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DigiActive News: Presentation at MobileActive Conference

Earlier this week, DigiActive’s Director of Applied Research, Patrick Meier, presented a talk on “Mobiles for Activism and Advocacy” at the MobileActive08 conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Please take a moment to look at his presentation below.  It’s so good that the editors of Slideshare put it on their homepage!

Theory: Poverty & Digital Activism

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.”
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