A democratic mobile revolution
Published: 20 Oct 2005 20:00 BST
On a billboard alongside a busy San Francisco boulevard, above a restaurant called "My Tofu House", a message aimed at young Asian-American voters is helping break new ground in political activism.
"Register to vote," reads the advertisement, which looks more like an ad for a hip new Nokia phone than a public service message. "Text 'IVOTE' to 80837."
The campaign, jointly produced by a new non-profit organisation called Mobile Voter and the city's Chinese-American Voter Education Committee, is one of the first in the United States to take the surge of political activity that has emerged around email and the Web and move it wholly to the mobile phones that are appearing in more and more pockets.
A handful of grassroots campaigns have already used text messages to help organise protests and other events, such as actions staged during the national party conventions in 2004. But Washington-based politicos are watching this early San Francisco experiment for lessons that might be applied more directly to their future campaigns.
"The thing that's interesting about this, particularly to political types in DC, is that this could actually affect the bottom line of an election, which is voter turnout," said Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet.
The San Francisco project is the work of the leading edge — at least in America — of a new generation of activists hoping to turn the immediacy and near-ubiquity of mobile phones into a powerful tool of political organisation and mobilisation.
Activists and technologists have long forecast that the Internet would become a campaigning tool. Those predictions matured only in the 2004 election cycle, when Democrat Howard Dean successfully used the Net to raise money and galvanise supporters.
The campaigns of John Kerry and George W Bush each drew heavily on the Net afterward, for fundraising and to support volunteer activities.
However, mobile politics has moved faster in many countries overseas, where people more commonly send text messages and surf the Net on their phones.
Text messages are widely given credit for tipping the scales in Spain's 2004 election, where 40 percent more messages were sent on Election Day than on an ordinary day, and young voters turned out in large numbers to help unseat the government.
In the Philippines earlier this year, activists opposed to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took a controversial...
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