By now, the general contours of East Africa’s communication boom are well-known: how in just a few years millions of people, rich and poor, rural and urban, have embraced cheap cell phone technology in ways that have revolutionized the region’s economy from the ground up.

It certainly seems a feel-good success story in the best “And they said it would never happen!” vein.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of East Africans live without electricity, cell phones have become firmly enmeshed in the fabric of Tanzanian, Kenyan, and Ugandan society (thanks in part, as the New York Timesreported, to the ingenious use of mobile car-battery charging stations).

Much of the commentary on the cell phone boom has focused on the economic benefits of the phones.  And so we hear in sources ranging from USA Today to theNew York Times to CNN about the phone’s impact on East African’s economic lives: about the fisherman who now can get weather reports every morning before heading out to sea, about the farmer who can check market prices on the way to town, about the shopkeeper now able to expand his delivery base beyond his immediate neighborhood.

All of this is newsworthy and, of course, true.  The degree to which cell phones have transformed how business is conducted in East Africa cannot be overemphasized.  I spent the past summer in Tanzania and continually marveled at the cell phone’s reach there.

I saw the phones used in every environment -- even in the Uluguru mountains of central Tanzania, where farmers wage a daily fight against gravity and creeping vegetation to eke out a living on steeply terraced patches of earth.  There, partners at the base of the mountains would text information to the farmers so that they could greet hiking travelers with baskets of fresh berries to sell.

But now that cell phones have become entrenched in East African society, it’s possible to examine some of the device’s more subtle cultural and social effects.  Cell phones are more than just business tools; they’re vehicles for communication of all kinds, between husbands and wives, teachers and students, leaders and citizens.

It’s easy to forget that the kind of instantaneous connection cell phones provide was very recently unavailable for all but the richest of the region’s citizens.  Before cell phones, East Africans had to (or, rather, learned not to) rely on costly, intermittently functioning government-run landline phone systems.

“Because they were controlled by the government, [landline phones] were beleaguered by all the problems of the bureaucracy.  Because of that the landline never entered the culture.  People didn’t learn to depend on it because it was never reliable,” said Mahiri Mwita, a lecturer at Princeton in Comparative Literature who also runs a grassroots HIV education group in his native Kenya.

Hiring a human messenger was until very recently the only reliable method of long-distance communication for the average citizen, Mwita said.

But now that private companies have moved in with cheap phones and calling plans – as I found out this summer, text messages cost the equivalent of pennies and short calls are often only slightly more expensive – people can communicate at an unprecedented speed.

This advance has made a significant change in the relationship between urban and rural regions, one of the major dichotomies in contemporary African society.

City-dwellers, Mwita said, often work to support relatives who stayed behind in rural villages.  In the days before cell phones, he explained, delivering this support was often a significant burden: “If you are the person whose money everyone depends on in the village, and you have no way of communicating with them, then it means every month you have to travel home and share your salary.”

“But with the cell phone, now you don’t have to do that – you can communicate, you can arrange for someone to be taken to the hospital, you can pay school fees wherever you are,” Mwita said.

New technology that allows for money transfer over the cell phone network has further connected cities and villages, he added.

Cell phones may also have impacted how class is viewed in many parts of the region.

“Parents are able to call headmasters in big schools and ask them how their kids are doing,” Mwita said.  “Especially in a society where status is very important, a headmaster is a very senior person, you usually have to make an appointment and go to the school and wait there the whole day.”

“The cell phone is bridging all that… Anybody is able to call anybody, regardless of their class, and the they’ll pick up the phone.”

Even politicians have gotten in on the act.  In Kenya’s 2007 presidential election, Mwita said, voters often received text messages from politicians – “This is Raila Odinga, I am asking for your vote,” for example.

That election revealed both the promise and the perils of the communication revolution.  On one hand, instant dissemination of region-by-region election results made the process more accessible than ever before, Mwita said.  But as some Kenyans began to fear foul play, text-messages allowed for quick disseminations of rumors – and worse.

“A lot of what they call hate messages were transmitted through the cell phone.  Tribal groups were able to mobilize a lot through the cell phone,” said Mwita, who was in Kenya during the election crisis, which soon turned violent and led to the deaths of hundreds of citizens.

At one point, he said, the Kenyan government even considered shutting down the text-message system to restore calm.

The Kenyan example is just one illustration of how a simple technological device has led to profound changes in East African society.  For better and for worse, people now get closer and ideas move faster.

As East Africa prepares for even more technological change – according to Time Magazine, the East African Submarine Cable System is set to deliver high-speed internet to the region in 2009 – one might expect further social restructuring.  It’s the responsibility of scholars, then, to investigate what’s truly changed in a region hurtling forward at the speed of sound.