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

4. Student activism/digital activism

November 7, 2007: Police surround the Lahore University of Management Sciences

In the media vacuum created by the censorship of television channels, Pakistani university students turned to new media platforms such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and blogs to facilitate hyper-local reporting, information dissemination, and community organizing against emergency rule. As such, student activism during the Pakistan Emergency was synonymous with digital activism.

On November 7, over 1,000 students of the privately owned Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)--Pakistan’s most prestigious business school based in Lahore--gathered to protest the imposition of emergency rule. Students at universities across Pakistan had begun protesting and organizing vigils immediately after Musharraf’s televised emergency announcement on November 3. But the gathering at LUMS was among the largest of the civil movement launched by lawyers, journalists, and students against the emergency. (By contrast, about 90 students attended a protest the same day at Lahore’s National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, FAST-NU, a federally chartered university.)

The protest took place amidst heavy police presence. Prior to the gathering, policemen warned LUMS students that they would be baton charged and arrested in the event of civil agitation. On the morning of the scheduled protest, police surrounded the campus, while plainclothes officers patrolled its grounds. Still, students managed to march through the campus grounds and eventually staged a sit-in at the main campus entrance, in front of the dozens of police officers.

Broadcast journalists for Geo TV and other stations that were continuing to provide live coverage of emergency-related events via satellite and internet streams were present to cover the LUMS protest. However, police officials successfully prevented media personnel from entering the LUMS campus and eventually confiscated their cameras and other recording equipment. After successfully removing all journalists from the premises, the police ramped up their presence on the campus grounds.

4.1. Creating the News, Organizing the Community

Once LUMS students realized that major Pakistani news networks had not been able to cover their protest, they took it upon themselves to document the authorities’ intimidation tactics and their own attempts at resistance. Midway through the day-long protest, a student narrated the morning’s events in a post on The Emergency Times blog,[27] which had been established to help students express their opinions about democracy and organize against emergency rule. This post was then linked to by other blogs, such as Metroblogging Lahore, that are frequented by Pakistani youth.[28] The Emergency Times blog also featured pictures of the protest.

Within an hour of the LUMS protest commencing, a Karachi-based blogger Awab Alvi, who runs the Teeth Maestro blog, also helped those behind The Emergency Times blog set up an SMS2Blog link, which allowed students participating in the protest to post live, minute-by-minute updates to several blogs, including Teeth Maestro, via SMS text message.[29] Students availed of this set up to report on police movement across campus, attempts to corral students in their hostels, the deployment of women police officers across campus, and the activities of LUMS students to resist these actions.

On the night of November 7, students posted video clips of the protest that were shot using handheld digital camcorders or cellphone cameras to YouTube.[30] These videos showed the students gathering to protest, confronting the university’s security guards, and the heavy police presence at the university’s gates. Many clips focused on protest signs that students were carrying in an attempt to convey their message in spite of the poor audio and visual quality of some of the video clips. Anti-emergency speeches delivered by students were posted in their entirety.

Some students uploaded their video footage of the protest, shot on cellphone cameras, to CNN’s iReport website, which solicits contributions from citizen journalists across the globe in the form of video, photos, or blog posts.[31] Footage from iReport was then used in a regular CNN broadcast about the student protests. That CNN broadcast was then posted to YouTube for circulation amongst Pakistanis who no longer had access to the channel because of Musharraf’s blanket ban on news programming.[32] Through this confluence of citizen reporting and the international broadcast media, Pakistanis--and a global audience--were informed about the LUMS protest.

Interestingly, between November 3-6, video clips of protests and gatherings at LUMS had been posted to YouTube. But none of these were as well produced or contextualized as those uploaded on November 7. In the days after the emergency, posted videos up to 10 minutes in length were not clearly titled for easy searchability, nor did they provide any explanation of the events portrayed in the footage.[33] In contrast, November 7 video clips were clearly titled and tagged. In many cases, the clips included captions that dated the event, identified the location, and contextualized the students’ activities.[34] This difference suggests that university students were aware within days of the emergency that their collectively generated coverage of the campus protests was the primary source of information for those looking for coverage of responses to the political crisis, including local and international journalists. For example, Dawn News, Pakistan’s first English-language news channel, first broadcast news of the student protests on November 10 in a clip that was made available via satellite and YouTube.[35]

It is worth nothing that university students became savvier in their use of new media platforms over the course of the emergency. On December 4, policemen and intelligence agents once again surrounded and barricaded the LUMS campus to prevent students and faculty from attending a daily vigil for civil liberties. As soon as police appeared at the LUMS campus, a post warning students that traffic in and out of the university was being inspected appeared on The Emergency Times blog.[36] Once again, an SMS2Blog link allowed students protesting against the barricade to post live updates to the Teeth Maestro blog. This time, the live updates were used to identify particular members of the security agencies [37] so that students could remain on guard and included messages from political parties advising students on how to conduct themselves during the protest.[38] This content indicates that students were using them as a dynamic resource for community organizing during the protest, and not merely for archival and documentation purposes.

