrastructure (health, education) and modify the worst extremes of

poverty and rising inequality. This pragmatic compromise between the demands of, on the one hand,

the global trade regime and international financial flows, and on the other, well-organized social

movements making redistributive demands, characterize what Santiso refers to as ‘the political

economy of the possible’ in Latin America today (Santiso, 2006). In terms of ICTs, neoliberal reforms

forced open ossified state monopoly telephony, allowed the entrance of new players both domestic and

foreign, and resulted in falling consumer prices and wider availability of ICTs and services (Aronson

and Cowhey, 1988). However, these same reforms limit the power of the state to either share in the

profits of the ICT boom, make demands of the private sector for meaningful universal service

provisions, make decisions about future technology and standards choices, or improvise innovative

redistributive mechanisms for access to information production and distribution platforms (for

example, it might be difficult at this point for any Latin American state to force a ‘must carry’ mobile

channel of public media, or to require third party software developer access to all handsets).

Postmodernist/poststructuralist/postcolonialist critiques

Meanwhile, from the left, in the 1980s and 1990s postcolonial, poststructuralist, and

postmodernist critics retheorized development as “[…] but one of a series of controlling discourses and

controlling practices - a “knowledge-power regime” - that has emerged since the Enlightenment, the

extension of a universalizing European project into all corners of the globe” (Cooper and Packard,

1997:3). Michael Watts (1993) provided an excellent summary of these arguments: if both liberal and

socialist thought share a teleology of scientific progress and technological advancement that eventually

brings the whole world ‘up to the same level,' this master narrative is countered by postmodern thought

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that sees all knowledge as partial and all 'grand projects' as either doomed to failure or self-replicating

through systematic violence and control. Watts emphasized the 'Foucaldian turn' in development

studies that traces the 'microphysics of power,' and the ways in which both Imperialism and

'development' produce not only economic arrangements of resource exploitation and use but also

subjectivities (Watts, 1993). Escobar (1995) focused on the institutionalization and professionalization

of development, the construction of 'poverty' and 'hunger' as problems, and the creation of new subjects

(e.g. 'Women In Development') through major transnational development initiatives and institutions

articulated with local processes. Ferguson (1994) demonstrated how development functions to enhance

state power while depoliticizing conflict and reframing politics as 'technical solutions.' Watts also

examined the World Bank's adoption of the language of 'participation,' criticized as ‘macropopulism’ by

"the neoliberal establishment who see this volte face as a pandering to popular sentiment producing

disastrous policy interventions" (Watts, 1993:266), as well as by skeptics who think that institutional

adoption of the language of participation is little more than an attempt to engineer consent among

'target populations' to traditional, top-down schemes. Many of these thinkers conclude by emphasizing

the importance of New Social Movements (NSMs), indigenous knowledge systems, and alternative

conceptions of development.

Alternative visions of Development

Some thinkers, activists, and development workers incorporated these critiques to rethink the

meaning, goals, and measures of development. Amartya Sen is one of the best-known theorists in this

regard. In Development as Freedom (1999), Sen argues that the goals of development should be

political and civil rights, freedoms, and agency, rather than simply economic growth. He marshals

economic thought from Smith to Hayek to Marx, and political theorists and philosophers from both

Western and Asian traditions, to argue for the need to balance efficiency with equity, markets with

social goods, and economic growth with redistribution of resources. Above all, Sen emphasizes that

shared (state) provision of basic literacy and public health do more than anything else to produce good

outcomes no matter how development goals are measured. Sen also attacks the position that democracy

is a luxury for the wealthy, in part by demonstrating that famines are produced through people's lack of

entitlement to food rather than through food shortage; he takes pains to point out that there has never

been famine in a democracy, no matter how poor. Also key is the importance of women's agency to

social change, both since women's empowerment produces outcomes 'good' for development but also

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since women's agency should be a goal in and of itself. Sen’s main points are that political and civil

rights are constitutive of development, apart from their instrumental role in economic growth, and that

"[t]he far-reaching powers of the market mechanism have to be supplemented by the creation of basic

social opportunities for social equity and justice." (Sen, 1999: 143).

