Text Messaging Is New Tool Of Political Underground: March 29, 2005

“...cell phone text messaging has become a powerful underground channel of free and often impolite speech, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies, where mobile phones are common but candid public talk about politics is not. Demonstrators use text messaging to mobilize followers, dodge authorities and swarm quickly to protest sites. Candidates organizing for the region's limited elections use text services to call supporters to the polls or slyly circulate candidate slates in countries that supposedly ban political groupings. And through it all, anonymous activists blast their adversaries with thousands of jokes, insults and political limericks. [...] At about 40 cents per missive, text messaging can be an expensive way to mobilize the masses, but the Gulf countries are lightly populated and afloat on record oil revenue. With political debate at a fever pitch this year, many of the region's well-heeled activists find it hard to resist the chance to compose their own uncensored statements and deliver their political wisdom to targeted audiences. [...] Text messaging is only the latest in a wave of border-hopping communication technologies to rewire patterns of Arab dissent during the past 15 years. Saudi exiles and Islamic activists waged an underground war of faxed pamphlets during the early and mid-1990s. Satellite television channels transformed the images and ideas available to Arab viewers during the same period. More recently, CDs, DVDs and the World Wide Web have dominated underground political publishing in the Gulf. As each new technology has spread, the region's authoritarian governments have tried to fight back. They have sent censors to license fax machines and block dissident Web sites, and they have pushed government-friendly investors to buy and manage satellite channels. But the Gulf's monarchies have not yet figured out whether or how to control text message channels.”
[Washington Post]