In all emergency-related demonstrations between November 3 and December 15, university students posted images from the events to Flickr.[39] However, security forces soon began using these images to identify student activists and subsequently arrest them. In an attempt to one-up the authorities, students began blurring the faces of protestors in images before uploading them to Flickr and other blogs.[40] The fact that the authorities were monitoring new media platforms such as Flickr is an indication of how quickly alternative resources gained influence in the media vacuum created by the television ban.

Meanwhile, young Pakistanis who were unable to join university protests and youth across the diaspora turned to the social networking site Facebook to express solidarity and oppose emergency rule. Within three days of the emergency declaration, a Facebook group titled "We Oppose Emergency in Pakistan" boasted over 5,000 members.[41] The group’s homepage featured links to online petitions, up-to-date news reports from the Pakistani print and broadcast media, and blogs with original news content, such as The Emergency Times. Embedded video clips of messages by detained opposition leaders were also uploaded to the Facebook site. The group’s discussion board quickly became the site of lively discussion, with teenagers and twenty-somethings--who previously did not have a voice in the Pakistani public sphere--debating the implications of Musharraf’s decision. As the emergency dragged on and the movement to restore the judiciary gained momentum, Facebook was harnessed by diaspora communities as a tool for organizing protests.

The internet also allowed students outside Pakistan to play key roles. For example, Samad Khurram, an undergraduate at Harvard University, helped mobilize the protesters in Pakistan from his dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts by maintaining an online newsletter and mailing list.

It is not surprising that university students were amongst the first Pakistanis to turn to the internet as a venue for information dissemination in the wake of the television ban. Owing to low literacy rates and high service costs, the internet has not been as widely adopted in Pakistan as cellphones. In December 2007, there were 70 internet service providers covering 2,419 cities and towns in Pakistan, but only 3.5 million internet subscribers. Owing to the popularity of cyber cafes, however, the total number of internet users was estimated by the PTA to be closer to 17 million. Pakistani universities are among the few venues where internet saturation is high: by 2005, over 80% of all university libraries had internet access. And in July 2007, the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan enhanced bandwidth four-fold at public sector universities--at private universities, bandwidth was doubled--to facilitate video conferencing and other online communications. Private institutions such as LUMS boast two internet access nodes in each double- or triple-occupancy room.

4.2. In times of emergency, The Emergency Times

The following case study of one blog during the Pakistan Emergency shows that new media platforms can facilitate civic engagement if they are harnessed to provide original reporting in a timely and consistent manner. Moreover, the success of the Emergency Times (ET) blog and newsletter show that to truly succeed in the developing world, civic media initiatives must straddle multiple mediums (in this case, for example, a blog, an online mailing list, and an SMS text message network).

The Emergency Times (ET) blog and newsletter exemplify the collision and collusion between old and new media that helped shape civic action against increasingly authoritarian rule. What began as an informative on-campus handout quickly evolved to become the mouthpiece and major news resource for the Student’s Action Committee (SAC), the umbrella organization that rallied student activists across Pakistan and the diaspora against Musharraf and his policies.

Launched online on November 5, 2007, ET described itself as "an independent Pakistani student information initiative providing regular updates, commentary, and analysis on Pakistan’s evolving political scenario." An early experiment in youth citizen journalism and digital activism, ET became one of the most regular and reliable sources of information about the Pakistani civil society’s movement against the government between November 2007 and June 2008. At its height, the blog claims to have reached over 150,000 people in over 100 countries.

Although many students were involved in generating the blog and its accompanying online mailing list, Ammar Rashid, a LUMS student who served as editor-in-chief for the blog, and Samad Khurram, an undergraduate at Harvard University who managed the mailing list, led the initiative. Khurram explains that Musharraf’s crackdown on news channels during the emergency motivated his and Rashid’s work: the blog was conceptualized as a daily newspaper while the mailing list was meant to emulate the one-to-many distribution model of traditional broadcast mediums. "Providing these were important to us," says Khurram, "since all the private TV channels were banned and the print media faced serious curbs." The choice of a blog and mailing list was further motivated by the fact that these mediums are "simple, reliable, and cost-effective."

Khurram, Rashid, and other SAC members initially experimented with a web-based television channel titled Freedom TV, but dropped the idea owing to time constraints and the lack of resources. The idea of launching an online radio station was also floated, but rejected. Eventually, Khurram and Rashid determined that the combination of a blog and mailing list would be the most effective in terms of disseminating information about the political crisis and organizing community action. While Rashid compiled and edited news, Khurram focused on coordinating and mobilizing different groups that included lawyers, journalists, and politicians in addition to students. This combined use of a blog and mailing list suggests that at the time of the emergency, Pakistanis with internet access were not yet accustomed to the interactive, collaborative, and user-generated culture of the blogosphere. Instead, they were seeking a broadcast alternative to the independent television channels that had come to dominate the media landscape in recent years.

