Last June 3rd to 5th, media experts, new media players, media producers, researchers, journalists, activists and others interested in the rise of new media gathered at the University of Southern California‘s Annenberg School of Communication in Los Angeles for the Beyond Broadcast 2009 conference.
Organizers invited this blogger/journalist/activist to speak at the opening plenary session that sought to share local perspectives on new and mobile media. I shared the table with new friends from the Americas, Africa and Asia and we discussed our initiatives and innovations. As the speaker from the Philippines, it was a joy to share Filipinos’ sophisticated use of mobile phones for progressive political purposes.
Here is the full text of my input at that opening plenary session:
Local Perspective: The Philippines’ mobile and new media activism
Anthony Ian M. Cruz
President, TXTPower
Beyond Broadcast 2009The Philippines is the 12th most populous country in the world. We Filipinos are a people of 90 million spread over 7,017 islands. 11 million Filipinos live and work abroad, especially in the Middle East and the United States.
Today, Filipino mobile phone users number more than 70 million. We send one billion text messages a day. We have more cellphones than landlines. We are a migrant people, with Filipinos traveling and moving from one island to another and from one foreign country to another. Communication is therefore very important to us as a people.
Formed in August 2001, TXTPower is an organization that seeks to empower Filipinos both as consumers and as citizens. While we do not profess to be media or new media organization, TXTPower from the very start until today depends on new media to amplify its positions, influence and mobilize the public, and to compel government and big business to respect the people’s rights.
When we formed TXTPower in 2001, we took inspiration from the role of texting in the second People Power uprising and wielded texting to defend consumer rights against what we perceived was an abusive proposal of the carriers which was to reduce and remove all free SMS bundled with prepaid credits and asked government to take action.
On the day we launched the campaign through a hastily-called press conference, we simply came out with and circulated an email petition that explained the role of texting and the possible effects of the removal of so-called free SMS bundled with prepaid credits. We landed in the most popular newscasts and in the biggest newspapers the following day.
In the petition, we declared: The citizens of the world’s texting capital are rising in protest!
The public agreed. Hundreds, then thousands, signed the email petition. The government and the telcos were surprised.
The furor resulted in congressional hearings where we had the first face-offs with executives and lawyers of the telcos. The telcos made a retreat. Although victory wasn’t complete, TXTPower compelled the telcos to delay and scale down the reduction of the free SMS.
SMS tax
Three years later, in 2004, the Arroyo government proposed the imposition of a new, separate tax on SMS on top of the value-added tax that we already pay.
Thanks to friends in Congress, we were able to get the mobile phone number of the Speaker of the House of Representatives at that time. We published the number in a press release and on a post on our website, and urged people to tell the Speaker to reject the new SMS tax.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer, the country’s biggest newspaper, made it its banner story and likewise republished the Speaker’s mobile number. TV and radio stations followed suit the whole day. Before the 6:00 pm early evening newscasts, we received word that consumers were able to send a clear message to the Speaker. He said that text tax was dead.
The Speaker’s reaction and the consumers’ victory was the banner story in the Inquirer the following day.
Hello Garci ringtone
In 2005, a year after the fraudulent 2004 elections, we Filipinos got the shock of our lives as audio recordings of purported telephone conversations between President Arroyo and Commission on Elections commissioner Virgilio Garcillano came out through the media. In the audio recordings, we hear a female voice (that of Mrs. Arroyo) asking a man (Garci): “Will I still lead by 1M?”. 1M meant one million votes.
It was an open secret that Arroyo wanted to move heaven and earth to ensure her electoral victory in 2004 but we didn’t expect that she had the audacity to repeatedly call a top Comelec official to ensure that she would have a one million vote lead over her hugely-popular opponent via large-scale fraud in Mindanao.
Days later, we in TXTPower discovered a cellphone ringtone featuring the President’s recorded voice clip “Will I still lead by 1M?” doing the rounds in Manila. We immediately got our copy, posted it on our website, announced it to our networks and put out a news release about it.
