Papers and Research

2011

Steven Livingston, The Africa Center for Strategic Studies - Africa's Evolving Infosystems: A Pathway to Security and Stability

Political instability and violence in Africa are often the products of rumor and misinformation. Narrow interests have used politically biased newspapers and radio programming to spread disinformation and champion politically divisive causes. Meanwhile, reasonable opposition voices have been kept silent and shuttered from public life, often by repressive, even violent means. This remains a serious concern across Africa. Against this backdrop, the emergence of new information and communication technologies in Africa, advancing in tandem with emerging democratic institutions, is noteworthy. Over the past 5 years the annual growth rate for mobile telephony in Africa has been 65 percent, more than twice the global average.
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2010

B.F Sullivan - Volta Star and Freedom Fone: The use of radio and Interactive Voice Response to reach farmers with agricultural information

Radio holds great potential as a distance education medium in the developing world because it is widely accessible. Unlike print resources, information delivered over the airwaves can reach anyone with a radio – whether male, female, literate or illiterate. Programs can also be aired in local languages. However, radio is typically a one-way flow of information, lacking in interactivity with the audience, meaning that listeners must be available at a specific time to listen to broadcasts in real-time and can only listen once. For this reason Farm Radio International launched an action research project, African Farm Radio Research Initiative (AFRRI) to determine how and in what ways modern ICTs, like Freedom Fone could be used to make radio more effective and interactive media.
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Seth Corwin Lewis – Journalism Innovation and the Ethic of Participation: A Case Study of the Knight Foundation and its News Challenge

The digitization of media has undermined much of the social authority and
economic viability on which U.S. journalism relied during the 20th century. This
disruption has also opened a central tension for the profession: how to reconcile the need for occupational control against growing opportunities for citizen participation. How that tension is navigated will affect the ultimate shape of the profession and its place in
society.
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Amanda Atwood and Bev Clark - New Media: Same old regime politics: Resisting the repression of media freedom in Zimbabwe (presented at the New Media | Alternative Politics conference, Cambridge University)

Some political scientists and social change activists have viewed new media and information communication technologies (ICTs) as having the power to transform organising, activism and politics. But this paper argues that even with these new tools, activists, political parties and individuals are still faced with many of the challenges of the “same old politics.” Using the work of Kubatana, Zimbabwe’s civic and human rights information service, this paper discusses how the Zimbabwean government views new media through a lens of threat. Whilst more “elitist” new media tools such as the Internet and blogging are tolerated, attempts to develop audio information services accessed by mobile phones have been met with repression.
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Peter Holt – Mobile Technologies for Social Transformation

Every year US$100s of millions is spent on projects in developing countries that have an ICT element. In addition, mobile networks are spending US$10s of billions on improving their infrastructure and rolling out data coverage. Over 4.5 billion people now have a mobile phone and the highest growth rates are in developing countries. Even in the poorest communities most people either own or have access to a mobile phone. Both governments and development agencies have been slow to exploit the unprecedented opportunities presented by ICT. There have, however, been many small scale pilots that have given people access to information via ICT and in most studies this has seen an improvement in wealth within the pilot community. The most well known studies with fishermen saw average profits rise 8%.2 Whilst ICT and more specifically mobile phones are beginning to be used both to provide access to information.
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Bill Orme - Broadcasting in UN Blue: The Unexamined Past and Uncertain Future of Peacekeeping Radio
For almost two decades, United Nations peacekeeping missions have routinely set up local radio stations that almost immediately have become the dominant national broadcasters of those post-conflict countries. From Cambodia to Liberia, these UN stations have helped end violent conflict and make political transition possible. They have provided citizens with trusted local news programs and nonpartisan discussion forums, often for the first time. The UN radio stations were also often the first to reach all corners of these war-ravaged countries. In national elections after peacekeeping interventions, the UN stations were the main if not the only source of nonpartisan voter information and campaign coverage, crucial for any functioning democracy. And then, when the UN missions ended, the stations would abruptly close.
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2009

Fabien Miard - Call for Power? Mobile phones as facilitators of political activism
This paper examines how mobile phones affect political activity. In a number of cases, the mobile phone as a uniquely easy-to-use and personal communication device has been portrayed as a key tool to facilitate mobilization and collective action, such as during the impeachment process of President Estrada of the Philippines in 2001. Taking some of these case studies as a starting point, I find a plausible theoretical framework for analysis in the literature on collective action theory, mobilization and diffusion theory, and network society theory, which I develop further to include the novel aspect of mobile telecommunications. Mobile teledensity data and three political activism indicators in over a hundred countries are then tested with negative binomial Poisson and ordinal logistic regression over a period of 16 years. The results do not support the observations of earlier case studies; I find no significant relationship between mobile teledensity and anti-government protests, riots, or major government crises.
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2008

Fabien Miard - States vs. SMS: Does the rise of cheap mass-communication pose a threat to state leaders?
In the last decade, the world has witnessed very high telecommunications investments in almost every country. More than half of these investments in 2004 were made outside of the OECD (ITU 2006: 9). Why is this happening? Universal demand, falling costs and a profitable, competitive market appear to be the driving forces behind this phenomenon. At the same time, governments around the world seem to be inclined to let it happen, and often encourage investment in this sector. However, as often the case with new technology, there may be unintended consequences. It is commonly accepted that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the ability to boost an economy by raising productivity. Less studied is their effect on civil society and what it may use these new technologies for. In the eyes of state leaders, particularly undemocratic ones, technologies with such a clear liberalizing potential as ICTs must inevitably be considered with caution.
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John West - The Promise of Ubiquity
Mobile telephony will be the world’s first ubiquitous communications platform and is getting there faster than anyone expected. Its major path of growth is now in the global South where the mobile is not just a phone but a global address, a transaction device and an identity marker for hundreds of millions of poor people. It holds unprecedented opportunity for media in developing countries to engage their core audiences more deeply, reach new audiences on the edge of their current footprint, and provide interactive and customized information services that are both profitable and life-improving. But the opportunity is also a threat to traditional media, just as the Internet has been – and on a larger scale in developing countries. If media don’t address the mobile as a viable information platform others will, and within the space of a few years media players there will have lost a large measure of their market share, ‘mind share’, and standing in society at large.
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2007

Patrick Meier - The Impact of the Information Revolution on Protest Frequency in Repressive Contexts
Does the information revolution empower the coercive control of repressive regimes at the expense of civil resistance movements, or vice versa? One way to answer this question is to test whether the diffusion of information communication technology—measured by increasing numbers of Internet and mobile phone users—is a statistically significant predictor of anti-government protests after controlling for other causes of protests. If a positive and statistically significant relationship exists between protest frequency and access to ICT, then one might conclude that the information revolution empowers civil resistance movements at the expense of coercive regimes. If a negative relationship exists, one might deduce that repressive governments have the upper hand.
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Fabien Miard - Connecting Rural Uganda. Can mobile phones contribute to local empowerment?
The economic success of the MTN villagePhone and its impact on the rural poor still remains somewhat unclear, though. Other than the village phone operator, who gains income and social status, signs of poverty alleviation among other villagers have yet to be demonstrated. Village-level research in Bangladesh (see, for example, Richardson et al. 2000) has brought some evidence of the actual social and economic impact of village phones. Improving finances and social relations of families, who had a relative abroad for migrant work, were some of the study’s revelations. The reason was that the village phone helped to stay in touch and better channel remittances sent home. So far, these aspects remain unclear in Uganda. There is, however, a study on the impact of village phones in poverty alleviation in Uganda under way, which will be published this year (GFUSA 2007).
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