Social media, connecting people

• Social media has evolved considerably making it a powerful platform to initiate social movements giving freedom of expression

A training workshop was arranged on Saturday by Individualland Pakistan in partnership with Freidrich Norman Foundation (FnF) on the concept of “Citizen Journalism” and “social media” at a local university.

Participants of the workshop said that social media has become the most powerful source of news updates and an important resource for the mobilisation of collective action and implementation of social movement across the world.

Media persons from print and electronic, bloggers, students of journalism and human rights activists were amongst the participants present.

The aim of the workshop was to create awareness amongst the masses about the concept of “Citizen Journalism” and social media, finding solutions for improvement and making the people realise its role in strengthening of democracy.

The participants said that social media has become the most powerful source of news updates through platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, Myspace, LinkedIn including many others. They observed that the social media has been instrumental in supporting political and social movements by providing opportunities for political expression, symbolic identification for collective action and information exchange.

Farhan Khalid of Individulland Pakistan said that the most popular social media website in Pakistan is Facebook, which has over 8 million users in the country out of a global total of more than 1 billion whereas Twitter and LinkedIn have 1.9 million and 1.2 million users in Pakistan respectively.

Speaking on the occasion, Individualland Pakistan Coordinator Shaukat Ali Ashraf linked the global rise of this new branch of media to the catastrophe of 9/11 whereas locally to the dreadful earthquake which jolted Pakistan in October 2005.

The participants of the workshop were introduced to blogging and micro-blogging with the help of social media websites “wordpress” and “Twitter”. Their accounts were made on these two blogging websites and they were made to write blog comments on various topics. This was done to acquaint those participants to social media that had never used it.

Different tools of Citizen Journalism such as “Letter to the editor”, “podcasts” and “Vblogs” were also discussed during the workshop.