If Gordon Brown is serious about inheriting Number 10, he should forget soft-focus makeovers and hobnobbing with pop stars. Instead, he need simply update his mobile’s ringtone. The ringtone, a high-decibel statement of peer-group conformity, has become the latest medium for delivering political messages. If you want to proclaim your party credentials or signal a note of protest, a home-mixed sound clip will do it in the time it takes you to answer the phone.

The trend emerged in the Philippines last summer among opponents of the less-than-popular president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Last June, an unauthorised tape recording emerged of her apparent phone conversation a year earlier with Virgilio Garcillano, a commissioner in the 2004 national elections. "Hello Garci?" Arroyo supposedly says. "So, will I still lead by more than one [million votes]?" The suggestion that the election had been fixed prompted a political crisis and a failed attempt to impeach the president. Her government banned the media from broadcasting the tape, but the incriminating few seconds found their way on to activist websites, from where they were downloaded more than a million times as ringtones.



Soon dozens of creative versions of "Hello Garci?" began appearing on local protest sites such as TXTPower.org, often mashed up with suitably piquant song clips such as Billy Joel’s Honesty. A recording of Arroyo apologising also quickly turned into ringtones, one version juxtaposed with Tracy Chapman singing: "Sorry – is all that you can’t say…" Though her opponents failed to remove her from office, the anti-Arroyo ringtones highlight popular contempt.

Then the idea went global, helped by an activists’ convention in Toronto last September called MobileActive. Mobile phones, the conference declared, were "a campaign-organising tool across traditional socioeconomic and cultural boundaries", and protest ringtones could now serve the cause just as effectively as SMS mobilisation campaigns. Delegates even issued a formal "Toronto Declaration" written to fit within the 160-character limit of standard texts: "Mobile phones serve Communication. Communication serves Humanity. Humanity serves Humanity. Mobile phones: tech4people changing the world."

Lately, the Bush administration has become a target for the ringtone protesters. Washington DC-based web developer Eric Gundersen has mixed President Bush’s praise for his federal emergency chief Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina – "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job" – with Arlo Guthrie’s City of New Orleans. Other hot downloads set Bush’s views on prewar Iraq intelligence to Billy Bragg, and new headlines about Tom DeLay, the disgraced Congressman, to Bad Boys.

With sites like Riot Tones ("Ringtones for the revolution", at riot.tones.protest.net), it will become easier to create and upload your own ringtones. Readers may wish to join me in suggesting combinations of our own. We could mix the Prime Minister’s prewar warnings about Iraq with You Spin Me Round by Dead of Alive, for instance. Or President Ahmadinejad’s posturing on Iran’s "peaceful" nuclear activities with the Sugababes’ Push the Button. Unless you have better ideas?

david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk

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