A Mexican wolf’s eerie howl does double duty as a ringtone and a reminder of habitat destruction. Barack Obama’s campaign offers text message updates, wallpaper, and ringtones with sound bites like “What I do oppose is a dumb war” over a hip-hop beat. A local community support group has turned volunteers with an hour or two between tasks into a network of translators.

Often seen as a platform for socializing or time-wasting novelties, cellphones also present a unique opportunity for social good. Portable and personal, the gadgets provide a discreet channel for people to receive information and a broadcast platform to rally like-minded activists around shared interests.

In other parts of the world where landlines and broadband connections may be scarce, cellphones have been used in election monitoring; to bring banking and economic development to poor, rural areas; or to remind HIV patients to take medication. Now in the United States, cellphones are beginning to catch on as an agent of change, too.

Text message use in the United States has steadily increased, from 65 million people who sent or received messages in January 2006 to 108 million this past January, according to M:Metrics. At the same time, “people are inundated with e-mail . . . they have e-mail coming out of their ears at home, at work, you name it,” said Katrin Verclas, cofounder of MobileActive.org, a network for organizations focused on using cellphones for social impact. “The phone is still a medium where you can reach people, and if you have a relationship with an organization or really care about an issue,” people are willing to get that information on their handsets.

Cellphone activism runs a wide gamut. It offers people the luxury of getting information they can act on immediately, without returning to their home computers.

For instance, a person browsing a store’s electronics or apparel aisles who is interested in finding out about a company’s environmental practices can text “cc” and the company’s name to 30644 to get Climate Counts’ report about the company. A diner browsing a menu for the most sustainable seafood selection can text the word “fish” and the name of a particular species to the same number to get information from the Blue Ocean Institute. A diner considering monkfish would get a reply indicating there are “some environmental concerns” and that catfish, rainbow trout, or tilapia may be a friendlier option.

It also provides a private channel that may be a good medium to connect with people about sensitive issues.

SexInfo, for instance, a text-messaging information line launched in San Francisco, is an effort to reach teens who may have pressing questions about topics they feel they cannot talk about.

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