Posted by An Iranian woman shows an image of Ayatollahs Ali Khamenei and Ruhollah Khomeini on her mobile phone during a demonstration in Tehran last month.
Brown was wrong. By the time concerned netizens had turned their Facebook profile pictures red and the “Stop the Rwandan Genocide” campaign had found its 1 millionth member, the genocide would be nearing its end.
It would have spread quicker than it did in 1994, when it was fueled by word of mouth and state-run Hutu radio. These days, hate-speech would spread virally through text messages and social networks. A few video clips of Tutsi atrocities against Hutus — unspeakable violence against worshippers in a church, for instance — spread virally by mobile phones could enflame hatred more effectively than traditional media ever could.
While the defining technological shifts of the 2000s were the ubiquity of mobile phones and the growth of the Internet, in the next decade these two trends will converge: the rise and rise of the mobile Internet. It is a shift that will present great opportunities for prosperity and democratization, but also grave possibilities for tyrants and extremists.
According to a December 2009 Morgan Stanley report, the world is just starting “the mobile Internet cycle.” It’s the fifth information-technology cycle in 50 years and follows mainframe computing in the 1960s, mini-computing in the 1970s, personal computing in the 1980s, and desktop Internet computing of the 1990s.
For years, the mobile Internet was bogged down in WAP: slow, text-heavy, a return to the Internet of the late 1990s, but on a tiny screen. 3G always seemed like a distant, futuristic dream, something that only happened to Japanese teenagers.
But then everything changed, largely because of the success of the iPhone and the proliferation of touch-screen technology. Five factors converged to drive the spread of the mobile Internet, according to Morgan Stanley: “3G adoption, social networking, video, VoIP [voice-over Internet protocol], [and] impressive mobile devices.”
Finally the mobile web was like the real web, with pictures and video and intuitive navigation. The days of scrolling down a series of static HTML links were gone.
In the next 10 years, we will use our phones and mobile devices more and more: from managing our weight to finding the nearest user-recommended pizza joint to tracking our kids’ movements. Our screens, full of third-party applications, will be a digital tapestry of our lives representing (not replacing) our loves, preferences, interests, tastes, and fears.
Third World Web
But perhaps the greatest opportunity for the mobile Internet lies in the developing world.
For years, there has been concern about the global digital divide: the vast disparity in access to the Internet between the developing and developed worlds. A number of Western philanthropic initiatives, most notably the One Laptop Per Child project, have had only limited success.
But where millions in the developing world remain without a laptop or access to a fixed Internet line, they might well have a mobile phone.
The growth of cell-phone networks has far outpaced the growth of fixed broadband or landlines in the developing world. In hard-to-reach places, it requires less investment from both the provider and the user. Pay-as-you-go programs have worked well in cash-based economies.
Mobile phones started the decade as an elite toy and ended as something owned by everyone from taxi drivers in Bangladesh to fishermen in Ghana. In 1999, around 1 billion people worldwide had telephone subscriptions. Now that number is more like 4 billion.
According to the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union, in 2000 people in developing countries had one-quarter of the world’s mobile phones. But in 2009, people in developing countries held three-quarters of the world’s estimated 4 billion handsets.
Where philanthropy failed, the market succeeded. With Western mobile markets saturated, telecoms looked to the developing world. As economist Jeffrey Sachs has said, “The digital divide is ending not through a burst of civic responsibility, but mainly through market forces.”
And with those phone towers came benefits. A 2005 study by Leonard Waverman from the London Business School showed that a 10 percent rise in mobile-phone penetration in developing countries could raise GDP by 0.6 percentage points.
2G mobile phones have already made crucial differences for people living in isolated societies: fishermen receiving weather updates by SMS, farmers checking prices before taking their goods to market, and so on.
In Kenya, M-PESA, a phone-based banking service, now has over 5 million subscribers, mostly people who have never had bank accounts before.
Just as developing parts of the world leapfrogged telephone landlines, they are well placed to leapfrog the fixed Internet. In the next decade, a farmer in Bangladesh or a taxi driver in Azerbaijan is more likely to access the Internet through his phone than through a computer.
More Freedom For All, For Good Or Ill
According to the Morgan Stanley report, not only are we now in the age of the mobile Internet, but globally it’s ramping faster than the desktop Internet did, and “more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.”
Other studies reach similar conclusions. According to Informa Telecoms, mobile broadband throughout the world will be dominant by 2012.
While the link between greater Internet penetration and economic growth is well established, what exactly the spread of the mobile Internet will mean for democratization is unclear.
Since the Enlightenment, technology has been equated with social progress. The Internet has spawned its fair share of techno-utopianists, confident that new technologies have the power to fundamentally change the way humans behave and interact. Unlike never before, they argue, the Internet gives people the opportunity to expand their personal freedoms in the face of meddlesome or authoritarian governments.
For example, in Iran, a combination of cell-phone cameras and social networking has sustained the opposition Green Movement. In Columbia in 2008, three people used Facebook to mobilize 1 million people to demonstrate against the guerilla group FARC.
And in authoritarian regimes around the world, the Internet — more than any other medium — has become the meeting place for dissidents and pro-democracy activists.
But where the techno-utopianists were limited in their vision is that in this great mass of Internet users, all capable of great things in the name of democracy, they saw a mirror image of themselves: progressive, philanthropic, cosmopolitan. They didn’t see the neo-Nazis, pedophiles, or genocidal maniacs who have networked, grown, and prospered on the Internet.
The combination of the cell-phone camera and the Internet has probably done more than anything to globalize the jihadist movement in the last decade. A generation of young men has been galvanized by grainy footage of “atrocities” committed by Western forces, “martyrdom operations,” or grisly execution videos.
Mobile phones and the Internet have also brought us “happy slapping,” random attacks on people filmed on mobile phones, and “sexting,” where teenagers send raunchy snaps of themselves to friends, images that sometimes end up on pedophile websites.
Technology’s Not The Answer
And as the blogger and author Yevgeny Morozov argued in a March/April essay for the “Boston Review,” “Cyber–utopians’ biggest conceptual mistake is treating cyberspace as some kind of anarchist zone, which the authorities dare not enter except to shut things down.”
The history of technological innovation has shown that tyrants and authoritarian governments have found that co-opting technology is often better than banning it.
Morozov continues: “The Soviets did not ban radio; they jammed certain Western stations, cracked down on dissenting broadcasters at home, and exploited the medium to promote their ideology. The Nazis took a similar approach to cinema, which became a preferred propaganda tool in the Third Reich.”
Increasingly, tyrants will find creative ways to co-opt the Internet, like the Chinese authorities who have created the so-called 50 Cent Party, a group of pro-government netizens who seek out political forums to promote the party line.
And while Iran’s blogosphere is admirably “democratic,” for every young liberal cosmopolitan blogger, you’ll find a conservative ready to die for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
In the future, old forms of repression — closing down publications on trumped-up tax charges, beating and imprisoning critics — will exist side-by-side with the new — infiltrating opposition movements through social networks or government-sponsored cyber-vigilante campaigns.
Just as dissidents find more innovative ways to beat the system, so the governments will fight back with both increasing sophistication and the same old brute force.
The mistake both the utopians and neo-Luddites make is by giving too much credence to the idea that technology can fundamentally change human nature. For every article about how Twitter will save the world, a cyber-fatalist will argue that smartphones have turned us all into zombies.
Both are wrong. It is not technology per se that has the power to change the world (for good or bad), but rather the innovation and creativity of the people enabling and using it.
Luke Allnutt is editor in chief of RFE/RL’s English-language website. The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL