ICTlogy

Online citizen-campaigning in the UK General Election of 2010: how did citizens use new technologies to get involved?
Rachel Gibson, Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester; Marta Cantijoch, University of Manchester; Stephen Ward, University of Salford

Previous elections have shown that the Internet is only for “politics junkies”, and that e-participation has just reinforcement effects.

In news, the Internet is presented initially as a game changer, to become lately a useless tool for candidates and parties.

During the UK 2010 election, there was more people online than during previous elections, and more people went online to look for political information, both at the official and the non-official sites.

4 factors of e-participation: e-communication (info seeking, e-discussion, online videos), e-targeted activities (e-contact, e-petition, e-donation), e-formal (register, party tools, join/start election related social networking site group) and e-informal (forward, post, embed unofficial political content).

Are people engaging/participation in these four factors differently?

Age, online skills and interest in politics are amongst the more important reasons that determine the kind of online participation that a citizen is more likely to engage in. Partisanship strength also has an impact in e-targeted activities and the e-formal factor.

In general, e-communication has an impact in increasing the probability of voting amongst people not interested in politics. Notwithstanding, there is a need to disaggregate e-participation, as not all e-participation is about the same thing, as it happens offline.

Campaigns and Communications: Is the Revolution in Digital Media Changing Political Organization? An Examination of the 2010 UK Elections
Mike Jensen, Institute for Governance and Public Policy, Autonomous University of Barcelona; Nick Anstead, London School of Economics (LSE)

The Network Society has turned upside-down the boundaries of some concepts like political and non-political, places and spaces of flows, etc. How does campaigning fit in this new context?

Facebook comments and twitter messages were analyzed to see the differences between the national campaign and the local level campaign (here the case of Birmingham). And we can see big differences in what happened in Facebook and Twitter between the national and local campaigns.

Concerning horizontal communication, we can see that for some candidates, at the local level there was much more decentralization than at the national level.

Elements of decentralization and localism can both be found at the UK 2010 election. Local candidates make relatively little reference to the national campaign while, at the same time, there is evidence of the existence of horizontal links at both the national and local level.

Towards a more participatory style of election campaigning? The impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 General Election
Darren G. Lilleker, Centre for Public Communication Research, Bournemouth Media School, Bournemouth University

To what extent was interactivity permitted on party websites at the 2010 election? What type of interactivity was permitted? How has permitted interactivity evolved between peace time and previous elections?

Typologies of interactivity, depending on the level of receiver control (high, low) and direction (one-way, two-way, three-way) of the communication flow: Feedback, Mutual discourse, Public discourse, Monologue, Repsondive dialogue, Controlled responses.

We can see that individuals (candidates) are usually more popular in social networking sites than parties. Uploading played a key part on interactivity, sharing creates a network effect, adding info was offered by a minority.

Different parties used different types of interactivity, ranging from monologue to public discourse. In general, though, there was a lot of two-way communication. Surprisingly enough, three parties (Lab, LDem and Green) abandoned many of their interactive features in their websites, while the others, on the contrary, increased the interactivity, a trend that has been thus in the last years. Similarly, some parties are increasingly losing control over the message.

In the UK 2010 election the Internet was mainly used to sell the party/candidate and to manage relationships, but social networks were also used (besides branding) for interaction. Supporters were contacted horizontally and more co-building was created. Notwithstanding, many partisans would share their ideas with other partisans, but not willing to do it with the party.

In general, participation was low, and people would engage elsewhere but usually in trivial if engaging ways. Notwithstanding, very active communities triggered more participation, creating a virtuous circle of high participation.

Me too for web 2.0? Patterns of online campaigning among candidates in the 2010 UK general election
Maria Laura Sudulich, University of Amsterdam; Matthew Wall, Free University Amsterdam

What is the use of the web 2.0 by candidates? How do they use Facebook? What are the elements determining the uptake of online campaigning by candidates in the UK 2010 election? Is the rationale behind launching a campaign website different from the one explaining candidates’ presence on Facebook in the UK 2010 election?

the probability of having a website (or a facebook profile page, a fan page or a group page) was calculated depending on incumbency, marginality, party affiliation, bookmakers odds / implied chance of winning, and whether opponents had a website and the number of these opponents.

A striking finding is that there seems not to be a thorough political strategy to be on Facebook,and results are very inconsistent across different possible forms of Facebook campaign presence. Marginality, notwithstanding, is very significant for both having a website and being on Facebook, as party affiliation is. Implied chance is a significant predictor of candidates websites, but not for Facebook groups; on the contrary, the “me too” factor is not a significant predictor of candidates’ websites but it is for Facebook groups.

