Saturday, July 14, 2012

Partial Integration of India-Pakistan Social Media Mela

As of now, two-day India-Paksitan Social Medial Mela  2012 #SocMM12 is over . I had the chance to follow the highlights of the "mega-event" on twitter mostly today. I thought some Indian/Paksitani bloggers and tweeps are meeting to share their experiences and thoughts about different aspects of Social Media.  That sounded like a very positive move and I excitedly followed the later part. I tried the event's .com website but somehow it wont open. Probably, something to do with the DNS settings. I can browse  it now that everything is over. 


The only major thing I noticed on Friday was an Express Tribune report on how Rehman Malik swooped in to save the day. However, I took it as something in connection with MyKarachi exhibiton.  On the second day, I noticed some tweets about talk of Mohammed Hanif and Karuna . That sounded like some sorta  professional discussion is going on. More and more tweets poured in, some about the Indian tweeps out there. Later, few reports and and blog also appeared. 

At the very outset, I had a feeling the event is not about social media in general, rather, just a bunch of tweeps and journalists from mainstream media. The blog Social Media Mela or Twitterati kitty party? by Imaan Sheikh and the rather aggressive assesment by LUBP A critical assessment of #SOCMM12 point towards something similar. Birds of a feather flock together which makes newer birds  feel alienated rightly.  That may leave a hint about the how social the chaps in the social media can be in real life.  A casual look at Dawn's coverage and highlights of talk by Ghazal Pirzada have a similar case study to offer in terms of interns.

It makes no sense by the LUBP to claim as if PPP was left out of the event and tie the ShiaGenocide and killings to this issue. How would that fit to the mutual interest of Indian Paksitani bloggers in what I  suppose is their first gathering of the sort. However, the coverage by Dawn and the responses on the twitter present two different stories to me. Though people on twitter were claiming its all about tweeting  , there were tweets only about a few talks. Anyways the introduced the funny side of of Usman Saeed somehow, the only fun thing associated with a fun event along with some free goodies, I would say. MQM leaves no chance to exploit any such event to its advantage. For an hour of so, it flooded twitter with #WhyILikeMQM + #SOCMM12 hashtags. That's shameful in its very spirit. I wonder why no one talked about whether or not aunty Marvi Sirmed took Dr. Alvi to task for propagating the fake list.

When there are likes of Jehan Ara, Beena Sarwar alongwith entrepreneurs and bloggers, there must have been more useful and fruitful talks and discussions. Perhaps the event was arranged in a conference format, and most of the stuff was too technical for the participants to tweep the way, they would tweep a TEDTalk. 

I guess I missed most of fun. May be it will be compensated if more reports and videos of talks become available.... I still have a fundamental question:  What part was about the common concerns and issues of Indo-Pak tweeps and bloggers ??


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