Joey works in a country where revolution and technology go hand in hand.

The ability to send short text messages on cell phones helped spawn a political revolution in the Philippines. President Estrada was on trial facing charges of bribery, corruption and breach of the public trust. Despite mounting evidence against him, the President was let off the hook.

That sparked it. I mean, people saw it on television, and a lot of people were revolted, they started text messaging each other, sending each other messages over the Internet, and that thing created a combustion, explains Ramon Isberto, a vice-president at Smart Telecom in the Philippines.

Because of texting and e-mail, within two hours over 200,000 people converged in the main street of Manila demanding that the president resign. The vigil lasted for four days and four nights, until President Estrada finally got the message and resigned.

Alex Magno, a professor of sociology in Manila, explains the relationship between communications technologies and revolution: In the last two decades or so, most of the political upheavals had some distinct link to communications technology. Iran, the Iranian Revolution, was closely linked to the audio cassette. The first EDSA uprising in the Philippines was very closely linked to the photocopying machine and so we called it the 'Xerox Revolution'. Tiananmen, the uprising that failed, was called the 'Fax Revolution', because the rest of the world was better informed than the rest of the neighbourhood because of the fax machine. The January uprising here in the Philippines represents a convergence between electronic mail and text messaging. And that gave that uprising its specific characteristics.