What is Mobile Phone (Cell Phone)

This article gives a general overview of the roles of mobile phone in initiating and mobilizing social protests. It is argued that text messaging had been used to mobilize civil engagement and protests ever before the prevalence of modern social media. Drawing from different social and political contexts, this article also shows that text messaging has been used by protesters alongside Twitter and Facebook to achieve significant political change. It further chronicles major research literature in political protests and social media studies. The article proposes further research directions on how true it is that texting and social media do indeed achieve realistic political change, giving different sociopolitical contexts and unique situations of protesters. It examines the argument against cyber utopianism that contends that the assumed emancipatory roles of social media and text messaging can be misleading.