The disgruntled and educated, socially and politically active youth across the Middle East are using social networking and technology tools to create reform and spur real change in their countries.
ing and online banking, a new phenomenon appears to be emerging in Africa using much simpler technology. A Google search of "mobile phones in Africa" retrieves articles about the use of mobile technology to ensure honest elections, in the fight against HIV/AIDs, and even to improve the grain market. While computers and laptops have failed to reach the masses of Africans, cell phone penetration has grown unprecedentedly, with a rate of 30.4% of the population being mobile subscribers - 280.7 million people! In an interview done in September, economist Jeffrey Sachs calls the cell phone the single most transformative technology for development, citing its reach into isolated rural markets as its most striking feature (exemplified by the image above of the Maasai "warriors" in Kenya). Yet, while reading the multitude of articles on the beneficial uses of mobile phones, I couldn't help but wonder whether our unabated praise for the potential of the phone may be idealistic. I recalled living in a small village in Kenya called Kaloleni, where my host sister had a cell phone but our home had no electricity for her to recharge the battery. Every few days, she would take time off from working at the church to walk to another village and pay a family with electricity some of her hard-earned money, all to charge her phone. While this does not subtract from the potential benefits of the mobile phone, it does present some questions that may be being ignored in development field. To expand upon my own internal pondering, this week I roamed the blogosphere for African perspectives on the spread of the cell phone and then opened up communication by responding to their posts. My first comment is on a post on a blog called What an African Woman Thinks, whose author is a Kenyan woman. It highlights the rise of the "mobile phone revolution" and questions how the industry will evolve and mature. The second post I responded to is written by a white Kenyan whose blog, The White African, is quite popular in the world of technology in Africa. His article discusses Ushahidi, a program developed during the period of post-election violence in Kenya that allows citizens to send SMS messages and report localized crisis information. Last week the tool reached the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the violent crisis is rapidly spinning out of control. I have included both of my comments below, but they can also be read in context by following the links.
it's a flash of the human spirit...the vehicle through which the soul of each culture comes into the material world." He says that every two weeks a language dies. Today, of the 6,000 linguistic groups still alive in the world, some are spoken by such minuscule numbers of people that less than 0.2% of the world's population speaks half of our languages. The loss of traditional communication is a slippery slope toward the assimilation, acculturation, and possibly eventual annihilation of indigenous peoples.
is all the more easily accessible and transmittable with new forms of global telecommunications on the web. In Africa, there was a period where hip hop thrived merely imitating American gangsta rap, using English slang and profanities. Today we see the emergence of hip hop that relates more to the realities of Africans, and with this the expanding use of local languages in the music. Often the fusion of native dialects with English and French creates wholly new vocabularies, which also has the effect of reviving and incorporating older, dying languages into modern society. In similar vein, Local Noise is a site funded by the Australian Research Council that focuses on Australian hip hop. They found that the storytelling aspects and multicultural roots of hip hop give it particular strength to be adapted to the aboriginal context. In "Indigenising Hip-Hop," one female MC talks about the ease in relating the four essential elements of hip hop to her Fijian traditions: DJing is like alali drumming; graffiti like cave painting; MCing is like her grandfather's public speaking around the kava bowl; and breakdancing is like traditional Fijian dance. Today there are numerous blogs, record labels, festivals and competitions dedicated to promoting native hip hop and cultural exchange. While often times the listeners cannot understand the language that the musician is rapping in, they comprehend the subject because they too have lived through such experiences.
