Mobile for Good: Positive Ways That Smartphone Technology Has Changed the World
In the interest of complete disclosure, I must country that before training as a psychotherapist, I worked in the telecom enterprise. Initially, I held a communications role for Orange, a cellular network operator, and then for the GSMA, a change body that represents the hobbies of mobile operators global. It’s in my blood—my grandfather, Paddy Burke, worked on radio transmissions for the first transatlantic cable between Europe and america, which laid the foundations for high-velocity net communications.
The telecommunications roles I finished were extensively extra prosaic. In 2008, after I began running for Orange, the iPhone was brilliant and new and the destiny looked very vibrant for the mobile telecom industry. Some of the initiatives I worked on still inspire me. One instance is Orange’s start registration marketing campaign. In Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, delivery registration stands at less than 1/2 of all children born. To get right of entry to education or health care offerings in those international locations you want to have a delivery certificates, however because of loss of the necessary office work many are denied those fundamental offerings. The adventure to check in a delivery—up to two days’ travel—is simply now not viable for a number of human beings due to fee or an incapability to take break day from paintings or childcare. Orange labored with Uganda Telecom to layout a primary cellular app that could be used by nearby village chiefs to file births of their groups. It was an awesome success. In Uganda, delivery registrations within the pilot vicinity stood at 12 percentage earlier than launch of the app, but following its uptake, eighty percentage of births were being registered.
In Mozambique, cell is getting used within the fight towards HIV and AIDS. British nonprofit agency Absolute Return for Kids (ARK) incorporated cell messaging to remind patients enrolled in antiretroviral remedy approximately appointment dates and to take their medicinal drug. Mobile reminders made a giant effect on compliance quotes: ninety six percent of users were nonetheless heading in the right direction with their remedy after six months and 85 percent after three hundred and sixty five days, as compared to a country wide average of 72 percent.
It’s clear that telephone generation isn't always all terrible, a ways from it! It’s crucial to understand how phones can be used “smartly.” Harnessed properly, our telephones may be sellers of social trade, spreading awareness for critical causes that in any other case may not benefit traction and helping to carry collectively people who are geographically or socially separated. Our devices are not accountable for all society’s ills. We do have a desire in how we use them. In this bankruptcy, my aim is to bring a few balance to the smartphone debate and shed light on how a few human beings are harnessing mobile generation’s abilities to result in fantastic trade in their own and others’ lives.
Innovation
Many developing international locations have leapfrogged landline set up completely, adopting cellular on a large scale because of the exceedingly low associated infrastructure prices. Nearly -thirds of American households have landlines, even as best 2 percent of African families do. This has fueled innovation and entrepreneurship in developing nations, with many 1/3-world nations outstripping what we’ve completed in the West.
Take Kenya’s M-Pesa provider, as an example, which shall we customers switch money thru text message. M-Pesa launched in Kenya in 2007, with similar structures released via other telecom operators in Sub-Saharan Africa quickly after. According to the Pew Research Center,2 in 2014, 61 percent of Kenyans with mobile telephones said making or receiving bills on their mobile phones in the previous year, as did forty two percent of Ugandans and 39 percent of Tanzanians. Similar figures on mobile bills weren’t to be had for the United States that yr, but in step with Pew Research Center,3 simplest 35 percent of US cellular smartphone users were doing any form of cellular banking at that factor. The World Bank estimates that the wide variety of unbanked people dropped with the aid of 20 percentage between 2011 and 2014,four which is basically attributed to cellular banking. The implications of this are huge. When human beings have get admission to to simple banking services, it permits them to take micro loans, shop, get financing, and make investments for their destiny.
Raising Consciousness
Social media thru mobile offers the capability for now not-for-earnings campaigns to attain a formerly unimaginable worldwide target audience. One terrific instance of this is the #Take3fortheSea campaign, encouraging humans to take three portions of clutter away with them whenever they visit the seaside. How lengthy would some thing like that have taken to gain traction offline? It’s hard to assume every other manner this kind of simple, crucial message would had been disseminated so constantly on a global foundation.