Initially, the ET blog was limited in scope, catering primarily to the Lahore-based community of student activists. Anti-emergency vigils and protest marches demanding the restoration of the judiciary were documented on the blog through original images, video clips, and first-person testimonies posted by university students.[42] As the SAC movement gained momentum, the blog became the go-to website for information about the campaign, upcoming meetings and protests, and related events such as a lecture series featuring leading activists. Politicians and lawyers hoping to woo, inspire, or advise student activists also used the ET blog as a communications platform. Moreover, students who had the opportunity to meet or speak with leaders of the movement for democracy--such as deposed judges, detained lawyers, or opposition politicians--would share notes from their conversations with the SAC community at large through the blog.

Significantly, the ET blog was one of the few resources for original reporting on the government crackdown on student activism. Reports of students being harassed or arrested were regularly posted.[43]

After emergency rule was lifted and Musharraf surrendered his post as chief of army staff, the blog shifted its focus to campaign for the restoration of an independent judiciary. Broadening the ET’s mandate in this manner kept it relevant and timely in the context of the unfolding political crisis, but resulted in a reduction of original content. Since most students were not directly involved in what came to be known as the "lawyers' movement"--a campaign to restore the independent judiciary that was in office on November 3 under Chief Justice Chaudhry--the ET blog increasingly featured news articles and opinion pieces from the mainstream print media, both Pakistani and international. Other online resources also began posting to the ET blog to generate traffic. For example, Parliament Watch, a political blog, announced its launch on ET.[44]

To its credit, the ET blog did maintain its link to the students’ movement by emerging as a mouthpiece for the SAC. The blog became a venue for stating and clarifying the goals and political agenda of the movement both for SAC members and the activist community at large. For example, a post on January 26, 2008, claims that SAC members would like to prioritize the restoration of the judges and believe that boycotting elections would be an effective way to pressurize the government. The post acknowledges voices of dissent within the SAC community and goes on to outline a methodology and rationale for upcoming activism.[45]

The mailing list, meanwhile, gathered momentum and gained credibility as it expanded to serve the activist community at large, particularly in the context of the lawyers’ movement. By March 2008, during Black Flag Week, a week-long protest against the lawyers’ deposition, the mailing list reached over 50,000 people. Khurram explains that he initially pushed his e-mails to prominent journalists, columnists, bloggers, newspaper editors, and political party leaders. The list was then forwarded by these ‘influentials’ to wide networks that were eventually incorporated into the original mailing list.

Thanks to the regularity of updates and its distribution of original content--posts from the ET blog or forwarded correspondence from high-profile lawyers, activists, and politicians--the ET mailing list came to be seen as a credible news source by most of its recipients. In a big moment for alternative news sources, Chief Justice Chaudhry chose to circulate a letter responding to allegations against him by Musharraf’s government via the ET mailing list. Indeed, news items and statements originally circulated on the ET list were eventually cited by publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. The mailing list’s credibility also allowed it to function as a fund-raising resource: "When I made a call for donations for the SAC long march [in June 2008]

we were able to raise over US$ 1,000 with one email," says Khurram.

Interestingly, both the ET blog and mailing list relied on their audience using SMS text messaging to push their content and community organizing efforts well beyond the limited online audience. For example, the blog coordinated a "mass contact campaign": readers were asked to forward protest messages and campaign demands to politicians via SMS text message. The coveted cellphone numbers of relevant recipients, including top-level politicians, diplomats, and army personnel, were posted to the blog.[46] For his part, when forwarding e-mails with logistical details about protest marches, Khurram would also make sure to circulate SMS text messages containing the same information. "We had a few key people in each segment of the population on an SMS list: a couple of lawyers, a couple of students, a few civil society activists, and some journalists," he explains. "They would then [forward the message]

and inform others [in their network]. Text messaging was a primary source of communication and the mailing list was a close second."

Despite its success during the Pakistan Emergency, the ET blog suspended operations on June 25, 2008. In his final post, Rashid indicated a lack of time and resources to maintain the blog. As such, the fate of the ET blog raises questions about the sustainability of new media platforms beyond times of emergency. Can tools of digital activism also be harnessed as tools of expression? Can young Pakistanis overcome the participation gap and use new media platforms to enact democratic and participatory practices on an everyday basis and not only as tools for community organizing during crises? More importantly, is it necessary for new media platforms to be used in a sustainable way, or is it adequate that developing nations muster ‘silent armies’ of networked citizen journalists and community organizers who can mobilize during crises?