18 Mobile Multimedia: Uses and Social Consequences

In chapter 22 of this volume, Kenneth Gergen analyzes how mobile telephony is transforming the political process and democracy. For him, the structure of political communication in Western societies has gone through a series of highly significant changes during the past fifty years. Between the government and the individual voter, there has always been a layer of face-to-face relationships in which people deliberate social issues and political issues. The fourth layer, a more recent addition, is mediated communication that was originally monological: the public was informed, but had only limited possibilities in participating in opinion formation in media. However, with mobile phones, the nature of mediated communication changes. For example, people are able to organize political protests, as the ousting of Joseph Estrada, the former president of the Philippines shows (see Rheingold 2003a). The history of how he left his position was largely a story of urban crowds organizing massive demonstrations with mobile phones and text messages. With messages such as ''Go 2EDSA, Wear blck,'' people organized a series of demonstrations at Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), a major Manila thoroughfare (Rheingold 2003a, pp. 157–160). We can call this picture optimistic. Mobile communication is an important constituent of what Gergen calls ''the proactive Mittelbau,'' opinion-formation and action that is rooted in the independent realities of civil society rather than in the opinions of political elites or mass media. However, the second picture Gergen paints is more somber. In this vision, the civil society is being slowly replaced by small communication clusters, which increasingly take the role previously played by face-to-face conversation in public venues. Political communication shifts from civil society to these ''monadic clusters,'' as Gergen calls them. Instead of participating in society, people move through the day largely disengaged from those around them, turning instead to their friends when in trouble or in need of advice or encouragement. In these clusters, people focus on immediate life and microrelationships at the cost of civic concerns. If they focus on issues relevant to democracy , they construct their opinions with their friends and acquaintances rather