Reflecting on my own non-public mobile use, I remembered one occasion (earlier than I started out scripting this book) waiting in line on the financial institution, once I became killing time through scrolling idly via my Facebook feed. Up popped a submit with the aid of a charity I observe, with an pressing appeal to raise money for a selected initiative they wished aid with. I had time to study it, and I felt moved. I clicked through and donated a small sum of money. The charity handed its goal in a completely short area of time that day, and I wondered what number of others had made their donation in a comparable way through their phones that day.
Reaching Out for Support
My work as a psychotherapist is changing too with the appearance of smartphone ubiquity. I every so often behavior periods through Skype, FaceTime, or WhatsApp video calls with customers who're operating distant places. While maintaining a consultation through the medium of a mobile or tablet display is without a doubt no longer similar to being in the equal room collectively, it enables preserve the momentum of the paintings.
There are honestly clear advantages to on line get admission to to simple counseling services. I used to volunteer as a befriender for Samaritans, a UK- and Ireland-primarily based charity offering emotional aid to those who are in distress or liable to suicide. Around 15 years ago, the employer began supplying textual content-primarily based befriending. There changed into massive resistance to it internally as many were cynical approximately what sort of “befriending” may be performed inside an SMS message of a one hundred sixty-individual maximum duration. However, this fundamental carrier decreased the access bar for individuals who wouldn’t have taken into consideration reaching out for help in any other case, in particular the ones below 18. Thus, Samaritans managed to attain another target group of vulnerable teenagers. In some instances, it changed into actually a lifesaver.
Online remedy seems to be growing in popularity, particularly inside the US and the UK. In the UK, the doctor app Babylon offers remedy to a hundred and fifty,000 lively users, while PlusGuidance, an online counseling service, has 10,000 users. Talkspace, a US-based on-line remedy platform, reviews it has 500,000 registered customers international, with maximum inside the US.
Bringing People Closer
The damaging effect of cell telephones on relationships is properly documented, and certainly it’s something that rears its head regularly in my paintings with couples, which I’ll deal with similarly in Chapter three. However, there are times in which cell telecommunications have served to provide a vital factor of contact among households, buddies, and partners who are separated geographically.
A specially poignant living proof pertains to a friend of mine. She and her associate met and dated in Singapore for a 12 months earlier than she moved returned to London for work. Over the subsequent -and-a-half of years they maintained their relationship long distance, most effective assembly every 3 to six months but seeing and speakme to every different every day via Skype. They even managed to have film dates collectively the usage of a cell app known as Let’s Gaze. This wasn’t a virtual dating. It become a relationship that had been evolved in actual lifestyles and honestly had a sturdy foundation with each of them sufficiently invested in it for it to bear numerous years living apart on distinct continents. However, I wonder whether or not without superior mobile technology it is able to have persisted so successfully?
Net Neutrality
It’s really worth remembering that during and of themselves, our phones are impartial gear. It’s what we do with them, what we download on them, and what we look for through them that has the ability to assist or restrict. As the Dalai Lama said, “Whether generation’s impact is good or horrific depends at the person.”
A few years lower back, the supermodel Natalia Vodianova have become frustrated with the futility and vacancy of the tradition of “liking” on social media. However, she additionally took stock of her very own strength to garner those very likes. Rather than get stuck in an area of bemoaning how vacuous social media is or how fickle human beings can be, Vodianova determined to harness her influencer energy for excellent.
In 2015, Vodianova, collectively with enterprise partner and cocreator Timon Afinsky, launched Elbi, an app that simplifies charitable donations for telephone users. Elbi makes a speciality of giving a platform to smaller charities that customers won't have heard of earlier than.
As Vodianova commented upon Elbi’s release: “On social media, it's been ingrained within us to ‘like’ posts, as shared with the aid of our community, as a shape of acknowledgment, attractiveness, and resonance. It’s the identical principle on Elbi. We encourage users to ‘love,’ that's stronger than ‘like,’ due to the fact with each faucet of the Love Button you are without problems and securely donating $1 in the direction of a meaningful cause.”five
Is your cell phone a assist or a hassle? The physical games that observe are designed to get you started with retaining music of ways precisely you’re spending some time on your device. Becoming aware about the most addictive but least useful apps or features is step one closer to converting your dating
with your device.
