Digitizing the Moment: The Realtime Web and the Developing World

(Photo via DigiActive)

One of the break-out trends of web communication is the push to get ever closer to the moment of events, as they happen. It began with instant messaging and chat rooms and extended into SMS and eventually micro-blogging. Earlier this month I blogged about the role Twitter played in alerting people about a fire that was occurring in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. Incredibly, I (and hundreds of others following Twitter user @kahenya) knew about the full sequence of events in detail before even the local affiliates were on the scene! The same scenario has played out time and time again (most recently in India and in China). The current buzzword for this trend is 'the realtime web'. That is, those people all over the world connected by PDAs, Smart-phones, mobile devices, netbooks, desktop computers etc. and what they are doing as close to 'now' as one can ever hope to get (before it becomes 'then').

Ever Closer to The Moment

So far the real-time web is even in it's infancy in the first world, but what do these new technologies mean for developing nations?

Souktel is a Palestinian start-up that uses SMS gateways to distribute and aggregate Job and Aid information in the West Bank. It's an incredible resource during times where travel, communication and even power are cut. Theoretically, mobile operators would be the last form of information to go down in a crisis situation. The infrastructure is sparse enough, and the staff displaced enough to keep a network up through whole conflict if necessary. Unlikely, but possible. Still, the value of Souktel to the region is hard to really quantify, if only for the speed at which information can be shared rather cheaply. Most recently Al Jeezera partnered with Souktel and the mobile incident reporting tool Ushahidi for a project that allowed citizens living in Gaza to build and view collaborative comprehensive maps (using Microsoft's Virtual Earth) of both critical incidents and aid necessities. These maps also included Al Jazeera's news coverage mapped by location as both text and video.

This is where the power of the real-time web applications really shows itself. Living half-a-world away from something as tragic as a mortar blast, you can know more about that moment in time right down to the hyper-second, than the people who were there to witness it first hand. Video from multiple angles, multiple first-hand accounts both in micro-blog and blog form, informed reporting; all these things culminate to create an experience that would make the writers of the movies EAGLE EYE (2008) and ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998) proud.

The Use-Case

Let's imagine the following scenario:

The fictional African nation of Bamzia is at an international, humanitarian stalemate. The world is watching but information can't be distributed through normal means. But a woman is walking from her village with a small device that carries the hopes and prayers of her neighbors. She doesn't know how the device works, she barely knows how to turn it on. It may as well be witchcraft as far as she concerned, but she knows that the contents are far more valuable than the device itself. She makes the long track from one village to another to see her ailing son, but before she sees him she hands the device to the town Elder who then hands it over to his son.

Weeks ago, an aid worker had shown him how to use it. 'Just press this button, all you have to do is press this one button.' He remembers only that part. Nothing about the fact that this device is a mobile server capable of broadcasting, short-range, to a number of similar devices. Nothing about the fact that tens, if not hundreds of emails would be distributed to a local area radio network (either wifi or bluetooth) that would then distribute those emails to computers and mobile devices alike. He just knows that when he presses that button, the village will receive news about whether or not the rebels or the government have won, whether someone's sister or father has been killed, whether or not the daily football score was in favor of his country or another...

While not exactly an example of real time web communication, in the above scenario I'm describing mobile devices capable of asynchronous storage and broadcast via radio device. 13 million people carry such technology around in their pockets everyday in the form of an iPhone or any number of other mobiles. With a powerful enough antennae and wifi-boster, even the iPhone could be used for point-to-point communication with another iPhone. The point is, the technology is there, the capability is there, it takes very little effort for people to repurpose what you and I might consider a luxury, to be a positively disruptive technology.  In this case using mobile devices as peer-to-peer nodes that can be used for real-time messaging or time delayed delivery of bulk messages.

The New, Agile Short-Wave Radio

Of course, the real value in this technology is in the ability to allow the average African country citizen to bypass the media, to bypass the government and even in some cases, to bypass the carrier; to deliver messages to loved ones, humanitarian workers or peace-keepers. People have done this for decades with the aid of single-sided short band radio broadcast stations. The difference is now the broadcasting and the station itself is far more agile. It fits in your pocket, it's hard to even tell when messages are being distributed or received. You can use them with the command line, a touch screen GUI, a stylus or your voice. Mobile devices come all shapes and sizes, from all manufacturers. The one constant is the ability to use a variety of protocols to transmit and receive digital information...usually far beyond the reach of the people who would be inclined to suppress that communication.

Even when the message is being suppressed, with tools like Feedelix and FrontlineSMS, users can truly use devices as disruptive point-to-point communication independent of infrastructure entirely. Feedelix was born out of the need to spread unfiltered information when the Egyptian government began censoring all communication using the countries SMS gateways. To bypass these blocks, the creators took advantage of other capabilities of the phones. FrontlineSMS is software plus some hardware kit that literally turns any PC into an local SMS or MMS gateway. Barring interception or scrambling technologies (which are available), it's the perfect form of communication off the grid. In this case, the realtime web would allow people in the field or in other such 'hot zones' to communicate with a central base or controller easily.

In conclusion, the realtime web is the evolution of a number different technologies we've seen before: the short-wave radio, internet relay chat, the instant message and SMS/MMS. In the form of micro-blogging, we can contextualize these moments with immaculate detail using maps, video and other data available via the web.