New Paper by Tim Chambers: "Mobile Media In 2012: The Mobile Revolution, Revisited"

For many years now the team at NDN/NPI has been making an argument that a new politics was emerging in the United States and around the world.  We've argued that this new politics was being driven by three big changes - rapid advances in media and technology, profound changes in demography, and a new global governing agenda driven by the extraordinary changes brought about by early 21st century globalization. We predicted that, taken together, these developments would bring about a 21st century politics vastly different from that which we witnessed in the 20th century. The events of recent years - Barack Obama's people-driven campaign in 2008; the Iranian Uprising in 2009; the visionary speech by Secretary Clinton in 2010 on the "freedom to connect;" and of course the Arab Spring which began in 2011 and continues today. All of these events, along with recent waves of protest in Putin's Russia all suggest that true change is in the air, something new is afoot throughout the world, an old era is ending and a new one, full of possibility, is being born.

Of all the papers, events, thinkers and articles on this subject, few have been as influential to us in assembling this vision as Tim Chamber's path-breaking paper on the coming age of mobile. When he wrote this paper for us back in 2006,  it opened our eyes, powerfully, to how this nascent internet age, characterized at that time by the Dean campaign and the rise of progressive bloggers here in the US, was about to give way to something much more ubiquitous and powerful - the age of mobile.   Much of what Tim anticipated then has come to pass and we're proud that NDN/NPI has been one of the first and most consistent voices on the significance of this technology. The world is being altered by mobile in the ways we foresaw, but also in powerful ways we have not yet fully digested due to the rapid pace of evolution - think iPads and iPhones, the App revolution, Facebook and Twitter.   Because of mobile we are on the verge of reaching what we think will be a tipping point in human history - a moment, when incredibly, everyone will be connected.  Every one.  The impact of all this transformation is only just now being understood while at the same time its effects are accelerating and intensifying. 

So to help us make sense of all this we asked Tim to update his influential early work with a new look at this remarkable age of mobile.  What follows in this paper is his take and where things stand today and where they may be headed.  But as he and I discussed in reviewing the paper in its final edits, this paper is at best a sketch, a suggestion, an informed and very temporal take - for the velocity of change this new age of mobile brings will only deepen as bandwidth and access increases, more people arrive on the network, and the great spirit of human kind finds new and more creative and powerful ways to use this global information network for its own ends - and where that takes us is truly one of the great questions, and great opportunities, of this exciting moment in history.  

On March 7th we hosted an event here at NDN with Suzanne Hall and Reed Hundt to help us release Tim's exciting new paper "The Mobile Revolution: Revisited." Full video of the event is available online here and the paper is available for download at the bottom of this page. Tim's thorough and insightful paper concludes with a series of concrete best-practices that will be essential for businesses, organizations, political activists, and everyone seeking to remain relevant in the years ahead.