The telecommunications roles I finished were extensively extra prosaic. In 2008, after I began running for Orange, the iPhone was brilliant and new and the destiny looked very vibrant for the mobile telecom industry. Some of the initiatives I worked on still inspire me. One instance is Orange’s start registration marketing campaign. In Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, delivery registration stands at less than 1/2 of all children born. To get right of entry to education or health care offerings in those international locations you want to have a delivery certificates, however because of loss of the necessary office work many are denied those fundamental offerings. The adventure to check in a delivery—up to two days’ travel—is simply now not viable for a number of human beings due to fee or an incapability to take break day from paintings or childcare. Orange labored with Uganda Telecom to layout a primary cellular app that could be used by nearby village chiefs to file births of their groups. It was an awesome success. In Uganda, delivery registrations within the pilot vicinity stood at 12 percentage earlier than launch of the app, but following its uptake, eighty percentage of births were being registered.
In Mozambique, cell is getting used within the fight towards HIV and AIDS. British nonprofit agency Absolute Return for Kids (ARK) incorporated cell messaging to remind patients enrolled in antiretroviral remedy approximately appointment dates and to take their medicinal drug. Mobile reminders made a giant effect on compliance quotes: ninety six percent of users were nonetheless heading in the right direction with their remedy after six months and 85 percent after three hundred and sixty five days, as compared to a country wide average of 72 percent.
It’s clear that telephone generation isn't always all terrible, a ways from it! It’s crucial to understand how phones can be used “smartly.” Harnessed properly, our telephones may be sellers of social trade, spreading awareness for critical causes that in any other case may not benefit traction and helping to carry collectively people who are geographically or socially separated. Our devices are not accountable for all society’s ills. We do have a desire in how we use them. In this bankruptcy, my aim is to bring a few balance to the smartphone debate and shed light on how a few human beings are harnessing mobile generation’s abilities to result in fantastic trade in their own and others’ lives.
Innovation
Many developing international locations have leapfrogged landline set up completely, adopting cellular on a large scale because of the exceedingly low associated infrastructure prices. Nearly -thirds of American households have landlines, even as best 2 percent of African families do. This has fueled innovation and entrepreneurship in developing nations, with many 1/3-world nations outstripping what we’ve completed in the West.
Take Kenya’s M-Pesa provider, as an example, which shall we customers switch money thru text message. M-Pesa launched in Kenya in 2007, with similar structures released via other telecom operators in Sub-Saharan Africa quickly after. According to the Pew Research Center,2 in 2014, 61 percent of Kenyans with mobile telephones said making or receiving bills on their mobile phones in the previous year, as did forty two percent of Ugandans and 39 percent of Tanzanians. Similar figures on mobile bills weren’t to be had for the United States that yr, but in step with Pew Research Center,3 simplest 35 percent of US cellular smartphone users were doing any form of cellular banking at that factor. The World Bank estimates that the wide variety of unbanked people dropped with the aid of 20 percentage between 2011 and 2014,four which is basically attributed to cellular banking. The implications of this are huge. When human beings have get admission to to simple banking services, it permits them to take micro loans, shop, get financing, and make investments for their destiny.
Raising Consciousness
Social media thru mobile offers the capability for now not-for-earnings campaigns to attain a formerly unimaginable worldwide target audience. One terrific instance of this is the #Take3fortheSea campaign, encouraging humans to take three portions of clutter away with them whenever they visit the seaside. How lengthy would some thing like that have taken to gain traction offline? It’s hard to assume every other manner this kind of simple, crucial message would had been disseminated so constantly on a global foundation.
