Adil Najam
Radio program Aap Ki Duniya on Voice of America’s (VOA’s) – now of the Wasi Zafar outburst fame – hosted an hour-long Round Table on blogging in Pakistan.
Hosted by Murtaza Solangi, the program featured a conversation on the state and future of blogging in Pakistan with four bloggers: Awab (of TeethMaestro and Karachi Metroblog) Ramla (of Next>), Hakim (of MicroPakistan) and myself (Pakistaniat). You can listen to it here:
[Audio:http://pakistaniat.com/audio/VOA-Pakistan-b logging.mp3]
Although framed in the context of the role of the Pakistan’s blogistan (‘blogsphere’ for non-Pakistanis), the lively conversation was, in fact, broader and looked also at why people blog, whether it makes a difference, and what the future potential of blogging might be. It also looked at the issue of blog bans in Pakistan, and the follies of such policies. I enjoyed the conversation very much. Not only because I can now match ‘voices’ to names but also because it made me think more clearly about why we spend so much of our time on this, whether it is really worth doing, and what it might mean in a broader context.
I am not arrogant enough to assume that the world will change dramatically just because a few of us are writing blogs. On the other hand, I am convinced that at least for those few of us who write and read these things, a world with blogs is different from a world without – at the very least, it is different in how we interact with that world.
To blog, at least for me, is about conversation and about community. The magic moment comes when you realize that there are others out there who want to be part of your conversation of your community. For us at ATP, that has always been out motivation. This is why I chose the photogrpah above (I do not have a full reference for it, but it is an AKRSP photograph from the Gilgit area). The photograph too – just like blogging in general and certainly ATP – is about conversation and about community.
As I said during the show, at the very least this becomes a way of catharsis – bhaRass nikalna. But when your thoughts echo back to you and you realize that there is someone out there who is not only listening to you, but maybe even nodding their head. It is then that you realize that this is more than just bhaRass nikalna. And it can be – not yet, but one day – it can be much more.
Abrar, Pakistani Industry is not even ready to accept traditional web as a part of their businesses. Web 2.0 is something which majority of people are not aware of. When I said majority, it means IT professionals rather laymen.
Teeth Mastero…… which Toronto Blog did you refer to in the coversation that made so much money?
Hello Adil
It was great to see and hear this dicsussion. It was a good discussion and very good to hear your comments on Pakistani blogs.
As a person in IT where part of my job is to understand all these Web 2.0 (blogging, wikipedia, social networking, etc) and knowing the medium, I think the Pakistani Government and the Media as well is having a hard time understand the impact of Web2.0.
I am thinking of putting out an article on it. Perhaps I should restart blogging myself. I am quite unsatisified by the fact that I have stopped blogging regularly. Your discussion may prove to be inspirational enough for me to start bloggin again.
Its great to listen the bloggers on VOA. Congratulations for your efforts which are now being discussed in the mainstream media.Its an indicator of your achievements.
On a separate note, Hats off for ATP team which has established a MEHFIL where we interact, discuss and argue on issues related to Pakistan.
Its my homepage.
adil — i hope you dont mind me pasting the editorial in full
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=4730 4
Editorial, The News, March 18, 2007
Dealing with dissent
One would have thought that going by the tumultuous events of Friday and the general response of the nation to them, on Saturday the police would have been ordered to be a little more circumspect in their dealing with those protesting the ‘suspension’ of the chief justice. On Saturday, the ‘action’, so to speak, seems to have shifted to Lahore, with dozens of lawyers arrested, manhandled and lathi-charged by the trigger-happy Punjab police. And while the chief justice’s lawyers are now claiming that the tight security cordon around him has been relaxed, it should be remembered that this has happened (pending independent corroboration) only after the Supreme Judicial Council made it clear on Friday that there were no restrictions on the movement of Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. As for Saturday’s actions by the police, they were mostly unprovoked again, this time beginning when lawyers were prevented by the police from going inside the premises of the LHC to attend an all-Pakistan convention organised by the Lahore High Court Bar Association. The police lathi-charged the lawyers and fired tear gas shells and this rash action eventually snow-balled into a full-fledged street battle between the unarmed lawyers and the Punjab police constabulary.
The question that one would like to ask is why cannot the government let the lawyers meet if they want, why cannot it be okay with people protesting whatever it is they wish to protest against, provided it is peaceful and does not disturb public order. Surely by now, it should have realised that an all-out confrontation with either the lawyers’ community or the media is going to be a futile if not downright negative exercise in that it will only serve to further exacerbate an already tense situation and that this heightening of tension will only damage the government’s own credibility and lower its image in the eyes of Pakistanis in general as well as the outside world. As for the attack on the office of The News and Geo TV on Friday, the government has reportedly suspended 14 policemen who allegedly took part in the raid. A judicial inquiry has been promised as well one can only hope that it succeeds in unearthing the real perpetrators of this naked assault on press and media freedom. Again, it is worth reiterating that it defies common sense and logic to believe that junior-level policemen on their own would attack and ransack the offices of a national newspaper and a news channel in the heart of Islamabad, a stone’s throw from the Parliament House, the Prime Minister’s Secretariat and the Presidency.
The best way forward for the government would be to allow peaceful forms of protest. As it has already said, the matter is now before the SJC and the directives of this body should be followed. One of them relates to the coverage of the SJC’s proceedings and of the hearing of the reference. Here, as directed by the SJC print and electronic media have reported only the press release detailing Friday’s proceedings. The government, and especially the electronic media regulator PEMRA, should not seek to unnecessarily extend this directive, as has been done so far, to order newspapers and TV channels not to cover the events and incidents arising out of Justice Iftikhar’s suspension and to desist from giving him any coverage.
Such a blanket prohibition impedes the people’s right to be informed on all matters related to the chief justice’s ‘suspension’ except of course those that are sub-judice, i.e. the contents of the reference against Justice Iftikhar and the proceedings of the SJC to examine it. Also, by prohibiting any coverage of the issue, a situation may well arise in which, because of absence of any information, rumours begin to gain currency and that only serves to destabilise things further. As a first step, the government should call off the police on the lawyers and permit them to exercise their democratic right to register a peaceful protest and this should be applicable for civil society in general. As has already been pointed out by some commentators, those at the helm of affairs should realise that the rise of the information age, characterised particularly by the coming of age of the country’s electronic media (and to some extent of the Internet, especially blogs and so on), has changed everything. Clamping down on the flow of information and on dissent is next to impossible and only counter-productive. Ban a TV channel and one will find the information on the Internet or on a blog, blackout a newspaper and get the story on a web forum. The dictum that the Internet is perhaps the biggest encourager of a democratic mindset (and certainly a facilitator of a level-playing field in terms of who controls and provides information) has never been as true as now in Pakistan’s case. Now only if the country’s polity was as democratic, with its head of state and head of government, both accountable solely to the people.