Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)

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Abstract

Arguments about digital technology, civic engagement, and collective action are often framed in the context of political participation in developed nations, particularly, the United States. Many have concluded that the availability of digital technologies and new media platforms facilitates democratic practices and participatory behavior. Whether this is equally true of the developing world remains to be critically examined.

Pakistan is a developing nation where digitally networked technologies and new media platforms are emerging, and where a struggle to establish democratic norms amidst authoritarian superstructures is underway. Between March 2007 and February 2008, a period referred to colloquially as the ‘Pakistan Emergency,’ a state of emergency was imposed, the constitution suspended, a popular politician assassinated, media censorship enforced, and general elections conducted.

To help address the knowledge gap about new media and democracy in the developing world, this research paper examines how digital technologies--such as cellphones and live internet streams--and new media platforms--including blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook--were used to promote democracy, coordinate action, and disseminate citizen journalism during the ‘Pakistan Emergency.’

This research finds that the Pakistani media landscape is multifaceted, comprising a combined--or alternating--use of different mainstream media sources, digital technologies, and new media platforms, depending on availability and security. Moreover, the study finds that the participation gap--the ability to meaningfully use digital technologies and new media--impacts participatory behavior and civic action far more than the digital divide, which is often overcome through the combined use of different technologies. The study also concludes that new media platforms are increasingly effective as tools for community organizing and information dissemination, that authoritarian regimes are quick to adapt digitally networked technologies to their own ends, and that news reporting in Pakistan is gravitating towards a hybrid model whereby old and new media platforms collaborate to keep the public informed.<!--break-->

About the MIT Center for Future Civic Media

The Center for Future Civic Media (http://civic.mit.edu) supports research at MIT to innovate civic media tools and practices and test them in communities. Bridging two established programs at MIT--one known for inventing alternate technical futures, the other for identifying the cultural and social potential of media change--the Center for Future Civic Media is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. It is made possible by a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation.

About the author

Huma Yusuf holds a master’s degree from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. She was a research associate at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media during the 2007-2008 academic year. Her academic research at MIT examined how new media platforms and mediated practices help shape urban identity and negotiate street violence. As a print and online journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan, she reports on Pakistani politics, media trends, development, and violence against women. She is the recipient of the European Commission’s 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism and the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation 2005 Gender in Journalism Award.

Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Media vacuum: Blocking independent television in Pakistan
3. Disconnected: Jamming cellular networks
4. Student activism/digital activism
5. Citizen journalism: Redefining media and power
6. New media and citizenship
7. Civilians with camera phones
8. Pakistani vs. Western new media use
Appendix A: Timeline of events
Appendix B: Pakistani blogs
Footnotes

1. Introduction

On March 13, 2007, a few days after Pakistan’s president General Pervez Musharraf suspended the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, an online petition condemning the government’s abuse of the independent judiciary was circulated via mailing lists and blogs.[1] But over the course of several weeks, the petition only attracted 1,190 signatories. Less than a year later, in February 2008, Dawn, the country’s leading English-language media group, launched a citizen journalism initiative, inviting Pakistanis to submit images, ideas, news reports, and analyses that they wanted to share with the world.

In a matter of months, the Pakistani media landscape evolved from a point where a politically relevant online petition failed to gain momentum to one where a prominent mass media group felt the need to include citizen journalists in the process of news gathering. This paper aims to explain why this evolution occurred, how it was facilitated by both old and new media, and what impact it had on the political process and civic engagement.

To that end, the paper describes how certain communities--for example, university students--came to use digital technologies and new media platforms to organize for political action and report on matters of public interest. In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler advances the concept of a networked public sphere. With reference to the internet and online tools, he argues that the networked information economy produces a public sphere because "the cost of being a speaker … is several orders of magnitude lower than the cost of speaking in the mass-mediated environment."[2] He adds, "the easy possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners to potential speakers and participants in a conversation." In Benkler’s words, then, this paper shows how some Pakistanis became "speakers and participants" in the political process. Enabled to create a networked public sphere, they began in the spring of 2007 to participate, reciprocate, and engage in many-to-many rather than one-to-many communications.