Today, rather than focus exclusively (or primarily) on economic growth, a substantial part of

development thought involves articulating new goals, developing new measures, and reforming

existing institutions to incorporate these into their practice at all levels. This has produced major

transformations in development activity, including the integration of goals and measures of equity,

gender parity, and environmental sustainability. In terms of class, the Gini coefficient has become the

most widely used indicator of wealth distribution, and debate is currently heating up over how best to

measure global wealth inequality (Held, 2007). For example, global inequality can be said to be rising,

holding steady, or decreasing, depending on whether the measure used is inequality between nations;

between nations weighted for population; or between all individuals (Ibid.) As a result of the women’s

movement, some development institutions have incorporated measures of gender parity throughout

their programs (Association for Progressive Communications, 2000). The environmental movement has

pushed many development institutions to incorporate environmental impact assessments in project

planning; however, there has not yet emerged a consensus on a standard index of environmental

sustainability. Carbon emissions has become one of the most widely recognized indicators of

environmental impact, but unfortunately this is a fairly narrow measure.

Partly because it is only a nascent political formation, the transnational movement around

information and communication rights has so far had only limited access in creating policy change

within international development institutions. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has

been only marginally responsive, for example, to NGO demands to incorporate measures of gender,

race, and class into all data it gathers (Ó Siochrú, Girard, and Mahan, 2002). Nevertheless, we may

build on the past critiques of mainstream development, as well as the work of Sen and others, to

consider modified measures of development, both in general and applied specifically to ICTs. Along

these lines, the campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) is currently

building a model for a Communication Rights Index that would combine measures of access (in several

senses of the term), media literacy, freedom from censorship and surveillance, and levels of

participation in media and ICT policy processes (Thomas, 2005). Beyond the field of communication,

we might hope for a widespread shift towards measuring development outcomes with a combination of

indicators including the Human Development Index (HDI), the Gini coefficient, gender parity, an index

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of environmental sustainability, and an index of strong (participatory) democracy. I call this approach

SED.

A note on mechanisms of change: social shaping of mobile technology

Before we turn to the implications of mobile phones for SED, it is important to clarify the

mechanism or relationship between mobile technology and social change. In short, we need to find a

path between technological determinism and determined technology, one which avoids the tendency to

believe that technologies in and of themselves produce effects on society, while also dodging the shoals

of a structuralist denial of human agency in technological development and use. Ernest Wilson (2004)

provides a useful description of the technodeterminist position:

"The [technodeterminist] analyst begins by describing the technology's component parts

and its overall properties and tracing the technology's recent evolution. With its

importance established, the analyst insists that the technology's internal properties may

reshape key aspects of the surrounding society. This may include everything from

organizational hierarchy to economic productivity to the spread of civil liberties. If a

technology is found to be inherently distributed and participatory, then the analyst claims

that the technology should necessarily reshape the society to be less hierarchical, less

centralized, and more participatory." (Wilson, 2004: 20-21).

As an alternative, Wilson proposes a theoretical framework for analysis that he calls Strategic

Restructuring (SRS). SRS highlights the complex interplay between structural, institutional, political,

and policy factors and the role of individual leaders or, as Wilson calls them, 'information

revolutionaries.' SRS allows for individual agency within a field of important structural constraints, and

draws attention to the way that ICT resources are always unequally distributed. Applying the

framework of SRS to the implications of mobile phones for development, for example, we might

observe that the engineering and design of mobile devices, the software available on handsets, and the

built-in functionality of mobile phones are all conditioned and structured by a number of factors

including North/South, geographical, race, class, gender, and age disparities. Additional shaping

structures include the regulatory regime under which mobile service providers operate; the target

markets for and pricing of services; and standards. In other words, the mechanism of impact of mobile

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phones on SED is not an impact of the devices or systems in and of themselves. Rather, we can speak

of the social shaping and use of mobile technology to amplify, modify, change, restructure, enhance and

entrench, break down or collapse, existing social relationships and practices in the various spheres of

life, including the relationship between individuals and institutions, the family, the State, the private

sector, ‘Civil Society’ (the NGOs, labor unions, organs of associational life) and even ‘uncivil society:’

unruly social movements, disruptive hackers, cells of clandestine cultural activists, guerilla forces, and

of course terrorist networks.