More information

• Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Day II at the OII blog.

Papers

• Gibson, Cantijoch, Ward: Online citizen-campaigning in the UK General Election of 2010: how did citizens use new technologies to get involved?
• Jensen, Anstead: Campaigns and Communications: Is the Revolution in Digital Media Changing Political Organization? An Examination of the 2010 UK Elections
• Lilleker, Jackson: Towards a more participatory style of election campaigning? The impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 General Election
• Sudulich, Wall, Jansen, Cunningham: Me too for web 2.0? Patterns of online campaigning among candidates in the 2010 UK general election

Why Mobilize Support Online? The Paradox of Party Behavior Online
Ana Sofia Cardenal, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)

There is an increasing number of Internet users, there have been some very interesting cases of political use of the Internet, and nevertheless, there still seems to be an underexploiting of the opportunities that the Internet offers for political mobilization.

The parties would use the Internet if benefits are higher than costs. Benefits would be increasing expectations of winning office and competition. Costs would be party cohesion (risk of losing control of message when using the Internet), party size (need for more resources and/or support cost of opportunity of allocating resources on online campaigns) and size and importance of extra-parliamentary organization (strategies of recruitment might interfere with online mobilization).

(H1) Large parties will have more incentives than smaller ones to use the net. (H2) Large parties that are in the opposition and compete for office have more incentives to be active online. (H3) Non ideological parties or conversel highly cohesive ideologicals are in better position to use the Internet in their own benefit. (H4) Parties with small extra-parliamentary organizations will also be in a better position than parties with large bureaucracies.

The research analyses the websites of 12 parties and the actions of +1300 online activists.

Findings show that large, non-cohesive, and parties with small bureaucracies have the best (the most interactive and participatory) websites and are the most successful in mobilizing their followers online. In particular, the Catalan nationalist party (CDC) is arguably the one that does best, as it has traditionally been a mobilization party.

Concerning supporters, while it seems that parties do not matter much in offline activism, cyberactivism is more successful in specific parties.

Summing up, party characteristics matter in explaining how parties behave online and what is their impact in cyberactivism.

Internet and Votes: The Impact of New ICTs on the 2008 Spanish Parliamentary Elections
Albert Padró-Solanet, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Goal: what is the role of the Internet in party competition: normalization or revolution? And what is the relevance of the context in all the matter?

The dependent variable is party vote or abstention (not participation) and as independent variables there are party vote intention at t-1, campaign exposure (offline, online, political information).

Findings show that online political information exposure differs from offline exposure: there not always is a reinforcement on party vote, and sometimes there is no impact or a negative one on major parties. In other words, e.g. people that stated at t-1 that they would be voting to the PSOE, have a decreasing probability of ending up doing so as their exposure to online political information increases. The probability of abstention, on the other hand, increases as the exposure to online political information also increases. Offline exposure, though, acts in the opposite way, reducing abstention and reinforcing your initial intentions to vote a specific party.

Reasons for this behaviour might be that, probably, online political information is more fragmented than offline political information, but it doesn’t lead to selective exposure (against normalization hypothesis but vs. a Balkanization hypothesis).

Lessons Learned from Obama? The Effect of Individual Use of Party Websites on Voting in the Elections to the European Parliament 2009 in Germany
Pablo Porten-Cheé, Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany

In Germany, parties still spend little on the Net, though they state the importance of web campaigning specially to inform the public, to mobilize young voters, to activate partisans, etc.

What is the impact of political informational (including use of party websites) and interpersonal political online communication on voting? The assumption is that there is a positive impact which leads to more votes.

Findings show that there was a highly significant effect in the green vote in the latest German elections.

Voter Targeting via the Web – A Comparative Structural Analysis of Austrian and German Party Websites
Uta Russmann, University of Innsbruck, Austria

How do parties target their audiences online? Classically, parties have segmented voters in combinations of age, gender, ethnicity, profession, education, ideology and lifestyle.

(H1) Catch-all parties address a more general audience on their website. (H2) Austrian parties address a more general audience on their website, zed features and techniques on their website to specific target groups.

Results show that catch-all parties do target specific groups and client parties address the general public and specific target groups evenly. The behaviour is similar in Germany and Austria. On the single website the general public is addressed more often. After the general public, party members and supporters are the most targeted audiences by political parties. There does not seem to be a clear strategy relating online targeting.

