Report on mobile phones and social change

some of you may have already seen this, but I just stumbled upon and thought I’d share. A recent report published by Vodafone and the UN Foundation on mobile phone use by NGOs and other activists…

From the UNF website:
“This second publication in the series—Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use—examines innovative uses of mobile technology by groups working to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals. The report identifies emerging trends in “mobile activism” through 11 case studies, and highlights the results of a global survey of NGO usage of mobile technology.”

Might be a nice summer reading assignment

Appropriating phones for teen dating in the middle east

Following our discussion on Chipchase-envy, here’s another fascinating piece of anthropological-mobile use research:

“Hiyam Hijazi-Omari and Rivka Ribak wrote a paper called “Playing With Fire: On the domestication of the mobile phone among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel”. In their research, they analyzed mobile phone practices among Palestinian teenage girls in Israel. The Paper constructs a detailed account of mobile phone use among Palestinian Israeli girls who, at the time of the fieldwork (2003-2006), used mobile phones given to them by their illicit boyfriends, unbeknownst to their parents.

You can link to the research paper, or see some commentary about it here where I initially found it, on Global Voices Online.

A new phone for digital storytellers

Nokia has announced its answer to Apple’s iPhone, the N78.  But the real gem is the recently-released N82, a device specifically created for visual storytellers.  This spring Nokia sent four bloggers and visual artists to travel the globe while documenting what they saw along the way.  The GPS-tagged images and the blogs maintained by these lucky four can be read at the Urbanista Diaries series here.