II. On the social uses of mobile phones for SED

The type of development desired (development as freedom, equity, gender parity, environmental

sustainability, and strong democracy) and the mechanism of impact (strategic restructuring) now

defined, we can turn to a discussion of the existing practices of mobile phone use and the implications

for SED. We will focus on use by development institutions, states, and social movement organizations,

although the vast majority of mobile communication takes place within the personal network of family

and friends. There is now detailed work that examines the implications in the personal sphere: see

especially Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda (2005) and Castells, Fernández-Ardévol, Qiu, and Sey (2007),

sections 3 and 4. The most widespread and significant impacts of the spread of mobile phones may well

be the changes in everyday life practices, youth culture, and persistent contact with friendship and

family networks, as described by these and other analysts. Here, we will consider in turn the

implications of mobile phones for human development and equity, gender parity, environmental

sustainability, and participatory democracy, with attention to ways that current forms of use either

advance or hurt these goals.

Human development, equity, gender parity

Positive implications: In terms of human development, poverty alleviation, and equity, mobile

phones have been found in many cases to be valuable tools for improving poor people’s access to

employment, financial services, market prices, health information, emergency information, and

personal security, among other benefits. For example, in a recent survey of 7,000 poor people in Latin

America, Galperin and Mariscal found that mobile telephony “is highly valued by the poor as a tool for

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strengthening social ties and for increased personal security, and that it is beginning to prove useful for

enhancing business and employment opportunities” (Galperin and Mariscal, 2007: 16). In particular,

they found that mobile phones are used by poor people in Latin America to coordinate access to

informal labor markets. Mobile telephony also provides employment in antipoverty initiatives where

the phone itself is used as a business to help generate income. The Grameen Village Phone model is by

now well known as an effective way to provide mobile telephony services to the poor while

simultaneously generating employment for rural women. In 2005, the Grameen Bank reported 150,000

Village Phone Operators were employed under their model, while the Canadian International

Development Agency found that Village Phone Operators in Bangladesh generated a quarter to a third

of their household income from call sales (Mallalieu, 2007).

This is an important example both of poverty alleviation and of the potential for mobile phones

to have positive outcomes for gender parity. Also positive in this sense is the fact that women often

control mobile phone use within the family, in poor households where there is one phone. Other

important uses for women’s empowerment include increased access to rape crisis and domestic abuse

hotlines, as well as to health and nutritional information in general, since women often bear the brunt of

responsibility of family health and nutrition. Many women also report feeling safer because of access to

a mobile phone (Galperin and Mariscal, 2007). Of course, the feminist movement and women’s

organizations can benefit from mobile diffusion; specific forms of social movement use will be

discussed below in the section on civil society.

Financial services, especially microtransfers, are increasingly available to the poor via mobile

devices. An InfoDev study reported a range of ‘m-commerce’ applications now in use, including cash

deposits, transfers, withdrawals, retail purchases, and bill payments via mobile phones (InfoDev, 2006).

In South Africa, poor people traditionally excluded from access to regular bank accounts have widely

adopted a mobile-based banking system (Economist, 2006). Mobile phones are also used extensively

by rural-urban or transnational migrants to send (or coordinate the sending of) remittances to family

members in the place of origin. A comprehensive review of additional types of pro-poor mobile phone

use, for example in the field of health information, can be found in Mallalieu (2007).

Negative implications: On the other hand, we must seriously consider ways in which current

structures of mobile phone use detract from human development, promote wealth concentration, and

reinforce gender inequality. Most importantly, the rise of 3G phones and ‘always-on’ data connectivity

provides a new layer of social, economic, and political advantages to the already networked, relatively

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wealthy minority who can afford such phones and services. Current pricing structures are skewed to

favor those who can afford to pay monthly plans, which in much of the developing world means the

well-off. For example, Barrantes, Galperin, Agüero and Molinari (2007) collected and analyzed data

from every tariff plan in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, including mobile (pre

and postpaid) and fixed line costs, and found that poor people throughout Latin America end up paying

more per minute for telephone services. They also found that even basic telephony costs were a

significant percentage of poor people's incomes:

Figure 1: Share of the poverty line income represented by low

volume pre-paid and fixed line baskets (current US dollars).

