Sixty percent of Pacific islanders have access to a mobile phone. Almost a million are Facebook users.
As mobile phone use sweeps through the Pacific it is bringing a revolution of change in its wake.
“In PNG in April social media brought together thousands of people for a political protest. Islanders have become more literate, more familiar with market prices and their social worlds have expanded,” says John Connell who is professor of geography in the school of geosciences at the University of Sydney.
Connell says the Pacific is changing dramatically. To our north Bougainville will have a referendum in a couple of years to determine if it will choose independence from PNG; New Caledonia will contemplate a similar question on independence from France.
“The reason my geological colleagues were investigating the seabed was because it is so poorly explored. Mars and the moon are better known,” Connell says.
But, he adds “The human landscape, too, is suffering the same fate. We simply know too little – and perhaps care too little – about this ever-changing and diverse region at our doorsteps.”
Sadly, the few news stories in recent months have almost exclusively focused on the latter-day ”Pacific solution” utilising Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru.
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