I've been doing a lot of stuff recently about computing. PCs, PDAs, music stuff, thinking about why more people, especially young people, aren't more excited about the possiblities of the web etc. And I've been trying to make the point that for many (especially younger people outside the US) the phone is actually the device that offers access and technology liberation. Not the PC. And then, as I was re-reading the magical Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, I found the stuff below. Which just put it way better than I could.
(Cory Doctorow's ability to illuminate the present via his science fiction is well worth checking out. I've always thought that his idea of whuffie - from Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom - would be a good way to think about brand reputations; if more brands thought of themselves as continually assessed like that, and were societally encouraged to do things that were creative and useful, many more of them would be any good.)
Anyway, the phone bit is from a sequence where a young alternative journalist questions the point of a couple of guys who are installing a free wifi mesh all over town, he suggests that a cellphone already does everything they're trying to introduce.
“Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other – even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in fifteen minutes in front of their presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corrupt hearings."
“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us all that our phones don’t give us real democracy. It’s so much bullshit."
“Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy so you think my phone is a toy.”
“Yes, in this abstract sense, there are bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I’m talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for free. I can talk to everyone with it. I can say anything I want. I can use it anywhere. Sure the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can’t invent the Web for my phone or make free long-distance calls I’m being censored?"
Brilliant.
Hey, have you seen bitchun.org yet? It has whuffie for people and there are plans to implement whuffie for tags. Next logical thing would be whuffie for corporations and brands. Check it out and let me know if you like it.
Posted by: Joseph Petviashvili | October 10, 2006 at 06:09 AM