Source: Barrantes, Galperin, Agüero and Molinari, 2007.

As evident from Figure 1 (above), even a basic basket of mobile phone services (one short call and one

SMS per day) is well out of the reach of Latin Americans living at or below the poverty line, at 17%

(Argentina) to over 40% (Peru) of income. Wealthier people with monthly plans both spend less per

minute, and spend a lower proportion of their income on communication access, even while they are far

more likely to take advantage of enhanced data services. The poor end up bearing a disproportionate

burden of the costs of mobile service in the Latin American market (Ibid.)

As for mobile phones as a direct source of employment, there are already indications that as

general diffusion increases, the business model is collapsing. Araba Sey reports that in Ghana, many of

the women who just a year ago were making their living selling phone access told her that business is

now declining rapidly (Sey, personal communication). Negative impacts on women include the phone

as a tool of gendered surveillance. South Asian women, for example, report that men in the family use

the phone to keep tabs on them, constantly checking on their location and looking at their call and SMS

records (Castells, Fernández-Ardévol, Qiu, and Sey, 2007). In addition, and predictably, more men

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report receiving business phones from their workplace; with the workplace more likely to pay for

advanced data services. In part because of workplace access to mobile data plans, it is likely that men

in general use certain kinds of enhanced data functions more, although evidence on this is inconclusive.

Additionally, multimedia content that gets extra visibility within the walled gardens of video for mobile

devices is, for the most part, content produced by the misogynistic cultural industries.

Unfortunately, general gains for the middle income proportion of the population, or even for the

top tier of those in poverty, may in some circumstances translate to reduced opportunities for the most

impoverished. Most worrisome, in terms of the implications for equity, is the rapid product cycle of

mobile phones and services, by which we can already see a new form of ‘digital divide’ taking shape

between those who have always-on, everywhere, high speed network connectivity, and those who have

basic, sporadic access to less than one voice call and one SMS per day. To make matters worse,

traditional mechanisms for redistributing costs and ensuring universal connectivity (universal service

regulations focused on fixed-line telephony) are increasingly anachronistic, but in the liberalized and

privatized telephony universe there may be little political will to implement new redistributive policies.

In this context, although it is true that the world’s poor may gain absolutely (low level mobile

telephony connectivity is an improvement over zero connectivity), they may lose relative to the vastly

increased connectivity levels of the middle-income and the wealthy.

Environmental sustainability

Positive implications: Positive implications for environmental sustainability are based on the

fact that the environmental and environmental justice movements will be able to use (and already are

using) mobile phones as part of their advocacy, fundraising, mobilization, and direct action toolkits. All

of this is described in the following section on participatory democracy. Additional possibilities include

the use of cellphones with small sensor plug-ins to monitor the unequal distribution of environmental

impacts on poor and minority communities. For example, researchers are developing inexpensive air

quality monitors that can be attached to cellphones, enabling communities to send readings with

geolocation tags in order to map pollution distribution (Piquepaille, 2008). Another possibility (though

it has not yet been realized) is the use of cell phones at the point of sale to access information about the

environmental impacts of consumer goods. Finally, mobile phones have been used by environmental

activists in direct action and mobilization situations for nearly a decade.

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Negative implications: Unfortunately, there are clear and significant negative environmental

impacts of the growing diffusion of mobile phones. Current mobile phone engineering and design

requires toxic chemicals and heavy metals, typically extracted under poor labor conditions in

destructive mining operations in (primarily) developing country locations. The largest direct negative

environmental impact comes from discarded handsets, which have become part of the growing

mountains of e-waste. Most observers of the ‘information revolution’ fail to critically examine the

unsustainability of current technology production processes, and the model of planned obsolescence in

the electronics and telecommunications industry. Griffiths (2003) has summarized both the health and

environmental impacts of disposable electronics, noting that "workers and the environment suffer ...

because of the high-tech industry's success in preventing safety regulation and unionisation from

encroaching upon their profits; often using their positions as the largest growth sector in the global

economy to intimidate governments and communities into giving them concessions that include a lack

of safety regulations" (Griffiths, 2003: 9). Where there have been successful moves by scientific

researchers, NGOs, concerned regulators, environmentalists and labor groups, for example in the

European Community directives on Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) and

Restrictions on Hazardous Substances (ROHS), "the US Trade Representative, prompted by US

electronics companies, has lobbied extensively against the adoption of the European WEEE and ROHS

initiatives as a threat to trade and so illegal according to the World Trade Organization" (Ibid: 10).

