Babar Bhatti, a Pakistani blogger on MobileActive.org states:

“Activists in Pakistan are leveraging technology to organize and support their campaign against the martial law in Pakistan. Using the tools of mobile phones, SMS, Wikis, social networking and blogging, the activists have stepped up to fill the gap left behind by the absence of news and TV channels. I reported about the rising trend of mobile activism in the world in July and I asked a question that if this is something we will see in Pakistan in the short term. The recent turn of events has made mobile activism a sucessful reality in Pakistan…”

“Due to the low number of Internet users and the very limited broadband in Pakistan, blogs and other Internet based tools are not within the reach of the masses. Text messaging on the other hand has been very popular and with the 70 million plus mobile subscribers, this is a medium which is widely spread in Pakistan. Bloggers report that Saturday 3rd November saw the highest ever number of SMS sent with an average of 10 text messages being sent across the networks per subscriber.”

Source: Bhatti, Babar. “Pakistanis Turn to Cell Phones and SMS For Activism.” State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan: A blog about telecommunication marketplace in Pakistan. November 14th, 2007 http://telecompk.net/category/blogging/

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