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| Mobile Warriors: Costa Rican Youth, Mobile Phones and Social Change |
 PRINTABLE VERSION |
While larger organizational uses of mobile phone technology are easy to chart, the bulk of mobile usage is personal, away from the public domain. This is beginning to change as some of the top visited Costa Rican websites are beginning to go mobile. Within one month of my starting to write this article Hi5, announced its new mobile version, m.hi5.com in 26 languages. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have long been mobile enabled, and search engines like Google and Yahoo both have Mobile versions.
One example of a mobile social network that has swept Costa Rica is Twitter. This social network has been around since October 2006 and is well known for engaging members by asking them “What are you doing right now?” Users post their updates in under 140 characters, which are called tweets. Since its launch, Twitter has rapidly taken over the world as a micro-blogging portal.
Twitter is best known as an activist tool from American student James Karl Buck who sent out a one-word tweet “Arrested,” while in Egypt attending anti-government protests. Within minutes of his post from his mobile phone friends and colleagues from home and abroad came to his aid. This butterfly effect is what Twitter has become famous for: spreading ideas and alerts like wildfires.
Thanks to mobile updates in Canada, the USA and India, users can have their friends’ tweets routed straight to their mobile devices. Yet these mobile updates have proven costly to Twitter. As such the social network has had to cut down on its services in foreign countries. Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone publicly apologized to users explaining the cuts to services:
Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users. Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and the Americas to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers for updating via SMS are on the way.
In the two years since its founding, Twitter made quite an impact on Costa Rican users, although, technically speaking, it was not available through mobile updates during its growth period. Twitter allows tech-savy ticos (Costa Ricans) to forge a unique national identity. To get a sense of the Costa Rican Twitter micro-blogsphere, look no further than Twittervision. Micro-blogging encompasses the things people do in between major blog posts, from the mundane to the profound, merging locative technologies with social networks.
The blogger, web designer, and first Costa Rican user of Twitter Josue Salazar comments on Twitter’s locative feature for creating virtual locative communities:
Personally, what brought Twitter to my attention was how easy it was to publish anything, to communicate with so many people, and to see what other people are doing. The truth is that it wasn’t until this year that I found other ticos on Twitter, and I was always noticing how other communities used Twitter to interact with people from the same place, sharing more things, and in general relating to others from the same place (debating the local news, etc.). Specifically, my Chilean friends took Twitter and they made it their own huge community, and had great conversations. I was always jealous because it was all in Spanish, and because they were getting the most out of it.
(Personalmente lo que me llamó la atención fue esa facilidad de publicar tonteras, de comunicarme fácilmente con tanta gente, y ver lo que todos hacen. La verdad, no fue hasta este año que encontré a algún tico en Twitter, siempre estuve viendo como muchos en Twitter eran del mismo lugar y compartían más cosas, en general relacionadas a que estaban en el mismo país (discutiendo noticias locales, etc), lo que fuera. En especifico, amigos chilenos tomaron Twitter y lo hicieron suyo hace tiempo, la comunidad chilena es grande, y tienen muy buenas conversaciones, siempre estuve celoso, porque hablaban en español, porque estaban sacandole el jugo a Twitter.)
Many Twitter users don’t fit together in the virtual or physical worlds as their references don’t translate. A video produced for a local Twitter Costa Rica meet up quotes scenarios where Twitter users swap comments that serve as a secret language that only they can decode:
Messages like “Have you written SMS messages that seem like they’re 140 characters or smaller?”, “Have you tried to explain how Twitter works to a group of non-users and they still don’t get it?”, “Have you converted at least one friend to Twitter?”, “Have you run to your house with the urgent need to tell the world what you’re doing right now?”, “Have you tweeted from a party/ concert/ meeting/ graduation/ communion/ church/ batmitzva/ mass?”, etc.
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Comments
circulating a film on AIDS thru mobile nielu patekar | Mar 30th, 2009
is it possible? if yes, how?
whom to contact?
hello,
i am a woman writer-director-actress-cinematographer from mumbai, india.
have you seen my following films?
a film on AIDS, ‘it’s just unjust’ duration 3 min. access to the link,
http://tigurl.org/uk0xo4
a film on baba amte , dur 7 min.s access the following link to view it in two parts.
http://tigurl.org/spytmi
I would like to share these with you, your family, friends , groups & your communities by including them in your video section, you can put the respective url s on your site so that visitors to your page can view it.
pl. also let me know your comment on viewing my films.
Regards,
neelkantee
Thank You! Timothy G. Branfalt Sr. | May 3rd, 2009
My younger brother died of aids at the age of 32. You are an incredibly determined mind that is of what this world needs more of. I live in Costa Rica, and if you ever seem to dwell on over, Me Casa es Su Casa!
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