Smart Mobs

In his 2003 book, Smart Mobs, futurist Howard Rheingold predicted the next social revolution would be triggered by the ubiquity of mobile phones. Their ability to send text messages, photographs, videos, and other instant data directly to a computer, he predicted, would give people a powerful new way to organize themselves on the fly, battle social ills as they are happening and ultimately transform cultures and reshape communities—for better or worse.

Rheingold's glimpse of the future is now—and is being promoted by a rising new crop of mobile activists like Katrin Verclas, cofounder and editor of MobileActive.org, a months-old Web site and community of about 8,000 people and NGOs from around the world. Verclas will be hosting a conference in Tokyo this fall to further promote the use of the technology and to "connect people and mobilize them for change," she says. Verclas estimates that about 80% of the world has cellphone coverage, and more than half of the global population has a cellphone—or has access to one. "We're at a critical time," she told me, " and 2009 will be the tipping point."

One recent example of where so-called smart mobs have already made a difference involves the National Democratic Institute, the U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes democracy abroad and sends volunteers to monitor polling places for corruption in potentially problematic democratic elections. A vote in Sierra Leone last August almost collapsed amid rumors of violence (also spread through text messages)—but order was quickly restored when some 500 NDI observers at the various polling places sent text messages to the central system saying that the rumors were false.

Cellphone activism is just getting started. Corruption will become even harder to hide as mobile phones improve their capacity as cameras able to capture police brutality, government corruption, or corporate crime as it occurs. The recent crackdown by Myanmar's junta on its Buddhist monks may not have been covered as widely had it not been for phone-toting witnesses who sent photos and videos of the uprising past censors to global broadcast networks and news outlets. "Mobile phones can get around the censorship controls that governments have been able to put on the Internet so far," Verclas says.

But the mobile-action movement is not only about playing the game of "gotcha." According to a recent story in The Economist magazine, shoppers in South Africa can now text-message the name of a fish to a service called FishMS and get an instant recommendation to "tuck in" or "think twice" about eating it, based on information telling how the fish was caught and whether the species is endangered. Similarly, the magazine reported, Londoners can now text a service called AirTEXT to get real-time data on air quality and alerts when pollution is spiking.

But will this increasingly cause-wired mainstream always work the upside? At a recent conference I attended at Oxford University, I asked Verclas about the odds that not-so-smart (or not-so-benevolent) mobs with cellphones could form surveillance squads or commit random snooping.

"Sure it could happen," she acknowledged. "But I figure it's an arms race. Better to have a wired version of a neighborhood watch out there to combat those who want to steal the civil liberties and freedoms and privacy of others. Mobile phones are empowering. With mobile phones, you have the choice to fight back."

What do you think?

Pangea Day

At the Skoll Foundation's annual think-fest for social entrepreneurs at Oxford University a few weeks ago, Ken Brecher, a social anthropologist and executive director of the Sundance Institute—organizers of the annual Sundance film festival—defined good storytelling as an increasingly powerful tool for social change globally. "...Storytelling is the refusal to be laid low, incapacitated; it helps us to understand the meaning of things, not simply the value...The purpose of a good storytelling," he said, "is to assist us all to understand and to operate in the open and not wildly in the dark."

To be sure, documentary film—images, captured words, sounds—is the premier art form in today's globalizing world, Brecher believes: it is the medium of the moment. "At any one time," he says, "there is only one art form that is speaking. Once it was dance, then it was poetry, then the short story. Today it is film, and it feels to me that we need to make that connection now if we really want to see change happen in the world."

Indeed. This blog, Cause Global, is a new blog—one that will cover this art form-of-the-moment and the connections it makes (and attempts to make) globally. Ultimately, this blog will track some of the news and ideas and people in today's world who are seeking to use social media to to make a difference, affect change, and use the Web to make solutions to common social problems profitable—and real. Why this? I'm a journalist, and for me it's all about covering the unlikely alliances and conversations that serve as catalysts to social change and problem-solving around common challenges. Storytelling is a big part of today's social change movement—one that packs the emotional resonance to cut through the noise of everyday media. "In storytelling," says Brecher, "you have to incline the ears of your heart."

Storytelling moves to the masses this spring with Pangea Day, documentary filmmaker Jenhane Noujaim's 2006 TED Festival dream-come-true. Noujaim, whose 2004 film, Control Room, exposed the divergent ways Arabs and the West covered the onset and outbreak of the Iraq war, is one of the catalysts behind this spring's globally-produced Pangea Day, scheduled for May 10. The live event is planned as a simulcast of films, speakers, and music; sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live that day to produce a 4-hour program, which will air on the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Raised in both Egypt and the United States, Noujaim says her aim is to explore culture as a driving force for both conflict and possibility. "I want to use the power of film to bridge gaps between people," she says. "...How are people supposed to communicate with each other globally...or move together into the future...when their stories aren't being told?"

What do you think? Check out the official trailer for Pangea Day HERE.