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.

Ringtones are now part of the mainstream media market, and have been around in some form for nearly a decade. For many people, ringtones are a fad, and a nuisance, but they remain a significant part of modern life, that continues to have cultural and social relevance. So, what are the key trends shaping the future of ringtones and how can we expect them to evolve going forward?

The first key trend is towards do-it-yourself or D-I-Y. The ringtone market has a history of high prices being charged both for single items (a ringtone can cost $7 compared to $0.99 for a full track music download) and, more recently, and notoriously, subscription ringtone services frequently charge a weekly or monthly fee in return access to a certain number of downloads or “club”. However, with the advent of mp3 support in most mobile phone handsets, it is now possible for consumers to easily create their own ringtones, either by loading a full track onto their handset or creating a ringtone by editing an mp3 file using cheap and readily available software. Therefore, the high prices sustained in the past are unlikely to be tenable in the future and the price of ringtones is slowly falling towards zero.

However, music on mobile is moving beyond ringtones, as mobile becomes the default device for listening to music on the move. On any form of public transport you can now see people listening to their music collection on their mobile phone, in a similar way to using an ipod. Already, in Japan, more music is downloaded onto mobile phones than onto PCs. A part of this trend is the increasing tendency towards teenagers using mobile music as a form of identity, far beyond using a simple ringtone. A common site in many cities is for young people to play music out load from their mobile phone speaker as they walk along the street, or sit on the bus, as a kind of “call-sign” or “boom-box”.

Finally, as the traditional ringtone industry declines, a range of new innovations are emerging. For example, ringback tones are ringtones carried over the mobile phone network, which are heard by the caller instead of a normal dial tone. A company called Vringo is marketing a similar service which provides an application that allows users to send each other ringtones when they call, so a user calling another can decide what ringtone is heard at the other end. At the moment, it is uncertain whether these innovations will be successful or not.

So, at present, the future of ringtones is uncertain, they could continue to exist in the future, but sold and produced for virtually nothing, with the focus on creating and sharing. Or, alternatively, new innovations may continue to keep the market alive, just in another form such as full track music downloads or music clips to be played on the move.