The Guardian Unlimited Filipinos rally to oust the president: C U @ the revolution
"Millions of ordinary Filipinos, communicating with each other via mobile phone text messages, swarmed on to the streets of the capital, Manila, in scenes reminiscent of the 1986 uprising which ousted the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos."

"Most people heard about the planned swearing-in of Ms Arroyo via the text messages, the same means that galvanised a spontaneous uprising on Tuesday evening, when Mr Estrada's impeachment trial collapsed after he bullied and bribed senators to block the admission of vital evidence."

"The text message doing the rounds late last night said it all: "I guess we've won again."

redux [11.29.00]
NPR: Morning Edition Cell Phone Rally
"NPR's Eric Weiner reports on the latest in the effort to unseat Philippine president Joseph Estrada. Filipinos send 30 million cell phone "text messages" daily- more than anywhere else in the world. Activists are using the technology to organize rallies and respond instantly to the latest corruption charges. (5:19)"

redux [07.07.00]
The New York Times Manila's Talk of the Town Is Text Messaging
[requires 'free' registration]
"Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone.

"There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back." ."

"Sending e-mail on mobile phones, has also taken off in richer parts of the world: Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and in Japan and other East Asian countries, particularly among teen-agers. But in the Philippines, where incomes are far lower, it is even more popular. And it has spawned an entire subculture, complete with its own vocabulary, etiquette and tactical uses. It has become particularly popular here, in large part because text messaging is cheap while traditional telephone service is spotty and Internet access by computer is expensive."

The Standard Net Sustenance
"From South Asia to South America, one hears tales of isolated rural poverty yielding to connected economic development, courtesy of Internet connections. Poor families in India and subsidence-level villages in Africa may get online with used 386s and marginal connections – the Net reaches parts of the Congo via shortwave radio – but once online, they are connected to information about clean water and health, to global markets and income.

Indeed, from my experience, it is clear that in many instances poor people are adopting the Internet because they are poor. Computers and the Net are enabling the world's less affluent to plug into global communication for less cost than conventional telephony or even postal service. In some places, the Net is the only means for communication."

redux [07.09.00]
Washinton Post Poor in Latin America Embrace Net's Promise
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.

Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.

It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""

""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."

Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.

"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""

redux [05.14.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."