The Berkman Center's Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich have put together a new 10-page report on how digital technology -- blogs, wikis, cell phones, text messages, Google Maps mashups and so forth -- impacted Kenya's post-presidential vote period. Called "Digitally Networked Technology in Kenya's 2007-2008 Post-Election Crisis," it's a much needed dose of skepticism about the assumption that the only possible future connective technologies can deliver us to is one of prosperity and peace:

On January 1, 2008, Kenyans started to receive frightening text message that urged readers to express their frustrations with the election outcome by attacking other ethnic groups. One such message reads, "Fellow Kenyans, the Kikuyu's have stolen our children's future...we must deal with them in a way they understand...violence."

The devil's in the details, though. The obvious parallel to the hateful text messages that circulated during the early days of the violence in Kenya was how talk radio fanned the flames during the Rwandan genocide. But, the authors note, there's a difference: while radio is more or less pure broadcast technology, texting can be "multidirectional." Perhaps there's hopefulness in the idea that we're learning to quit investing in technologies that only let us talk and not talk back. (On that point -- The estimate for the number of cell phone subscribers in all of Africa was something like 250 million last year, out of a population of some 900 million.)