Counterprojects or alternatives to planned obsolescence include initiatives from the NGO and activist

sectors such as Lowtech in the UK, as well as some more recent high-profile university-public-private

partnerships - most visibly, One Laptop Per Child. Still, attempts to rethink the production and

consumption cycle of computing, electronics, and mobile telephony equipment remain quite marginal.

Some environmental activists have been directly targeting this problem. Greenpeace recently

launched a 'green Apple' campaign in an attempt to push Apple towards green technology development

in Macs, iPods, and iPhones (http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/), and EarthWorks has a ‘recycle my

cell phone’ campaign (http://recyclemycellphone.org). Basel Action Network documents the global

disposal chain of e-waste, and lobbies for regulatory reform that would block e-waste dumping and

force electronics firms to reengineer with safer materials (http://www.ban.org), as does Sillicon Valley

Toxics Coalition (http://www.etoxics.org). Such efforts recently received increased visibility at the

international scale when a civil society working group on the environment and ICTs formed within the

World Summit on the Information Society (http://www.wsis.ethz.ch). It remains to be seen whether

these and similar efforts will have a significant impact on green technology redesign, or whether

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mobile e-waste will continue to mushroom unchecked, with the attendant destructive impacts on the

environment and on public health.

Participatory democracy

Although the tendency in much ICT4D literature is to look for evidence of the positive

implications of ICTs for democracy in government initiatives, the facts on the ground indicate a

different scenario: most of the positive outcomes are based on the appropriation and adoption of ICTs

by NGOs and social movement organizations. Indeed, Mallalieu’s (2007) summary of existing m-

government initiatives finds that they have an overwhelming failure rate (up to 85%). In addition,

Galperin and Mariscal found that low-income users in Latin American and the Caribbean make

practically no use at all of government services via mobile, even where such services are available

(Galperin and Mariscal, 2007). Furthermore, our conception of democracy is direct and participatory,

rather than representative and top-down. Accordingly, we will focus here on recent developments in

mobile phone use by civil society organizations (CSOs).

Positive implications: CSOs have adopted and modified mobile technologies to their full range

of activities, including monitoring the powerful, fundraising, information and cultural production, and

tactical use during mass mobilization and direct action. As monitoring tools, mobile phones are an

important addition to the CSO arsenal. Still images and video footage shot on mobile phones are now

regularly used as documentation of human rights abuses. This is has become an integral part of the

work of many human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Witness. A high profile

recent example is the transnational circulation of video shot on mobile phones in Burma during the

government crackdown on the Saffron revolution (see http://witness.org). Documentation of police

abuse with mobile phones is also common, and examples of police abuse caught on phonecam have

been widely circulated via phone, internet, and in the mass media in Egypt, Greece, Albania, and the

United States, among many other places (see http://mobileactive.org). The Albanian youth movement

Mjaft! uses cell phones on the one hand as a monitoring system to document police abuse, government

processes, and labor events, as well as to send imagery directly to mass media. At the same time, they

use mobile phones as a mobilization tool to organize members into rapid response actions (Murray,

2008).

Another interesting recent development is the launch of point-of-purchase company information

15

for consumer activism. Gay and lesbian advocacy organization Human Rights Campaign recently

announced an SMS ‘buyers’ guide’ that allows socially conscious consumers to check on firms’ ratings

in their Corporate Equality Index, where companies are reviewed based on their policies of support for

gay and lesbian rights (see http://www.hrc.org/issues/ceihome.asp). In terms of fundraising, the ability

to send funds via SMS has opened the door to a new general strategy by CSOs. Most recently, for

example, the organization United Way aired a television ad against child obesity during the Superbowl

(the most viewed annual television event in the US), with a plea for viewers to send $5 via SMS by

texting “FIT” to UNITED (Mobile Accord, 2008).

