Friday, May 21st, 2010 - 2 comments

Mobile phones and citizen media

Citizen media, or media created by non-journalists, is having a huge impact today. Mobile phones are making the spread of information even easier.

Mobile phones have already played a significant role in advancing citizen media around the world. They were instrumental in helping capture photos and videos on the streets of Tehran during 2009 protests that followed the elections there. A video captured during that time even won a prestigious journalism award. Mobile phone technology has been used in Namibia to enable more people from around the country to express their views in one of the country’s largest newspapers. In the US, day laborers have been using MMS messages to blog about their daily lives. In South Africa, citizen journalists use SMS, MMS, and other phone-based technologies to submit content and commentary to a local newspaper. The list of examples are plentiful.

In the ongoing digital divide discourse, there are many concerns about fostering online participation in less dominant languages. Voice-based technologies on the mobile phone may play a role in bridging this inequity, especially with languages with weak association to written representation, or languages with tricky character sets. Mobile voice-based technologies also provide opportunities for information services and participation for non-literate audiences.

Making information accessible

For example, a few innovative projects in India are already taking advantage of the ubiquity of mobile phones and cheap voice calling there in order to enable both reporting and news dissemination to rural villagers in local languages. Widespread illiteracy makes newspapers and SMS alerts inadequate as news delivery systems, and irregular electricity makes television and radio unreliable. Voice calls are also very inexpensive in India, with per-second billing and a downward price-war among the main operators. Voice calls over mobile phones are an easy way for villagers to stay informed. In the region of Uttar Pradesh, Gaon Ki Awaaz delivers twice-daily news updates via voice calls to villagers in their native Avhadi language. Launched in December 2009, the project now has 250 subscribers spread throughout 20 villages. Read a case study on the project here.

Further south, a similar project is operating among the members of the Adivassi tribe in India. Like Gaon Ki Awaaz, it allows villagers to share and receive news over their mobile phones in their native language (in this case, Gondi). Launched by Shubhranshu Choudhary of the International Center for Journalists, the project focuses on citizen reports with dozens of citizen journalists reporting throughout the region.

How do we fulfill the potential?

I had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile last week. The summit brought together bloggers, activists, and thinkers working to advance citizen media all around the world.

While the discussions that took place were informative, most presentations and panels fell short in  recognizing the role mobile phones have played and exploring the potential mobile phones can play in citizen media.

There were three unconference-style sessions at the summit, and each session had at least some discussion on the use of mobile phones in citizen media. In most of these conversations, I was glad to realize that mobile phones’ potential in citizen media was in the back of many minds. Given the potential, however, I kept wishing that mobile phones’ role in citizen media were discussed front and center.

Raising further questions

As a way to push these ideas further, I pose the following questions:

• How can you use mobile phones more in your daily reporting work? Will they let you become more creative, spontaneous, immediate in how you can cover events and news? Will they help you in your reporting as they are innocuous devices, much less likely to be confiscated by authorities if you are covering sensitive events? Will they be handy simply because they will always be in your pockets?

• Can we turn increased access that mobile phones provide into increased participation? What is required beyond access to facilitate participation on mobile phones? Can we include ways to participate via sms or voice in every new participatory project that we envision?
• Can we use voice-based technologies to interact better with communities which have richer oral than written traditions? Can we enable more participation in native languages by using voice-based technologies?

Tell us if you have more ideas, or whether you are exploring some of these ideas in your work. If you would like to find out about the tools that you will need to do this work, find case studies of other organizations doing similar work, or a myriad of other resources having to do with mobile phones, check out (and contribute to) the MobileActive.org mDirectory. To read about case studies, tools, and resources specifically to do with media production and dissemination, have a look at this page.

A variation of this post was originally published on Mobileactive.org (http://mobileactive.org/potential-mobile-phones-citizen-media-thoughts-global-voices-citizen-media-summit) and republished here by permission.

The views expressed in this blog-post are solely those of the author.