The iPhonization of Central Asia

Some six months ago, this blog discussed the possibility that mobile broadband could alter the discourse in Central Asia by creating a level playing field between independent and state-controlled news media. O&G contributor Sasha Meyer sees events moving faster in that direction. His report:

By Sasha Meyer

Since the fall, analysts have been describing the advent of a mobile internet revolution, with some predicting 1 billion devices to be online by 2013. Central Asia will be part of the trend, with the down-drift of prices persuading more consumers to replace their conventional cell phones with Internet-capable, PC-like smartphones and smartbooks.

Competition is helping. Facing strong competition from iPhones and Blackberrys, the big cellphone makers are rolling out their own models: Nokia, the world’s biggest handset maker, has introduced its N97 and E72, and started offering netbooks. No. 2 Samsung has launched a smartphone platform. Meanwhile, newcomers are piling in. Google has shipped Nexus One, Lenovo plans to buy a handset maker and has just unveiled a smartbook; and chipmaker Freescale has introduced prototype smartbooks that it says will reach stores by the summer. Apple’s eagerly anticipated tablet will give the whole mobile product category a further boost.

Importantly, iPhone and Blackberry are being introduced to China, the world's biggest and fastest-growing market. Chinese telecoms are signing up some 10 million customers per month and the biggest – China Mobile – has 508 million users, more than the entire population of the European Union. (By comparison, Verizon, the largest U.S. mobile operator, has 89 million subscribers.)

When these phones take hold in Central Asia, they will create new opportunities and challenges, both for the governments and the societies.

The governments will face their typical conundrum: how to gain from global progress without surrendering control. That even North Korea has set up a 3G network shows that new technology will be allowed and deployed, if after some foot dragging, simply because technological compatibility with the rest of the world is increasingly essential today.

Internet access will probably be fairly open. Online censorship is often trivial to bypass and generally ineffective. China, the world’s most sophisticated censor, “is losing a war over the Internet” even though it “has prevailed in battles,” report Loretta Chao and Jason Dean in The Wall Street Journal. The governments can and will literally pull the plug on Internet access; but they will do so only in critical moments, and then still be compelled to turn it back on, as happened in Burma after the 2007 monks' protests and in China following last year’s riots in the western province of Xinjiang.

Internet hasn’t realized the expectation that it would usher in democracy anywhere. But ubiquitous wireless access to the Web is likely to have other effects, including economic benefits and the isolation of an older, Soviet-era generation that tends to cling to the old ways.

But probably the most important effect will be in allowing the society to better understand itself: Online behavior reveals a society’s mood and preferences; this is more the case with untethered web access, which allows for more spontaneous behavior since people don't have to wait in line at an Internet café, or until they get in front of their home or office computer. As Michael Lewis writes in Next: The Future Just Happened, the Internet allows people to pick any identity; our choices are “telling us what we want to become.”

In addition, everyone turns into kind of a reporter, with the ability to send description and images of events they encounter. Everyone is pushed – government-controlled media outlets, opposition and independent news organizations – to improve their own reporting.

The overall impact could be the expansion of Central Asia’s version of the “parallel society.” Sabrina P. Ramet, professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, describes it well in another context in her 1994 book Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation:

Parallel society “is a living part of any society. Its breadth varies in inverse proportion to the breadth of allowable open activity: Where the political authorities let society organize itself, parallel society inhabits the narrow ravines of subculture, deviance, and crime; where the political authorities seek to impede society's self-organization, parallel society encompasses a much wider array of socially organic processes.

Parallel society “cannot completely ignore the official structures, the legal codes, and official economy: it cannot be fully "independent" or create a full-blown "alternative," though it self-consciously tends in that direction."

There is "the possibility of interaction, interference, mutual influence, and exchange with official society. It also leaves open the possibility of an eventual merger of the two, or as advocates of parallel society envisioned, the swallowing up of official society by the freely self-organized structures of parallel society. This is, in effect, what came to pass in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, as well as in Slovenia and Croatia by mid-1990."