Perhaps it’s the constant ringing you hear - in your pocket, on your hip, in the car.  Or the fact that even a cursory look at the local mall or a city street seems to indicate that humans have mysteriously developed a new appendage, one complete with a dial tone.  Or maybe it’s the haunting realization that the way to your teenage daughter’s heart appears to be through an iPhone.  You may not have heard, but your surely intuit, that the world recently reached a tipping point. There is now one cellphone for every two people on the planet.

The mobile phone has been hailed as the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history.  As with any technology of this magnitude and reach, what follows is revolution - social revolution, to be exact. From fish farmers in India to mobile financing in Africa, the ability of the mobile phone to effect social change is one of the most exciting and important stories being written today.  This week’s Friday Five highlights just a few examples of the growing trend of “mobile activism.”  

Texting for Social Change - FrontlineSMS

In many developing countries mobile phones are not only far more ubiquitous than computers and landlines, in many cases they are the only means of communication.  Organizations such as NGOs rely on tools like text messaging to reach out to the communities they work with. FrontlineSMS is a text messaging system that allows a user with a laptop and a GSM mobile phone the ability to send a large number of text (SMS) messages; because it depends on cellular networks instead of the Internet, it will work in any country on any GSM network. In the first two years since its release, FrontlineSMS has been used by NGOs in 41 countries for a wide range of activities including monitoring elections and disease outbreaks, blood donor recruitment and the exchange of market price information for vegetable and coffee growers.

Mobile Phone Reporters - Voices of Africa

Launched in May 2007, the Voices of Africa project is creating a cadre of “mobile reporters.”  Armed with mobile phones, the reporters are known as ‘camjos’ (short for ‘camera’ and ‘journalist’) who use mobile phones to write, takes photos and makes videos about daily life in Africa on subjects they find newsworthy. Using the mobile phone as the reporting platform is critical, as many journalists don’t have access to the Internet to file their stories. According to the project site, Voices of Africa aims aims to “put Africans in a much better position to take part in discussions that have been taking place about their continent  for centuries without their knowledge and participation.”

Environmental Monitoring - MESSAGE on a Bike

This New Scientist article reports that cellphones used by bicycle couriers are monitoring air pollution in Cambridge, UK, and beaming the data back to a research lab. The project, called MESSAGE, is developing low cost sensors to provide data for the planning and management of environmental impacts in urban areas. Sensors are embedded on vehicles and people to act as “mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards.” One very practical application: working with doctors to correlate their patient’s asthma symptoms with the air pollution around them. (thanks to Changeist for the heads up)

Mobile Acitivism = MobileActive

MobileActive is a global network of people (and their tools, projects, and resources) focused on the use of mobile phones in civil society. It’s without a doubt one of the most comprehensive and connected sites on the web documenting the use of mobile phones for activism and advocacy, featuring hundreds of examples, case studies and resources (see this Boston Globe article for a sample). Most importantly, MobileActive taps into activists around the world, connecting a community that is literally creating social change one cell phone at a time.  For anyone interested in following the emerging trend of mobile activism from the ground up, the organization’s news aggregator and del.icio.us feeds are must-reads.

“Socially Networked Consumption” - CarrotMob

What if the most important step you could take to help solve the world’s most challenging problems was to drop into the corner store on a certain week and buy a certain brand of toothbrush? This is the question posed by Carrotmob, a new non-profit that organizes consumers to make purchases that reward companies who make environmentally friendly choices.  At its initial launch Carrotmob organized 300+ people for a few hours of shopping at a local market in San Francisco. The company, K&D Market, pledged to allocate 22% of gross revenue from Carrotmobbers towards energy-saving measures. The big idea, according to founder Brent Schulkin, is to improve the world by helping companies embrace socially responsible choices, leveraging the power of “socially networked consumption”* to do so.  

*4/22/08 update: Stephanie Gerson, a student at UC Berkley, wrote to tell me that she coined the term “socially networked consumption”; while the term isn’t explained in detail on her blog (only: “peer consumption via consumer networking sites”), according to her email she’s writing a thesis on the topic.