Reflecting on my own non-public mobile use, I remembered one occasion (earlier than I started out scripting this book) waiting in line on the financial institution, once I became killing time through scrolling idly via my Facebook feed. Up popped a submit with the aid of a charity I observe, with an pressing appeal to raise money for a selected initiative they wished aid with. I had time to study it, and I felt moved. I clicked through and donated a small sum of money. The charity handed its goal in a completely short area of time that day, and I wondered what number of others had made their donation in a comparable way through their phones that day.
Reaching Out for Support
My work as a psychotherapist is changing too with the appearance of smartphone ubiquity. I every so often behavior periods through Skype, FaceTime, or WhatsApp video calls with customers who're operating distant places. While maintaining a consultation through the medium of a mobile or tablet display is without a doubt no longer similar to being in the equal room collectively, it enables preserve the momentum of the paintings.
There are honestly clear advantages to on line get admission to to simple counseling services. I used to volunteer as a befriender for Samaritans, a UK- and Ireland-primarily based charity offering emotional aid to those who are in distress or liable to suicide. Around 15 years ago, the employer began supplying textual content-primarily based befriending. There changed into massive resistance to it internally as many were cynical approximately what sort of “befriending” may be performed inside an SMS message of a one hundred sixty-individual maximum duration. However, this fundamental carrier decreased the access bar for individuals who wouldn’t have taken into consideration reaching out for help in any other case, in particular the ones below 18. Thus, Samaritans managed to attain another target group of vulnerable teenagers. In some instances, it changed into actually a lifesaver.
Online remedy seems to be growing in popularity, particularly inside the US and the UK. In the UK, the doctor app Babylon offers remedy to a hundred and fifty,000 lively users, while PlusGuidance, an online counseling service, has 10,000 users. Talkspace, a US-based on-line remedy platform, reviews it has 500,000 registered customers international, with maximum inside the US.
Bringing People Closer
The damaging effect of cell telephones on relationships is properly documented, and certainly it’s something that rears its head regularly in my paintings with couples, which I’ll deal with similarly in Chapter three. However, there are times in which cell telecommunications have served to provide a vital factor of contact among households, buddies, and partners who are separated geographically.
A specially poignant living proof pertains to a friend of mine. She and her associate met and dated in Singapore for a 12 months earlier than she moved returned to London for work. Over the subsequent -and-a-half of years they maintained their relationship long distance, most effective assembly every 3 to six months but seeing and speakme to every different every day via Skype. They even managed to have film dates collectively the usage of a cell app known as Let’s Gaze. This wasn’t a virtual dating. It become a relationship that had been evolved in actual lifestyles and honestly had a sturdy foundation with each of them sufficiently invested in it for it to bear numerous years living apart on distinct continents. However, I wonder whether or not without superior mobile technology it is able to have persisted so successfully?
Net Neutrality
It’s really worth remembering that during and of themselves, our phones are impartial gear. It’s what we do with them, what we download on them, and what we look for through them that has the ability to assist or restrict. As the Dalai Lama said, “Whether generation’s impact is good or horrific depends at the person.”
A few years lower back, the supermodel Natalia Vodianova have become frustrated with the futility and vacancy of the tradition of “liking” on social media. However, she additionally took stock of her very own strength to garner those very likes. Rather than get stuck in an area of bemoaning how vacuous social media is or how fickle human beings can be, Vodianova determined to harness her influencer energy for excellent.
In 2015, Vodianova, collectively with enterprise partner and cocreator Timon Afinsky, launched Elbi, an app that simplifies charitable donations for telephone users. Elbi makes a speciality of giving a platform to smaller charities that customers won't have heard of earlier than.
As Vodianova commented upon Elbi’s release: “On social media, it's been ingrained within us to ‘like’ posts, as shared with the aid of our community, as a shape of acknowledgment, attractiveness, and resonance. It’s the identical principle on Elbi. We encourage users to ‘love,’ that's stronger than ‘like,’ due to the fact with each faucet of the Love Button you are without problems and securely donating $1 in the direction of a meaningful cause.”five
Is your cell phone a assist or a hassle? The physical games that observe are designed to get you started with retaining music of ways precisely you’re spending some time on your device. Becoming aware about the most addictive but least useful apps or features is step one closer to converting your dating
with your device.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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