Mainstream politics & cricket dominate SMS news alerts in Sri Lanka.
This infographic was made up from 320 SMS updates by a single news provider, covering the period of 23.10.2014 to 16.2.2015 and totalling around 5,228 words. Attribution to the service provider, at the end of each SMS, was stripped from the text that fed into the word cloud, so as to stop it appearing as one of the most used terms.
Given the Presidential Election in the time this content was monitoring, the heavy use of ‘election’, ‘Sirisena’, ‘Mahinda’, ‘Rajapaksa’ and ‘President’. The heavy use of ‘Rs’ embraces the updates around the interim budget.
‘ODI’ appears heavily in the word cloud, along with ‘New Zealand’ and ‘England’, reflecting the number of updates around cricket matches, cricket scores and other updates around Sri Lanka’s cricket team.
If it’s largely mainstream politics and cricket updates that thousands if not millions of mobile subscribers get as news over SMS, does it impact the way we perceive and engage with the myriad of other issues and processes central to governance and government? What is the interplay between SMS news and, especially for mobile consumers, news and information received over social media (Twitter and Facebook) on the same device? Given the draconian restrictions around reporting news over SMS imposed by the Rajapaksa regime, it was understandable why these alerts were so bland and unrepresentative of pressing national, regional and local issues.
Under the new political dispensation after 8th January, can subscribers expect a more diverse menu of news & information over SMS alerts, reflecting concerns, work, persons, processes and ideas wider and deeper than just mainstream politics and cricket?