have found that the youth vote dropped steadily from 1972 to 2000. A surge in the 2004 elections still left less than 50% of young Americans actually voting, the lowest turn-out of any age group. With the world watching, a focus this election cycle has been how to get and keep young citizens engaged. This week I felt motivated to comment on a post that talks about a popular online video that can be personalized to show a fake post-election broadcast revealing the name of a single person whose failure to vote led to Senator John McCain’s victory by one vote. Featured on the New York Times political blog The Caucus, it stresses the great lengths groups have gone to urge American youth to vote and the prominence of the issue in national media. Upon reading your article, my first reaction as a young American was sadness that being “humiliated” into voting is a successful technique! I can only imagine how many young Iraqis or Mexican citizens would die to have a say in the election of the American president, yet the youngest age-group of voters in the
I wanted to write and thank you for all of your interesting posts. I spent a semester studying abroad in One thing that interests me is to compare is youth participation in the
One last comment I would like to make is on the popularity of Barack Obama in
Censorship in the Middle East may be a key factor in the rise of religious extremism, particularly amongst youth. In countries such as Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has largely repressed the freedom of political expression, many marginalized Muslims have given up on politics and resorted to a more fundamental Islam. Due to decades of corruption, inequality, and foreign intervention, violence became the only forum for dissent in the region. But there are signs that the rising generation, who has only known injustice, may be searching for alternatives to violent opposition. As youth struggle between violence and submission, they seem to have adapted the tool of the internet to their local milieu. 
many graphics or tools that may distract from the great content, although this also limits reader interaction with the site. Another, more specialized news source is WireTap Online Magazine, which is created by and for youth on national news and culture. WireTap has well-researched, diverse content using videos, blogs and stories. The graphics are complementary to the content, and even the advertisements on the sidebars are for youth voting organizations!
graphics (see image on left), that focuses on hip-hop from the Palestine to Laos and Brazil. The Global Action Project also promotes arts and social change around the world, and supports itself by selling exceptional videos created by its young members on the site. Even the short clips are worth a visit. While not focusing explicitly on youth, National Geographic's All Roads Film Project promotes documentary filmmaking as a medium to enhance indigenous culture. I Buy Different is an environmentally-focused site that teaches young consumers how to make a difference just by buying differently. Like all of these youth-led sites, it is especially interactive with striking design. MobileActive.org focuses on the cell-phone and its 3 billion users worldwide to create social impact. It is a basic blog, but puts into focus another innovative topic that is below the radar of mainstream media.
sea (see image at right) . The festival's vision states that music is a way to transcend borders of all kinds: linguistic, national, religious, ideological, racial and cultural. Indeed, music can be considered the most universal agent of globalization, as telecommunication techniques have increased our ability to share music with peers around the world. Despite such positive aspects of globalization, the scene I saw on the beach in Santa Monica also made me think about the deeper consequences of the global exchange of traditions and musical manifestations. Through international music festivals, the Western ability to import "exotic" and often enlightening art mediums from abroad is assymetrically balanced by our export of the MTV and rap cultures. Indeed, blogger Andrew Woolford of the Phuzion Magazine blog was quite baffled by the violence that American hip hop apparently inspired on the island of Trinidad as well as the influence that our hip hop culture has on the diamond industry in Western Africa.
Cuba never strays from American media for long. From reports on which presidential candidate is pandering for Cuban-American votes in Florida, to the debate on whether the economic embargo allows post-hurricane relief aid, this fall is no exception. Despite such interest, the average American knows very little about the realities of life in Cuba due to the US travel embargo and media that is often politically-biased (both on the left and the right of the political spectrum). However, since Fidel Castro passed the presidential torch to his slightly younger brother Raul this past year, a more liberal allowance of luxury goods (such as the legalization of cell phones and computers) has opened up passages of communication to enterprising Cuban citizens, and it is especially encouraging to note that Cuba's youth have been the first to master and capitalize on the tools to spread their voices throughout the global community. As a young American, I feel as though my generation is often criticized for eroding morals and increasing apathy, often it is said, due to the proliferation of technology. Yet I argue that political participation and social activism are in fact facilitated and even spurned by the new forms of technology, as witnessed in the recent presidential elections. It would seem that my generational peers in Cuba are also using using the same resources as channels of change, which signifies an important process of democratization in Cuba, a country known to have little freedom of speech and political dissent.
also the case with our peers 90 miles south of the Florida straits, as seen in February when the call for such social liberalization certainly turned political. At the University of Information Sciences in Havana, students pressed National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcon for answers to questions that ranged from the right to travel, low wages, and access to the internet (see the image at the right which contains a Cuban youth wearing a t-shirt with the @ symbol, peppering Alarcon for answers). In what could only be possible in the current age of technology, a video of the meeting was later posted on the internet site YouTube, sharing with the world this unprecedented, open confrontation between Cuban youths and their government.