Discussion

Ute Russmann: is there a profile of citizen that only gets their political information online? Albert Padró-Solanet: people are very heterogeneous in how they find their political information.

Q: could targeting be made by tailoring different candidates within the same party, each candidate shaped according to the expectations of different segments? Ute Russmann: there does not seem to be such a practice. On the contrary, the image of all the candidates of a given party is very homogeneous.

Stephen Ward: could online negative campaigning have an impact in people being informed online voting less? Albert Padró-Solanet: doubtless there is an impact, but maybe is not that much that there is such a thing as negative campaigning, but that people online find much more information, positive and negative, about candidates and parties.

Stephen Ward: in targeting, wouldn’t it be a better channel using direct e-mail or social networking sites? Ute Russmann: they surely are now, but during the German elections in 2008 (which is the object of the research), political parties were not really using web 2.0 tools very intensivelly.

Papers

• Cardenal: Why Mobilize Support Online? The Paradox of Party Behavior Online
• Padró-Solanet: Internet and Votes: The Impact of New ICTs on the 2008 Spanish Parliamentary Elections
• Porten-Cheé: Lessons Learned from Obama? The Effect of Individual Use of Party Websites on Voting in the Elections to the European Parliament 2009 in Germany
• Russmann: Voter Targeting via the Web – A Comparative Structural Analysis of Austrian and German Party Websites

New ways for policy-makers to interact with citizens through open social network sites – a report on initial results
Matthew Addis, IT Innovation Centre, University of Southampton, UK

WeGov aims at using social networking sites (where the people is) to engage citizens in two-way dialogues as part of governance and policymaking processes.

Several issues are raised, though, concerning security, privacy, digital identity, hacking, masquerading, bugs and system malfunctions, etc.

So far, though, it seems that social networking sites do offer plenty of potentgial for improved interaction of plicy makers and community, and they are complementary to other models. Notwithstainding, care is needed on what’s legally acceptable, risks need being assessed. On the other hand, there is a high dependency on the major actors (Google, Facebook and other SNS operators). Last, many technical challenges have to be overcome before real dialogue can take place.

Discussion

Q: Should politicians and/or public servants take part in social networking sites? Are them an appropriate place where to engage in a conversation? A: These issues are taking into account in the project, though no results are available at this moment. Notwithstanding, SNS can be used to create only-politicians workgroups, so they can work amongst them in a new environment without “third parties” peeking in.

Q: Isn’t that a big brother approach to policy making? Are SNS only used for surveillance but not for listening? A: Of course it depends on the usage.

Analysing e-consultations with the help of Computer Assistance
Aude Bicquelet, London School of Economics (LSE)

Text mining is the process of extracting information in large corpora with the aim of identifying patterns and relationship in textual data. Can text mining methods help the analysis of large corpora such as e-consultations?

Alceste software was used to explore petitinons and comments from the citizens. After a first scan, cluster analysis was performed to try and isolate groups of terms and infer from them concepts/meanings.

Text mining methods help in categorization of data, reduction of information, visualization to help and disentangle complex and prolific data, high velocity of analysis.

On the other hand, there are some risks like points or issues missed by the algorithm, missing data, insensitivity to meaning and context, etical issues related to privacy or confidentiality, “dehumanization”, non-awareness of participants being a matter of research, etc.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: Though there might be a risk of decontextualization, text could also be mixed with other data (e.g. on the author of the text) and thus reintroduce context within the equation. Would that be possible? A: Yes, this is definitely an option.

Q: Text mining can be used for “sentiment mining”.

Q: How are these findings used? A: They feed back the whole participation process and they inform the people designing the systems so that they can improve them.

Surfing the Net: a pathway to political participation without motivation?
Rosa Borge and Ana Sofía Cardenal, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute IN3, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona

Goals of the research: To investigate the relationship between internet motivation and political participation, and to see whether the use of Internet changes the importance given to motivation.

The literature is not conclusive, and both positive and negative impacts have been found in Internet over political participation in the literature.

The main drivers of political participation are resources, psychological involvement and recruitment networks. Does the Internet reduce the importance of motivation (psychological involvement)? Does the Internet has any impact on it? When participation is not so costly (due to the Internet), maybe political interest is not so important, as participation is almost costless.

(H1) Use of the Internet will not cause the effect of motivation to disappear, but digital skills may actually be a barrier. (H2) Browsing aimlessly on the Internet and being contacted online will increase the probability of online participation.

