Facebook-politics is no substitute for a good local paper

Standing in the baking sun on a north London High Street for six hours might not sound like your idea of cutting edge election coverage, but it was one of the most well received pieces of journalism that I have witnessed in this campaign.

Armed with little more than a bottle of water, some hastily purchased sun cream and a stack of red, yellow, blue and green pieces of paper we were carrying out an election poll for the seat of Hornsey and Wood Green.

Hampstead and Highgate Express

After minutes we realised that we weren’t going to have to fight hard to encourage local voters to make their voices heard. These were the normal people on the street out buying their weekly shop or popping into the post office. They hadn’t joined a facebook group to show their disdain for Gordon Brown or commented on a spoof Tory Youtube video but we quicky got the distinct feeling they would have done if they were a little more Facebook savvy.

There was frustration on the streets which led to people coming up to our stall uninvited, asking questions and writing mini-essays explaining the causes of their alienation.

One man who told me how he had fought and been injured in WW2, how he had watch his commander, an old man at 26 die 10 days before the end of the war. He is 83 now and he was going to spoil his ballot. Why? A lifelong labour voter he feels betrayed on a national scale and alienated on a local level. The worst offence, he said was the letter he received on his 80th birthday telling him his pension was to be increased. By 25p a week.

Another woman told us that national politics held no sway over her anymore. They, she said, were career politicians interested in lining their politics and hiding their policies. She was voting simply on what her local candidates had to offer. Lynne Featherstone, the incumbent Lib Dem MP, is well regarded here, and this lady was no exception to this opinion.

She has been a good candidate fighting hard for local issues and bringing them to national attention when necessary. An expenses ‘saint’ she also held a lot of sway in terms of morality. The fact that she is the daughter of a millionaire and not exactly poorly off herself was never mentioned – it seems that there is not so much anger at people being over-paid or over-privilege but simply about the lack of honesty over that payment.

After four hours we had amassed almost 200 votes just from passersby. The ‘ballots’ were covered with scrawls of ‘change needed’ and ‘time for change’ suggested the locals were not immune from the national message being thrust down their throats. But hearteningly there were also comments that showed a real interest in national and local policies and in how these party’s would address their personal needs.

Four first time voters gave me a rush of pride in our long tradition of youthful social conscience. They said that they could see how Labour had made mistakes but expressed a belief that they couldn’t vote any other way than red. They believed in equality and in continued investment in the National Health Service, in education and in those struggling out of poverty. They said they knew that Conservatives would not provide this, no matter how friendly Cameron appeared to be.

That long sunny wait on a busy pavement showed me how important the local paper can be for empowering local voters. We could sense the gratitude people felt at the paper giving them a voice on local issues. Their willingness to speak out highlighted that, despite the shift towards US presidential politics, it was the response of their local MP to their struggles that really mattered in the long term. But these people do not want their worries exploited by the leaders as anecdotes for  ping-pong TV rallies. The voters want to be listened to by their local candidates and  for their local papers to make them heard.

Indeed the local parties would do well to read through our final cardboard box of ‘votes.’ It would tell them more about the state of mind of their constituents than any YouGov poll for utterly unbiased Sky News ever will.

UPDATE – I now work for Ham&High as a reporter but when I wrote this I was a lowly work experience with no renumeration. Flattery, it seems, will get you anywhere!

Can a $15 mobile phone increase development in Africa? it's got a better chance than Bono

Vodafone is launching a handset that will sell for under $15  – making it the lowest cost mobile phone on earth. It is built with what, Patrick Chomet – Vodafone Group Director of Terminals, describes as ’emerging market consumers’ in mind. What he really means is poverty-struck ones.

http://www.youtube.com/v/FEYtf-E-fP4&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999

It is easy to forget, with all the hype around apps, smartphones and spangly products like the iPad that basic mobile phones are facilitating a much more basic and fundamental transformation in developing countries across Africa and Asia

In countries where huge swathes of the population live in rural areas with little or no communication infrastructure the introduction of mobile technology can have a profound impact.

The mobile phone has been a significant contributor to the development of free and fair elections in Africa. Most modern election observation efforts take advantage of the recent proliferation in mobile phones and nearly all use mobile phone calls as part of their communications system.

In Zimbabwe the Movement for Democratic Change’s to used camera phones to photograph blue protocol documents posted at all polling stations in Zimbabwe in an attempt to document their poll-watching.

The South Africa-based election monitoring group, The Independent Result Center, set up a website, ZimElectionResults.com, to publish independent election results. The website was updated by specially trained agents who were taking pictures of the results on their mobile phones. The polling agents took photographs of the data displayed at individual polling and sent the images back to a manned call centre.

photo: futureatlas.com

Even when camera technology is not available, mobile phones can be a powerful tool for fledgling democracy. In the recent election in Ghana, for example, mobile phones were an integral part of the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers’ (CODEO) observation effort. Even without cameras texts and phone calls allowed them to quickly collect and share a comprehensive body of information on the conduct and results of the election analyzing 54,570 datapoints within a few hours.

Much of the news dissemination in Africa is already through mobile phone technology. As more people have access to a mobile phone than to electricity access to internet is still relatively rare (6.7% penetration – in comparison to 37% for mobile phones) and printed papers don’t make it very far out of the cities so mobile phones and radio provide for the news to most of the continent. Headlines are sent out in as SMS messages and or a special news headline number can be called to

Unlike radio it is hard for authorities to block mobile signal without severely disrupting the country’s infrastructure and economy. In times of unrest or authoritarian rule the SMS can function as the only source of news. The London-based SW Radio Africa sends out a selection of headlines to 30,000 people in Zimbabwe via SMS.

Mobile phones are an important economic stimulus too – and it is in this sphere perhaps that the new Vodaphone models will have the most significant impact.

Bangladesh is often used as the case study for the impact that mobile telephony can have on the economically disadvantaged. In the late 1990s Grameen Bank, a Dhaka-based for-profit enterprise set up Grameen Telecommunications, a non-profit organization that provided low-cost phone services in rural areas. Village entrepreneurs purchased mobile phones and then sold on phone services to other villagers. The investment created a swathe of rural mobile phone entrepreneurs, 95 percent of whom were female.

Meanwhile villagers benefited from instant communication – they were able to contact distant family members making it easier to find employment opportunities, it enabled farmers to check prices in different markets before selling produce, and eventually allowed the quick and easy transfer of funds. After it’s success in Bangladesh a similar project – village phone – was launched in Uganda.

With the launch of a mobile phone costing under $15 these micro-economies fuelled by mobile access will become more accessible across the developing world and should, in time, have more impact than a hundred Bonos could ever hope to achieve.