Interestingly, a networked public sphere emerged during a time of heightened political instability that has been colloquially termed the ‘Pakistan Emergency’ (March 2007-February 2008).[3] Digital technologies that were harnessed during this time for political advocacy, community organizing, and hyperlocal reporting include cellphones, camera phones (mobile-connected cameras), SMS text messages, online mailing lists, and internet broadcasts (live audio and visual streams). Meanwhile, popular new media platforms utilized during the Pakistan Emergency include blogs (live blogging), YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and other social networking or sociable media sites.[4]

Writing about mass-mediated markets that are slowly inundated with new media tools, Benkler points out that a transition occurs "as the capabilities of both systems converge, to widespread availability of the ability to register and communicate observations in text, audio, and video, wherever we are and whenever we wish."[5] During the Pakistan Emergency, a similar convergence of old--that is, traditional broadcast--and new media occurred. In a time of turmoil and censorship, Pakistanis were driven by a desire to access information and thus turned to multiple media sources when the mainstream media was compromised. One could say the media landscape became hydra-headed during the Pakistan Emergency: if one source was blocked or banned, another one was appropriated to get the word out. For example, when the government banned news channels during the November 2007 state of emergency, private television channels uploaded news clips to YouTube and live streamed their content over the internet, thus motivating Pakistanis to go online. In this context, the mainstream media showed the ability to be as flexible, diffuse, and collaborative as new media platforms.

A combined use of digital technologies and new media tools also helped bridge the digital divide in a country where only 17 million people have internet access and the literacy rate is less than 50 percent. In "Democracy and New Media in Developing Nations: Opportunities and Challenges", Adam Clayton Powell describes how the internet can help open up developing democracies:

Many argue that in much of the world, the Internet reaches only elites: government officials and business leaders, university professors and students, the wealthy and the influential. But through Net-connected elites information from the Internet reaches radio listeners and newspaper readers around the world, so the Internet has an important secondary readership, those who hear or are influenced by online information via its shaping of more widely distributed media, outside of traditional, controlled media lanes of the past.[6]

No doubt, traditional broadcast media relay information from the internet to the Pakistani public. But the national "secondary readership" was established in a far more dynamic and participatory way during the Pakistan Emergency thanks to the prevalence of cellphones and the popularity of SMS text messaging. Indeed, this paper shows how citizen reporting and calls for organized political action were distributed through a combination of mailing lists, online forums, and SMS text messages. Emails forwarded to net-connected elites containing calls for civic action against an increasingly authoritarian regime inevitably included synopses that were copied as SMS text messages and circulated well beyond cyberspace. This two-tiered use of media helped inculcate a culture of citizenship in Pakistanis from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In other words, the media landscape witnessed a convergence of old and new media technologies that also led to widespread civic engagement and greater connection across social boundaries..

Despite such multivalent uses, this paper shows that the overall impact of digital and new media tools in Pakistan has been nebulous. After all, General Musharraf’s dictatorial regime retained control over access to the internet and other communications infrastructure throughout the period of widespread civic engagement. As an increasing number of Pakistanis turned to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and SMS text messages as alternate media portals, the government clamped down on these sources. Between March 2007 and February 2008, cellphone networks were jammed, internet service providers were instructed to block the YouTube website, internet connectivity was limited or shut down, and blogging softwares were banned. Moreover, the authorities came to monitor the public’s use of new media platforms: images of anti-government rallies posted to Flickr were used to identify and arrest protesters.

The only antidote to the government’s control of digital and new media tools, this paper shows, was the widening of the networked public sphere to include Pakistanis in the diaspora and global media sources. For example, when the government blocked news channels and jammed cellular networks in November 2007, young Pakistanis across the globe continued to plan and organize protest rallies via the social networking site Facebook. Similarly, when university students demanding the restoration of an independent judiciary realized that security officials had prevented journalists from covering their protest, they submitted self-generated video clips and images to CNN’s iReport, an online citizen journalism initiative. Indeed, as Pakistan’s media landscape became a hybrid model in which professional and amateur journalists generated and disseminated news by whatever means possible, international mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the BBC, and the UK-based Channel 4 increasingly sought out hyperlocal reporting posted to local blogs, YouTube, and Facebook.

Ultimately, this paper identifies how the means of communication in Pakistan became dispersed, accessible, and decentralized, leading to a freer flow of information during the Pakistan Emergency. By focusing on how Pakistanis have harnessed digital technologies and new media platforms, the paper aims to illuminate the way for Pakistan to become a full-fledged digital democracy. Indeed, as a product of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, this project hopes to play a prescriptive role. By analyzing digital technologies in the context of existing technologies and social practices in Pakistan, the paper emphasizes the importance of real-world deployment. It shows that users adopt and adapt tools in a way that responds to local needs. As such, the paper can be considered a call for members of the civic media community to design tools that bridge the digital divide, adapt to local circumstances, and are flexible enough that different communities can use them in creative and relevant ways. After all, as Benkler puts it, "the networked public sphere is not made of tools, but of social production practices that these tools enable."[7]