First results show that political interest and political skills have a direct effect on online political participation. Specifically, having internet skills does have a direct effect in participation, though it will not make political interest disappear as a reason to participate.

There also is a relationship between browsing aimlessly on the Internet and being contacted online and an increase in online political participation.

[Own ramblings: Pippa Norris stated that citizens were increasingly engaged in “actions” rather than “ideologies”. Isn’t that the next step, where “action” is substituted by “casual politics”? Is there still a role for deliberation? We’re witnessing transition fr endorsement of ideas, to participation in actions to casual politics on the run. Seems like e-politics is less of the Habermassian e-agora and more about e-herding.]

Civil Society and ICTs: Creating Participatory Spaces for Democratizing ICT Policy and Governance in the Philippines
Ian Jayson Reyes Hecita, Florida State University

Goal of the research: analyse the state of Civil Society Organizations (CSO) in Philippines.

Context: failure of institutions, lack of capacity of government, democracy dominated by the elite.

Thus, CSOs are raising many relevant issues in Philippines related to ICTs and society.

But government receptiveness on CSOs can depend on leadership, on tapping government “champions”, the political attractiveness of the policy issue, and the effectiveness of engagement will be more viable at the executive level than at the legislative level. It will also depend on the openness/receptiveness/political will of government agencies to CSO participation, on the level of institutionalization of CSO participation, the resources of CSOs and capacity and skills to engage the government, the critical mass in their basis and policy audience, the need to develop consumerism, their capacity to carry on research and, of course, the legal and regulatory framework.

As a conclusion, CSOs may have a limited impact in terms of influencing policy outcomes, but they may have an important one in brining relevant topics on the table.

Papers:

• Addis et al: New ways for policy-makers to interact with citizens through open social network sites – a report on initial results
• Bicquelet: Analysing e-consultations with the help of Computer Assistance
• Borge, Cardenal: Surfing the Net: a pathway to political participation without motivation?
• Hecita: Civil Society and ICTs: Creating Participatory Spaces for Democratizing ICT Policy and Governance in the Philippines

The political click: political participation through e-petitions in Germany
Andreas Jungherr, Otto-Friedrich-Universität, Bamberg Germany

A platform where anyone can create a petition and invite others to follow, diffuse and, of course, endorse it. The difference is that several ways of participation are allowed and their evolution can be tracked.

Several examples are portrayed, being the “No indexing or blocking of websites” the more popular, but not all of the topics were Internet-related and they still got a lot of signatures. Notwithstanding, the number of signatures per petition does follow a power curve, that is, there is a long long tail of petitions thata get very low attention, while a few of them get highest rates of attention. And same happens with the users: a very small number of users signed a large amount of petitions, while most of the users just signed a few of them [curious because users could only endorse a petition, not vote for or against it].

Typologies of users (number of users):

• New Lobbysts (269): vote intensivelly and in a long period of time.
• Hit and Run Activists (235): voted many related issues, but in just a couple of sessions.
• Activist Consumers (80,278): voted several issues that were not related amongst them.
• Single Issue Stakeholders (414,829): voted just a few issues.

Broadening participation through E-Petitions? Results from an empirical study on petitions to the German parliament
Ralf Lindner, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI), Department of Emerging Technologies, Germany

The research aims at analysing different e-petitions and see how e-petitioning affects citizenship participation, after the Bundestag’s e-petition system was set up in 2005. The reform of the petition system has six key elements: the introduction of online submissions, the creation of public e-petitions, co-signatures online, online discussion forums associated with each public e-petition and obligatory public meetings of the petitions committee with petitioners who collect more than 15,000 signatures.

The system has been growing in usage since 2006 and now reaches almost 25,000 e-petitions and public e-petitions, and with more than 3,000,000 of signatures supporting e-petitions and public e-petitions.

Results show that e-petitioning does not seem to change a lot the habits of citizens, as those who participated online were also the ones that used to participate offline, that is, the participants in the e-petitioning system were the ones politically more engaged than the general public. Thus, it failed to attract underrepresented groups. Indeed, gender and socio-economic biases are exacerbated.

e-Petitioning and Representative Democracy: a doomed marriage? – Lessons learnt from the Downing Street e-Petition Website and the case of the 2007 Road-Tax petition
Giovanni Navarria, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk to allow people to create new or sing up for existing petitions addressed to the Primer Minister’s cabinet. The Road Tax petition was created by Mr. Peter Roberts in November 2006 and was sent just to some 30 friends: 3 months after, it had raised 1.8 million signatures.