It became an instant hit and became the most popular cellphone ringtone in the country. Our website crashed within hours of our announcement. The media again picked up our story and the Hello Garci ringtone became the rage across all media platforms.
Many users submitted their own version of the Hello Garci ringtone. Some were set in the most popular songs of the day. Popular DJs sought us to submit extended dance remixes. We posted them immediately on our site. Others volunteered to offer free hosting services or to provide mirrors due to the huge number of ringtone downloads.
Broadband scandal
In 2007, the country again exploded in anger after revelations that the President was again involved in a multibillion-dollar scandal involving a plan that was supposedly aimed at blanketing the Philippines with a broadband network. One of the technocrats revealed that big money exchanged hands, with the full knowledge of President Arroyo, as grease money to favor the contractors close to the President’s husband.
Within days, ordinary Filipinos and techies came out with new ringtones and YouTube videos that sought to capture the public discontent.
Looking back, looking forward
TXTPower turns eight years old this August 2009 and we look forward to more consumer and political battles ahead.
We feel confident of winning more of these battles because of three things:
First: We know that fighting for consumer welfare and for genuine, grassroots and hi-tech democracy will always strike a chord among our people.
Second: We are always connected to the people and their organizations. Our convenors and officers mostly from people’s organizations and social movements that have their own.
Third: We always strive to become the media ourselves, to befriend members of the so-called legacy media, and to tap all the various forms and types of new media as soon as they become available.
Individually, our convenors are excelling in our respective fields and opening new ones. Raymond Palatino, student leader, blogger, and TXTPower convenor, recently became a Member of Congress as representative of the Kabataan Partylist. One of co-founders, Professor Roland Tolentino last week became the dean of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. Another convenor, Ederic Eder, is now the search editor of Yahoo! Philippines. The scientist group Agham has started a column for national broadsheet Manila Times while the Computer Professionals Union continues to blaze the trail for free and open source software and pro-people principles in the use of technology.
We intend to continue fighting for consumer welfare. Countries like the Philippines still contend with monopolies and oligopolies that control our telecommunications industry. For one, we will continue to press them to make mobile and wireline internet not just faster but accessible to more people, cheaper and easier to use as well. We want cheaper voice and texting rates. We want cheaper multimedia messaging rates. We have also began training our sights on internet service providers, their pricing, and abusive practices. We plan to press government and the private sector to provide free wireline or wireless internet access to those interested.
Many Filipinos today have hi-tech mobile phones but only a few actually use the full capabilities of their handsets like making videos and then uploading them to the internet via mobile broadband. The biggest stumbling block is cost.
I think we cannot overemphasize that in many countries, pricing of mobile phone services remains prohibitive vis-a-vis the income levels of the majority of the population. This elementary issue of access remains a factor in bridging digital media and the people, for how can the people themselves be the media or use new media to advance their interests when pricing of services are too exorbitant?
Also in the Philippines, we repeatedly fought back attempts to implement mandatory SIM card registration to protect our privacy from whatever form of government snooping and spying. We will not let them succeed in the future either.
There have also been attempts to levy new taxes on mobile phones since 2001 up until this year. We are always in the forefront of battles against them.
In 2004, the justice department tried to harass us and the public into stopping the spread of the Hello Garci ringtones. We just laughed at them and ignored them. We will protect not just the right of consumers to affordable and quality mobile services, but we will always unite with the public in defending their right to use these devices for political ends, as tools for empowering themselves.
As we meet here in Los Angeles, Filipinos are busily campaigning against an ongoing attempt to amend the Philippine constitution courtesy of the pro-Arroyo members of Congress. Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, blogs and mobile phones are now conduits of protest by the public, helping social movements organize protest actions, reaching out to the otherwise politically-apathetic and preparing for perhaps for the next People Power uprising. ###
I’ll share more stories about this conference and my trip to the US in the next few days.