Technologies of Freedom

Reporters without Borders, a Paris-based watchdog group, has increasingly complained about the number of journalist's deaths, and those imprisoned in Russia, China, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Burma and around the world; controls imposed on Yahoo, Microsoft and Google by governments limiting citizen access to certain Web sites; banning of YouTube by other authoritarian political regimes, and more recently, Hugo Chavez's decision to shutter a popular TV station in Venezuela.

Surprisingly, citizen protest using cell phones and the Internet represent a trend in the opposite direction. Because the Internet will soon be available on cell phones, the sheer ubiquity of such "technologies of freedom," as the late Ithiel de Sola Pool of MIT used to say, offer the potential for a rebirth of democracy and citizen participation in global governance.

It is not unlikely that the world will be "connected" within the next few years. While it took 10 years to achieve the first billion mobile users the second billion will occur next year. Now that advertising is finding its way to the mobile Internet, allowing users to watch video clips of their favorite shows and receive regular reports of sporting events and other items of interest, cell phone costs are expected to drop to levels making mobile Internet use affordable most everywhere.

Rick Stengel, editor of Time magazine, believes that we have indeed reached a critical juncture in the history of the world where technology is changing the very nature of the information age and empowering citizen participation in global affairs as never before.  In the U.S., former Senator George Allen, a candidate for re-election from Virginia was defeated in 2006 because of an ethnic slur captured by a cell phone and recorded on the Web site "YouTube."

Europe's "mobile democracy" came of age, it is said, with a Spanish election. In March 2004 after a terrorist attack in Madrid, Socialists rode to power on a wave of text messages expressing anger at the conservative government. In elections in the Congo and the Philippines, the same technique was used to rouse the faithful, and in the presidential race in South Korea, the current President Roh Moo-Hyun is said to owe his election to a surge of support from young people using their cell phones to connect with like-minded supporters.

Perhaps more important, cell phone use in even the world's poorest nations is experiencing double-digit growth.   A recent survey by The Economist reports that such growth is happening because the economic benefits are so great.  "They [cell phones] do not rely on a permanent electrical supply, and moreover can even be used by people who cannot read or write."  In Bangladeshi villages, cell phones are widely shared and rented out by "telephone ladies" found throughout the village.  Farmers and fisherman use the phones to call markets to work out where they can get the best price for their products.  "Small businesses use them to shop around for supplies.  Mobile phones are used to make cashless payments in Zambia and several other African countries."  They can have, says The Economist, a dramatic impact:  "reducing transaction costs, broadening trade networks and reducing the need to travel."

Another recent report by the Aspen Institute on the Fifteenth Annual Roundtable on Information Technology concluded "that innovative mobile technologies are causing disruptive tectonic changes that will shape unalterably the way the next generation will live, work, play and interact with the world." In India, worshippers send text prayers to the temple of a Hindu god.

In China, coupons received on cell phones are redeemable at MacDonalds.  In Singapore, drivers can pay tolls and buy tickets with