BROOKE GLADSTONE: Earlier this month, as the SARS epidemic began to spread, a teenager in Hong Kong nearly succeeded in creating mass hysteria when he started a rumor via the internet that the city was about to be declared an "infected place." The Hong Kong government effectively countered his prank by sending literally millions of calming and corrective announcements via cell phone test messages. Thus was a panic, created by misuse of high tech communications technology, defused by an even higher-tech solution. And last week a private company has announced a new service in which subscribers can use their short message systems or SMS-enabled cell phones to identify "contaminated buildings" in their neighborhoods. Text messaging is an increasingly important communications medium in the Far East. Recently in Wired News, Xeni Jardin wrote how coping with SARS has pushed it even further. She says that the government scheme of mass test messaging was well received.

XENI JARDIN: The reaction was one of relief. Certainly when news that the entire city is going to be quarantined, when, when a message of that magnitude hit, people react in all kinds of strange and frightening ways, and I understand that there were, you know, runs on rice, on water, on batteries, on gasoline. And so the immediate effect was a calming one, which is indeed what the government intended to happen.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:It's a remarkable thing that Hong Kong would use cell phones to counter this rumor. We're not used to the idea of a telephone as a medium of mass communications in this country.

XENI JARDIN: I don't know if it's really proper for us to think of us as mass communication. It's not one to everyone -- it's almost like a new form of do-it-yourself media -- if you sort of think of how web logs are being used to spread information which is not official information and is not penned by journalists necessarily -- but yes, also it's been used as effectively as any conventional broadcast medium -- by governments -- to broadcast information to the populace.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:There's a certain "big brother" aspect to all of this which I find a little disconcerting. The government can reach you by cell phone. The government knows where you are. The government knows your number and it could probably even track your location. It's that aspect of the cell phone that has me a little worried.

XENI JARDIN: And I think there's good cause to be worried. In speaking with mobile technology users in Hong Kong and in Singapore and in other cities, there is a growing awareness and set of questions that people have about how the rise of cellular technology and location-based mobile technology will change one's sense of privacy. Along with that, though, there's a growing awareness that that same technology can be used by individuals to share information with each other in sort of a timely and personal and immediately relevant way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So now we've read a, a private company has announced a new scheme whereby subscribers can use their cell phones to identify "contaminated buildings." How will that work?

XENI JARDIN: Sunday Communications launched this service last week. The service allows subscribers who have SMS-enabled phones to basically dial into Hong Kong Department of Health data, and the story is how the Hong Kong Department of Health began releasing that data is also an interesting one. There was a web site launched by some concerned citizens in Hong Kong called sosick.org and from the message that they left on their web site, apparently they were so frustrated by the fact that the Hong Kong government wasn't releasing statistics in a timely and thorough manner that they began doing it themselves.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is sort of a collective blog, SoSick, right?

XENI JARDIN:It - yeah, it was like a SARS collective data blog, and they shut down the blog when the Hong Kong Department of Health began releasing official statistics on its own web site on a daily basis. They left a message on the web site saying that they had essentially achieved their goal and that there was no longer a need for them to be providing that service on their own.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is there any precedent for the kind of mass communication use of the cell phone that we saw Hong Kong use?

XENI JARDIN:I haven't seen anything like it before, but I don't think it's going to be the last time that we see that. Because judging from anecdotal testimonies I heard from Hong Kong residents, it was a very effective use of the technology.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay! Thanks a lot!

XENI JARDIN: Well thank you, Brooke!

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Xeni Jardin writes about technology and culture. We'll link to her wired news story -Test Messaging Feeds SARS Rumors - at onthemedia.org. [MUSIC]