Mobile phones also serve as a platform for cultural production and distribution by marginalized

groups of people. For example, cultural workers Zexe.net have helped create collective mobile blogs by

motorcycle delivery boys in Sao Paolo, migrant Nicaraguan agricultural workers in Costa Rica, and sex

workers in Spain. In part inspired by Zexe’s work, researchers at the Annenberg Network on

International Communication (ARNIC) are currently developing a project called Mobile Voices, in

partnership with community based organization the Institute for Popular Education of Southern

California. Mobile Voices is meant to be a shared platform for first-generation immigrants in Los

Angeles to produce images, text, and audio clips documenting their lives, designed in a participatory

process with day laborers who will be the first group of users (see http://mobilevoices.net). In a similar

but unrelated example in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, there is now a popular community-based SMS news

feed called Alô Cidadão! (See http://www.mobilefest.com.br). Another important form of cultural

production facilitated by mobile telephony is political jokes. Political humor is one of the key tactics of

everyday resistance available to most people, especially (but not only) in the context of societies with

heavy political censorship of mass media channels. For example, widespread circulation of political

humor via SMS has been reported in Iran, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines. The corruption scandal that

rocked the administration of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was widely spread via SMS and ringtones

(Bogle, 2006).

At the time of this writing, the ongoing post-election crisis and violence in Kenya provides an

important example of the activist use of SMS and mobile audio to circumvent state information control.

Following the elections, the Kenyan government banned live television and radio broadcasts, and

Kenyan network operator Safaricom sent an SMS to all subscribers that read ““The ministry of Internal

Security urges you to desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This

may lead to your prosecution.” (Afromusings, 2008). However, news and information continue to

circulate widely via SMS, while innovative popular journalism practices are being born out of the

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crisis. For example, the capability to attach prepaid minutes to text messages, itself a user innovation

adopted by local mobile providers, is being used by Kenya Indymedia to gather audio interviews:

“Kenya IndyMedia solicits contributions of either cash or airtime minutes from not only

within East Africa but from around the globe. Text messages with sufficient minutes

attached are sent out to potential interview subjects, who then ring up one of IndyMedia's

reporters. With the interview recorded, either John or a fellow activist then trudges over

to one of Nairobi's cyber cafes. Paying about $1 an hour for Internet access, [interviews

are] posted online for all the world to hear. Some of these SMS-enabled recordings have

appeared on the Kenya IndyMedia website. Others are now airing on international radio”

(Scola, 2008).

Meanwhile, for those without internet access, group SMS feeds from Kenya are available via Twitter

(for example, http://twitter.com/KenyaNews).

Mobilization and tactical use of mobile phones by social movements is one of the most

important developments with respect to direct democracy. The most popular meme that describes this

phenomenon is smart mobs (Rheingold, 2006). Although the term perhaps undermines the complex

interplay of social movement organizational activity, cultural repertoires of contention, spontaneity, and

ICTs, it is undeniable that mobile phones have been used repeatedly, in a range of political and cultural

contexts around the world, to help coordinate large scale mobilizations with important political

consequences. Frequently cited examples include the 2004 Spanish general election, where younger

voters used SMS to mobilize opinion against the incumbent party’s misinformation about the Madrid

bombings, leading to an upset victory of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español; the South Korean

presidential election where, again, younger voters used SMS to get out the vote and elected center-left

candidate Roh Moo-Hyun over the center-right opposition; and the Philippines, first with the

TXTpower movement against Estrada, later the corruption scandal against Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

and the famous “Hello Garci” ringtones (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu, and Sey, 2004; Ramey,

2007). Tactical use of mobile phones by activists includes not only the appropriation of existing

services like SMS, but also the development of new applications both server-side and on the handset.