Once the petition was closed, it got major media attention and by the end of 2007, the then Prime Minister decided to listen “to its constituents and ditch the national road pricing scheme”.

Lessons learnt:

• To host the service within its official website gave the new service a public seal of recognition, increasing the political weight of the petitions submitted through the site. And once the people spoke, media used that “legitimacy” of the site to push more on the Government.
• New e-petition systems have to be integrated in the whole government-citizen dialogue structure, and e-petitions cannot “go on their own”.

Engaging with Citizens Online: Understanding the Role of ePetitioning in Local Government Democracy
Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos, Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University

Potentially, e-petitioning (and petitioning in general) aims at engaging the citizen, should help in bringing more information to the citizen and in a quicker and more direct way, etc. But what is the reality like? And how does the system adapt to it?

A data collection of 13 semi-structured interview with key informants, and supported by informal contacts and documentary analysis was performed with the aim to examine the interactions between IT-related innovations and organizational changes.

The complexity and novelty of e-petition systems end up with the system being participated by many more stakeholders than usual: citizens and local organizations, the government, IT systems departments and providers, academic institutions, etc.

One of the problem that now raises is how to combine (offline) petitions with e-petitions, to decide the number of signatures that validate an e-petition (the same as offline? more? less?), etc. As a general conclusion, it seems that it is not the technological artefact the one that determines engagement and its impact, but the organizational/democratic backup it has.

Discussion

Q: How do people find the e-petition that interest them? Jungherr: Most of the times the e-petition is discussed in mainstream media, sometimes even being the story created in mainstream media, thus driving people to the site to endorse the e-petition. Panagiotopoulos: No doubt social networking sites help a lot in heating the debate and, over all, in distributing the link.

Q: Did people that initiated e-petitions had already exhausted other ways, or they directly “shopped around” the e-petitioning website? Linder: Data seem to prove that people that are active online are active offline too, and people that are active online they were already active offline.

[The discussion was rich and difficult to summarize here. Though, a personal recap of the session: online engagement is highly correlated with (prior) offline engagement; mainstream media (can) boost e-petitioning, crossmedia communication strategies might make a (huge) difference].

More information

• Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Political Participation and Petitioning at the OII Blog.

Papers:

• Jungherr, Jürgens: The political click: political participation through e-petitions in Germany
• Lindner: Broadening participation through E-Petitions? Results from an empirical study on petitions to the German parliament
• Navarria: e-Petitioning and Representative Democracy: a doomed marriage? – Lessons learnt from the Downing Street e-Petition Website and the case of the 2007 Road-Tax petition
• Panagiotopoulos, Al-Debei: Engaging with Citizens Online: Understanding the Role of ePetitioning in Local Government Democracy

An Impact Assessment
Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan

The Internet is a new device that can be used to drive change, but still we have to find out how. Most efforts to do so have ended in sheer failure.

A lot of the debate is understood as a confrontation between “us” the people that want to shape the Internet for higher goals, and “them” people that are lazy, ignorant or apathetic to politics. With the result of failure. Guidelines should be:

• Biology, defining the possibilities.
• Social scientific studies of learning, persuasion, etc.
• Political contexts, that pose special challenges.

Persuasion is a battle for:

• Attention. Attention has a very limited capacity and a high decay rate; thus, a winning utterance must provide a large amount of pleasure/pain and prevail over proximate other utterances. On the other hand, what a target audience remembers may not be what you intended them to remember.
• Elaboration. Learning, physically (by linking neurons), is putting close two different concepts. To be able to leave a cognitive legacy, chunks of information have to be perceived ad unique and highly relevant. The topic has to be local, make its consequences concrete and immediate, and make the desired outcome possible to achieve through actions that the audience can imagine taking.
• Credibility. Credibility is a lot about context. Politics is not only about what you say, but about how you say it: politics yields to language indeterminacy, with words having multiple meanings, and meanings being context-dependent. For contested issues, high credibility is a must, and credibility is domain-specific and bestowed by the audience. Credibility is a function of source, message and contextual attributes and audience effects. Credibility is about setting up strategic contexts, based on a perceived interest proximity, about interactivity.

How to build trust? The Habermas’ Argument: in the absence of natural law, no common framework informs legitimacy claims. If an ideal discourse is procedurally transparent, it can facilitate collective legitimacy.

