Celular e ativismo social

Um artigo publicado em junho no Blog TechSoup trata do uso do celular na organização do ativismo social. Na minha pesquisa, analiso de que forma as novas tecnologias digitais móveis, especialmente o celular, trazem transformações na coordenação e ação das mobilizações sociais. Howard Rheingold chama essas práticas de mobilização via dispositivos pórtateis móveis (PDA, celular, Notebooks) de smart mobs. Esse conceito, entretanto, engloba diferentes formas de utilização dessas tecnologias . Desde um grupo de jovens que usam o celular para marcar encontros nas baladas até cidadãos que o usam para organizar ações de ativismo social. Por isso, denomino o uso do celular na organização de mobilizações sociais como smart mobs políticas.

"No artigo, a autora coloca o celular como a inovação técnica mais importante dos últimos cinco anos para todo ativista. Ela destaca as smart mobs políticas ocorridas nas Filipinas, na Ucrânia, em Gana, entre outras. Abaixos alguns trechos do artigo.

"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. Bloggers helped make Howard Dean a contender for the democratic nomination for president in 2004, and many of the people involved with his online campaign have gone on to develop increasingly complicated software, helping support efforts towards Congressional transparency as well as political organizing. Because blogs were such a visible manifestation of political discourse, they’ve been extensively studied and reported on, which leads to a sense of the importance of these media for the campaign’s impact.

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 reasons for this are simple: for most of the world, mobile phone penetration vastly exceeds Internet usage. (In China in 2005, there were 350 million mobile phone users, and 100 million Internet users. In sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, there were 52 million mobile phone users and approximately 5 to 8 million Internet users.) While analysts in the North talk about users receiving information on three screens — the computer, the television, and the mobile — users in the South are usually looking at two screens, and users in rural areas of the South are looking at one: a mobile phone that might be shared by all the residents of a village."

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