With the new year on the horizon and my Master of Environmental Studies wrapping up it's time to set goals and to focus on laying down the foundation for my future. I feel like I'm at a crossroads in my career with interests flying in a million directions: mobile phones, social media, youth, social change, HIV/AIDS, health prevention, the list goes on. I feel like my identity is split into different areas which require different vocabularies that never meet.

When I think of what a thesis is I often imagine it as taking two strands of thought that usually never touch and combining them to examine an issue in a new light. For me my thesis work does that through examining the ways that youth activists are using mobile technology for social change. I'm in the midst of gathering data in eight different languages on how you the TakingITGlobal users are creating new innovative ways to use mobile phones, whether it's through text message crisis reporting or for facilitating communication for an environmental youth group. Already the data is showing trends, the most interesting being what issues the youth were interested in according to country. While Human Rights issues are popular among Latin American youth, European youth are very concerned about the environment. It will be interesting to aggregate all of the data into one document and run statistical tests and potentially look at the data private v.s. public. What effect will private v.s. public have on the connectivity and needs of the users around the globe?

In the Economist recently they slammed Ethiopia for having a public phone system claiming that it's stiffing growth. The opposite is true in Costa Rica where their system which is on the brink of being privatized has provided high connectivity rates when compared to the other countries in Central America with one of the lowest price baskets. Only the next few months of analysis will tell and the results should shed light globally on the current popular practices of youth activists. The results should serve as telecommunications policy recommendations for governments across the globe. There are countless examples of mobile phones adding to development across the globe and policies that stifle this like censorship, high price baskets, will be forced to open up free speech.

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Automatically translated into German thanks to WorldLingo

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