Lupia-Krupnikov-Levine (2010): an expanded domain for transparency is required for discourse to generate legitimacy. A “procedurally transparent” discourse will anyway be influenced by interruptions, the order effects on persuasion, disagreement… matters difficult to deal with. Thus, this domain of procedural transparency has to be expanded, and there is also a need for a higher commitment in measuring success and failure.

Discussion

Q: How does the Sarah Palin and the Tea Party affaire can be explained with this frameworks? A: It is about localization: the message found its niche thanks to the Internet. Before that, the mainstream media space was crowded with messages and it was more difficult to allocate yours in there.

Q: Nowadays we do build at destroying credibility and reputation, how can new media contribute in solving that? A: New media can certainly act as counterweights to the biases of mainstream media. And microtargeting, making things local, relevant to me is a way of doing things that mainstream media can compete with.

More information

• Internet, Politics, Policy 2010: Keynote by Arthur Lupia at the OII Blog.

In Search of the Elusive ICT4D
Matti Tedre

The mainstream Tanzanian press equals development with ICT and ICT with development.

Why is there such a hype? Is there a hype cycle? Why is there this media portrayal of ICT and development? How has research covered the topic?

One of the strongest claims made are that you do fight poverty with cell phones, and that mobiles bring people money quite quickly through a mobile revolution, or create a lot of jobs, because the role of technology in development is well known and is a key to economic growth, the revolution is sustainable and there are no downsides, because mobile phones are better than aid and even better than aid.

There is good research backing this, but there’s also good research being critique with some euphoric statements.

A survey on 12 rural villages in Tanzania wiht 400 respondents showed that a majority earned $41-$83 and spent a third of the income in phone bills. Notwithstanding, it has to be said that there is a lot of informal economy, goods exchange, etc. so these figures should be taken with a grain of salt.

In fact, 75.25% disagreed that cost of mobile phones was justified by the benefits, while they reduced time and concentration from other important activities and making them forgo other important things.

So, what is happening in there? Don’t people in Africa read headlines?

A second set of interviews were performed asking why people owned a cell phone, what for, how did it affect their own lives, what were the costs, what was the relationship with benefits, and whether there was a choice at all (in using, in supporting costs, etc.)

First of all, there is a huge difference between rural and urban Iringa (Tanzania). In rural Iringa people pay for airtime vouchers but also for recharging the batteries of their mobile phones, a cost you have to bear even if you only get calls. And it was a high cost indeed.

One of the main reasons to own a phone, despite costs, is that it precisely saves other (higher) costs, like travelling… though the trade-off was neither clear nor always in the same sense.

Same with time: on the one hand, you save time for not travelling around, but you have to walk to a power centre to recharge the phone, instead of working in my shamba and attending my cattle.

There was no evidence of high rates of phone sharing, for matters of availability, of privacy, etc. And beeping can be found disturbing and, over all, consumes a lot of battery.

At the social level, many people stated the dangers or the negative effects of phone usage: corrupts children if not well monitored, destructive if not well used, lying through phones…

On the other hand, people state that they give up things because of the phone, but just few of them could list exactly what.

So, why phones:

• Because they want to communicate, to talk to each other… like everywhere else in the world.
• They want to be in touch with the world, not to be disconnected.
• They want, too, to simplify communications, thereby improving my living standards.

About job creation, it looks like there is more job redistribution than creation: if the demand for plumbing services does not rise, what the phone will do is not create more plumbing jobs, but channel them to the one plumber that is reachable (i.e. has a phone). On the other fact, it is also true that there is a direct impact on jobs, in the ICT and mobile sectors.

Outcomes?

• A side outcome of mobile telephony is that people who have never been part of the formal economy now become a part of it an even start to pay taxes (VAT), because they pay bills in real money (no goods exchange allowed with telcos, mind you).
• Saves money but costs money.
• Saves time but takes time.
• When investikng a significant portion of their income in mobiles, people’s capability to invest in other things is reduced, which may hinder development.

Three dogmas that we should challenge:

• Delusion of universality of technology: technology is not value-free, not culturally neutral, not universal; local contingencies do matter.
• Belief in progress through technology: technology does not progess in the course of time; progress is not inevitable; and progress has not a direction. We do have a choice.
• Faith in liberation: some kinds of technology not inevitably create benevolent social forms; technology not always empowers people and liberates them from oppression and poverty.

(side note: Matti Tedre consciously took a very provocative approach and forgetting that his speech has a specific relaxed, friendly context would be really unfair ;) The discussion that followed — unquotable here — was very rich and constructive)