News.com article mentions riot tones

Yesterday i met up with John Borland from cnet to talk about activist ringtones. Lo and behold today there is an article about activist ringtones. John does a pretty good job talking about the potential of political ringtones. He sidesteps the evils of the ringtone industry, but i can see why as that draws in a lot more elements which didn’t fit.

He talked about my side project i’ve been putting a little time in here and there, Riot Tones – Ringtones for the Revolution. Unfortunately the project is just a project at this point. It’s not done. I got the idea when a few activist i know asked me, how would i make a ringtone. They wanted ringtones to share in Europe around protest chants. Then somebody was talking about how they should be mixed over the sound track of the infernal noise brigade. It seemed like a good idea, but my interest faded after i managed to trackdown a bella ciao ring tone.

Then Tonyo and the other crazy kids at txt power created a few ring tones about corruption in the philipine government, to host it our friends at qc indymedia hosted the tones. They made political ringtones which took off. The ringtones helped make a decentralized continous protest, a space for social protest which is as much culture jamming than blocking streets.

Hopefully riot tones will be able to make tools for ringtones to be a very small contribution to other political campaigns. It’s not a replacement for organizing, but it’s a tool like stickers, fliers, and protests.

Riot tones is a personal project, under a gpl license, but it’s related to the kind of thing we’ve been thinking about at odeo with casual content creation ev blogged about recently. Media should be a tool of people, participants in society, not something a few professionals produce and the majority of the people just consume.