Mobile Communities
Formas comunitárias emergem com sistemas locativos. Post do Smart Mobs mostra como tecnologias móveis estão ampliando formas de mobilização, criando novas sinergias sociais e usos dos espaços urbanos. A questão colocada no post:
“If ingenious games designers can inspire thousands of people to collaborate to solve a puzzle, could we do something similar to tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for the elderly, help disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and make physical products?”
O texto aponta para perspectivas de uso “de baixo para cima” das tecnologias de comunicação móvel para mobilização política.
“(…) By the powerful storm of the new communication technologies, mobs that think and act collectively are taking over areas dominated before by scholars, organizations, institutions, and corporations. There’s an evolutionary process taking place as we speak, a process that is experimenting with replacing the hierarchical top-down organizations with peer-to-peer forms of mob organizing. Citizens have now a worldly opportunity to organize themselves without the trappings of traditional organizations. Nowadays we have mob politics, mob branding, mob science, mob learning and so on. Leadbetter offers wonderful examples of each mob. What I found to be interesting is the observation about processes that truly promote democracy: the broadband by which mobs communicate, get organized and act proves itself to be more efficient in bringing democratic change –- consider the example of the political opposition in Vietnam, entirely founded and organized via Internet –- than the billions of dollars spent by US on the war in Iraq.(…)”
No mesmo espírito, post do New Mobilities comenta artigo do NYT mostrando o crescimento de redes sociais móveis que utilizam blogs, micro-blogs e software sociais a partir de dispositivos móveis para manter vínculos sociais em mobilidade pelo espaço urbano. Também diversos projetos de mobilização política e de reforço comunitários podem ser vistos no site do MobileActive.org, como os recentes sobre vídeos sobre direito das mulheres: “about women’s rights is one of three mobile phone videos made by Egyptian artist Ahmad Sherif, designed to be spread virally on mobile phones.(…)”, ou sobre guias para ONGs utilizarem SMS para pressionar representantes: “(…) text-to-screen campaign allows for exactly this: A large screen, placed right outside the State House, for example, that brings your constituents’ text messages to legislators’ eyes.”
O uso de tecnologias móveis como telefones celulares devem ser prioritários já que há mais usuários de celular do que de internet e recente pesquisa confirma essa tendência. Post do Geek mostra como os celulares são “mais necessários que internet”: ” Uma nova pesquisa do Pew Internet & American Life Project mostrou que os telefones celulares ultrapassaram a internet e a televisão na lista de prioridades entre o público americano.(…) A pesquisa também descobriu que 62% de todos os americanos já utilizaram um celular para aplicações não tradicionais (enviar e receber chamadas), ou acessaram a internet a partir de uma conexão sem fio. Entre os usos mais populares para celulares e PDAs estão envio e recebimento de SMS (31%), fotografia (15%), jogos (8%), acesso a informações (7%), reprodução de música (6%), mensagem instantânea (6%), gravação de vídeos (3%), visualização de mapas (3%) e reprodução de vídeo (3%). O estudo completo traz divisões étnicas e etárias e pode ser lido, em inglês, neste PDF.
Por último, post do MediaShift de Paul Lamb mostra sitema mashup, Netsquared em São Francisco projetado para encorajar a participação civil e de organizações sem fins de lucro: ” For example, a submission called Community News & Caring Map is aimed at allowing writers to know where their readers are geographically located. The idea being that if you know more about who your audience is, the better you can speak to them and provide more informed journalism. (…) Another listed contender is called NewsFlash: Mapping top stories in 200 plus countries. This one is already live, and allows you to pick top stories from around the globe from a colorful world map. The idea here is to encourage people to expand their news horizons through a graphically rich interface. (…) My favorite idea submitted so far on the news front is called Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of post election violence in Kenya. This mashup intends to help document issues of violence and death not reported by the government, police or the mainstream press. The effort seeks to provide a graphical timeline of events, document specific cases, and ultimately provide pictures and information about unreported or underreported victims. This strikes me as a very practical and important tool, not to mention representing “citizen journalism” at its best.”
Como coloquei na minha fala no Medialab Prado sobre comunidade:
“The city is seen as a place that insulates people, where prevailing the lack of contact and privacy. The community is a social pre-urban form, with emphasis in place as “home”. Could locative media locative recreate community feelings of belonging? What are the goals of bottom-up projects if not, effectively, creating more effective ways of communication and new forms of fighting against anomie and separation? We can see collective and collaborative processes with virtual communities on the Internet (virtual communities like forums, chat rooms, newsgroups) and today with locative media projects (mobile social networks, collaborative maps, urban annotations, bottom-up mobilizations, location-based games, smart and flash mobs). We can see these experiences as ways to combat the emptiness of urban space, to rethink the social bond. For young people, community are friends and family members that they can stay in touch by face-to-face encounters but also, by information exchange in blogs, micro-blogs, social software, SMS text, cellphone photos and videos. Community only makes sense today in terms of mobility, fluidity. Theses online relations don’t kill face-to-face relations AND the urban spaces. They create new forms and NEW temporalities of communities and places. Discussions on Facebook, updates in micro-blogs, synchronization of activities by SMS, perpetual contact with cellphones is all new activities that reinforce social relationship, the community belonging and the use of urban spaces. We must avoid a nostalgic vision of communities, of places and cities, on the risk of no longer see the urban realm that is growing in front of us.”