For example, during mobilizations against the Republican National Convention in NYC, activists with

the Institute for Applied Autonomy developed an application called Txtmob. Txtmob allows for real-

time mass or group text alerts, and anarchist affinity groups used it to keep up to date on the position of

17

police forces and opportunities for roving direct actions. The software was released to the public, and

has now been used by a wide range of organizations and interest groups. In Los Angeles, the Frente

Contra Las Redadas (Front Against the Raids) presently maintains a Txtmob list via which they

distribute alerts about workplace raids and checkpoints by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement

(ICE) section of the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, beyond case studies and anecdotal

observations, scholars are beginning to gather more extensive information about civil society use of

mobile phones. By the end of February 2008, MobileActive, in partnership with the UN Foundation

and the Vodafone Group Foundation, will release the results of a global survey of 25,000 CSOs about

how they use mobile phones.

Negative implications: Of course, civil society appropriation of mobile phone use is a classic

double-edged sword. Just as in civil society appropriation of the internet, increased mobile activism

opens the door to heightened levels of surveillance by state and corporate actors. Mobile data, gathered

by network operators and easily accessed by agents of the State, can provide a fine-grained picture of

activist networks, including minute-by-minute information on who communicates with who, what the

central nodes of the activist network are, and even the location of the phone mapped through time and

space via cell tower triangulation. State intelligence agencies can also use handsets as remote recording

devices, and they can be activated without the awareness of the person carrying the device. Apparently,

in the US, it is currently legal for the FBI to do this without a warrant (McCullagh, 2006). State and

corporate data mining of cell phone records is probably a more serious problem for most activists, and

with the shift to greater use of phone-to-web interfaces, the persistence of online data applies

increasingly to SMS.

In general, besides problems of direct surveillance and repression of activists, mobile phone ‘m-

governance’ initiatives will by and large be developed within and consequently tend to enhance

existing systems of political rule, regardless of what the system is. Since most current systems of

political rule are either authoritarian states or representative liberal democracies, with low levels of

direct participation, we can expect m-governance initiatives to be top-down affairs with limited ‘strong

interactive democracy.’ The current model for m-governance is the opinion poll, rather than the

community assembly.

III. Conclusions

18

We have seen that the diffusion of mobile phones has the potential both to contribute to and

undermine sustainable equitable development, in areas including poverty, wealth distribution, gender

parity, environmental sustainability, and participatory democracy. Some key observations:

● While a minimal level of access to voice calls and SMS is increasing for most people, universal

access to the ‘mobile web’ in developing countries is currently more of a fantasy than a reality,

and there is no reason to assume that it will become real in the near future. Regulators, civil

society, and development institutions need to intervene to shape the guiding contours of policy

in ways that will promote SED. Regulators should ensure open platforms for both software and

content, rather than the current walled garden models. Although it will be a difficult political

struggle, a new kind of universal service policy should be developed, focused on mobile rather

than fixed line telephony.

● DIRSI researchers suggest the need for continued innovation in business models that target the

poor, as well as the for public policymakers to focus attention on pro-poor mobile telephony

policies rather than continue to regard mobile phones as luxury items. For example, adoption of

micro-prepay systems and per-second billing could shift the distribution of telephony costs off

of the poor and reduce their telephony costs an average of 22% (Barrantes, 2007).

● The environmental impact of mobile phones is, on balance, largely negative. In the short run, at

a minimum all States should adhere to the standards set out in WEEE and ROHS. However,

sustainable development ultimately must mean green technology redesign, which will require

massive R&D efforts.

● Mobile phones are important tools in the hands of civil society organizations and social

movements, and can be used to aid the growth of participatory democracy. However, they are

also used regularly by states and corporations to monitor and track civil society actors. Activists

should take the time to learn about both the potential benefits of mobile phones as advocacy,

monitoring, fundraising, and mobilization tools, as well as the dangers and potential harms.

Policymakers should find ways to limit abuse by either state or corporate intelligence agencies.

Mobile phone technology is being used to contribute to human development, equity, gender parity,

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environmental sustainability, and participatory democracy, but also to wealth concentration, patriarchy,

ecological destruction, and centralized control. Engaged researchers have a role to play as advocates for

institutions and policies that support the former kinds of use but block, as far as possible, the latter.

20

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