Mobile phones can be a solution for citizen media…

I’ve had a few moments of pondering in the past few days, weighing the prospects of the mobile proposal I made to the three network providers on my last blog. My opinion is that mobile phones can be used as practical items towards citizen journalism.   

On that thought, while facebooking the other day, I stumbled across these numbers. At least 83 percent of South Africa’s population owns a mobile phone.

Well if you look around, from gogo’s who are some times technically challenged by these little devices to even five year olds who are doing the rounds on Mxit and chatting! Almost everyone owns a cell phone these days. These fancy and some not so fancy, but practical gadgets have become a necessity that drives our lifestyles.

Because of their popularity, even their price tags have simultaneously dropped. You can even get one for 50 bucks these days…I’m still not convinced with this price tag though!

Cell phones have certainly transformed the dynamics of how we communicate amongst each other.  Most relevant is that they have managed to bridge the social rural-urban divide that is so evident when you look at ICT penetration statistics in South Africa.

We live in a technically advanced society and mobile phones are not only a means of communication, but they also have produced a creative social platform where almost every South African can express themselves in.  Even marketers are responding to this technological surge because I occasionally receive advertorial smses. 

Given these pros, it seems inevitable to assign mobile phones as the tool for citizen media. At this year’s Digital Citizen Indaba workshops during the Highway Africa conference, these pro’s kept popping up.  The conference was a discussion of how citizen journalism has evolved over the years and how citizen journalists can make use of technologies available to them.

The term digital citizen also kept crawling up during these workshops. Digital citizens are not only limited to the elites of society who have access to computers and the internet. Citizens who make use of technology items such as cell phones to tell the stories of their communities are also digital citizens.

The qualities of any technological item that can be used to empower grassroots citizens for participatory media are affordability and skills for using the technology. And the mobile phone manages to avail these epitomes as well as reach hard to reach communities.

The mobile phone is already seen as a tool for facilitating development initiatives and Africa cannot ignore this trend. In countries like Rwanda , the mobile phone has been used to facilitate communication between clinics and patients.

Since South Africa is still legging behind when it comes to ICT infrastructural development, why not then adopt cell phones as practical tools to advance citizen media in our small communities.  We are already sending smses, videos and MMSes’s to our close friends using our phones. Why not then use the phone to advance our communities and tell our stories?

Instead of folding hands, complaining and waiting for government funds that take probes and commissions of enquiry before they get to the people intended for.

When I wrote my blog last week, making a proposal to the three network providers to sponsor grassroots citizens with cell phone kits, I had hopped that lucky someone out there would be listening, well reading.  And I haven’t received any promises nor proposals. Well not yet!

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