Pakistan’s Long March goes live

A feature of life in Pakistan, as in many other Third World countries is that there has been a wide take up of mobile communication technology. Getting a telephone landline requires too money and too many bureaucratic hurdles so mobile phone services have seized the opening with relatively lower entry prices. One byproduct of this is that a mass demonstration like the latest Long March led by the militant lawyers’ movement is being reported by participants minute by minute through Twitter and through various designated protest blogs and websites such as http://longmarch.seenreport.com/ and http://teeth.com.pk/blog/.

An amazing collection of reports and photos shot by protestors and passersby on their mobile phone cameras can be seen on these live popular media. These are some of the messages that were being sent in over Twitter by Citizen Journalists:

From Long March on Twitter [SMS] Rawalpindi Civil society activist Jamil Abbasi”s house in Bani Gala has been surounded by po.. http://cli.gs/vjzRpM posted on March 13, 2009 03:59:23 am
SeenReport] Two messages of solidarity from overseas: From Australia: March 12, 2009 De.. http://cli.gs/9B8VNB posted on March 13, 2009 03:59:23 am
[SMS] Civil society activist Jamil Abbasi”s house in Bani Gala has been surounded by police.His 3 .. http://cli.gs/rnshu8 posted on March 13, 2009 03:59:23 am

(Mr. Boyle’s post has been reprinted from: http://www.asia-pacific-action.org/node/260)

Seenreport.com set up their page for the LongMarch at longmarch.seenreport.com and Chopaal.pk facilitated with the SMS, but the number of people Twittering about the event and the number of people searching for the HashTag (#LongMarch), landed the tag on the front page of Twitter.com. The status for hundreds of people kept changing to update their friends and contacts about the happenings on the ground. If SMS or cellphone service was experiencing lag or was switched off, there were hundreds of reporters actually giving television channels a run for their money, demonstrating the true power of Citizen Journalism.