Whoever figured that mobile phone / text-messages were always a "good thing" for 21st century political organizing might consider this...

According to an article in the New Zealand Herald,Syrian protesters who burned and looted the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus were encouraged to organise by the Syrian authorities, and received text messages from Islamic study centres urging them to gather.

"The sheikhs told us to send five text messages to every true Muslim we knew urging them to participate," said a student from the Abu Nour Islamic Institute in Damascus.

SMS is also being used as calls for boycotting Danish Products (oddly enough along side rantings about the dangers of bluetooth).

This should come as no surprise. The networking powers we produced have created a situation that requires a great deal of attention. As the networks create or expose voids in the systems of institutionalization, it is up to us to determine how, positively, the social networking of the smartmob or flash mob is to be used.

According to Manuel Castells

... social movements emerging from ...ecologists, feminists, religious fundamentalists, nationalists, and localists ...are the potential subjects of the Information Age. In what forms will they express themselves? ...[The] main agency detected in our journey across the lands inhabited by social movements, is a networking, decentered form of organizations and interventions, characteristic of the new social movements, mirroring, and counteracting, the networking logic of domination in the informational society. This is clearly the case in the environmentalist movement, built around national and international networks of decentralized activity. But I have also shown this to be the case among woman#039s movements, insurgents against the global order, and religious fundamentalist movements. These networks do more than organizing activity and sharing information. They are the actual producers, and distributers, of cultural codes. Not only over the Net, but in their multiple forms of exchange and interaction. Their impact on society rarely stems from a concerted strategy, masterminded by a center. Their most successful campaigns, their most striking initiatives, often result from turbulences in the interactive network of multilayered communication ...Because our historical vision has become so used to orderly battalions, colorful banners, and scripted proclamations of social change, we are at a loss when confronted with the subtle pervasiveness of incremental changes of symbols processed through multiform networks, away from the halls of power. It is in these back alleys of society, whether in alternative electronic networks or on grasrooted networks of communal resistance, that I have sensed the embryos of a new society...

Just goes to show that with great networking capabilities also comes great responsibility.

[thanks Jon]

also False SMS leads to burning of embassies in Damascus

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