Theory: Poverty & Digital Activism

Written by DigiActive Team on October 15, 2008 – 5:12 pm -

As our contribution to Blog Action Day, I’d like to offer a response to a common question I receive: “How can you promote digital activism in resource-constrained societies if poor people don’t have access to digital tools?”

In answering this question, it isn’t sufficient to respond with the multiple examples of activists without substantial resources mounting brilliantly creative and successful campaigns for social an internet center supported by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and political change like the strikers in Egypt using Facebook, the Help Fouad campaign in Morocco, and anti-FARC activists in Colombia.

Answering this question in a persuasive way requires a more thorough analysis of how access to digital tools is changing and what this means for political activism.  The key trends here are sky-rocketing increases in mobile phone subscriptions in developing countries and more shared mobile phones and computers.  The digital divide is no longer defined by computer ownership.  There are simply too many other ways to get on the network.

Let’s take Brazil as an example.  To quote an article from World Politics Review from earlier this year: “In Brazil, the spread of communications technology is proceeding at breakneck speed. Internet usage statistics are breaking records every month.  As a result, Brazilian society is changing in ways that have hardly begun to be understood.”

The most obvious way to close the digital divide is to increase computer ownership.  In 2007, computer ownership in Brazil increased 17% among families earning between $600 and $1,000 monthly, according to the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (BISC).  This increase was due to monetary, commercial, and political factors that have led to a 50% decrease in the cost of owning a computer in the last four years.

But the story of increased access is not in ownership but in shared resources.  The decrease in the cost of computers has led to an increase in the number of lanhouses (internet cafes).  Accordiung to a survey by the BISC, fully 49% of Brazilians who use the internet do so at lanhouses.

This trend is true even for the poor.  In the favelas (slums), the anti-violence NGO; Viva Rio runs free internet-access centers where media and tech courses are taught and online job listings for favela residents are listed on the web site.  In addition, the Brazilian government has announced that 55,000 urban public schools will have broadband access (via satellite, not landline) by late 2009.

What are the political results of this increased access to the internet? In Brazil’s 2006 presidential elections, 1.5 million people joined political groups on Orkut, Brazil’s most popular social networking site. The Orkut groups helped mobilize suppoters and analyze candidates’ statements. A study by the Center for High Studies in Advertising and Marketing in São Paulo indicated that, like the US political blogosphere, these groups acted as an echo chamber for political junkies rather than attracting new voters or persuading the undecided.  Still, it reveals the possibilities of increased internet access for augmenting grassroots political participation in Brazil.

The mobile phone story in Brazil is also impressive.  According to a recent article in Vodafone’s Receiver magazine, 63% of Brazil’s citizens own a mobile phone, and the number is likely higher today.  In addition, due to the existence of mobile phone vendors, who sell minutes on their phones to people who cannot afford to their own handset, the number of people with mobile phone access is likely even higher than the ownership rate. Much of the increase in access is due to pay-as-you-go services that allow people to use pre-paid cards to limit the amount they spend on phone time and is much more affordable than the expensive monthly contracts favored in countries like the US.

The spread of mobile phones in Brazil has led to creative grassroots initiatives such as Alô Cidadão!, a news show highlighted by MobileActive.org for bringing information about jobs, educational and cultural events to the citizens of Southern Brazil via text message.  For the 2004 Help Without Borders campaign, detailed in MobileActive’s Strategy Guide 4: ¡Acción Móvil¡ Guía de Móvil Activismo para Latino América, people made donations to the Red Cross by texting ayuda (help) to a local shortcode.  Within two weeks, 160,000 donation messages were sent by Brazilian citizens eager to help.

As the case of Brazil illustrates, poverty is no longer an insurmountable obstacle to digital action.  Through shared computers and mobile phones, people who cannot afford the cost of ownership can still get on the network.  More and more, the challenge of digital activism is not access but the creative use of existing resources and convincing citizensthat they have the power to make change.

photo credit: gotisbrown3000


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Posted in Americas, Mid-East & N. Africa, Mobile Phones, Theory |

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