Social Media and Cyber-Jihad in Pakistan

The Internet and social media are part of today’s battlefield between the forces of liberalism and those of extremism, at least in Pakistan. Both forces are jostling for using—and controlling—the Internet and social media to make themselves heard and silence the opposition. This paper looks into how extremist forces appropriate the Internet and social media to get their message out, sway public opinion in their favor and seek new recruits. It also examines the potentials of social media for civic activism in Pakistan and how the misuse of blasphemy laws in Pakistan’s constitution stifles liberal voices on the Internet and social media. This paper discusses the concept of blasphemy in Islam, their incorporation in the legal system of Pakistan and their impact on the freedom of expression. This paper concludes that an effective use of social media is contingent on at least three things: 1) Literacy 2) access to the Internet and social media tools and 3) media laws and policies that guarantee freedom of expression and access to information. These are essential for the creation of a vibrant public sphere, which can then be strengthened by using social media as a long-term tool. Without freedom of expression, liberal forces cannot make full use of social media for promoting democracy and rights of minority groups.

Lexical Analysis of English Language Used in Documents of Federal Secretariat of Pakistan

Lexical Analysis of English Language Used in Documents of Federal Secretariat of Pakistan This quantitative study aims to analyze lexis of English language used in the documents of the federal government. The purpose of this study is to describe the lexical variation of English language and determine how different it is from the ordinary use of English language. The theoretical framework for this study is English for Specific Purposes, with an emphasis on the need of incorporation of office language in the conventional pedagogy at academia as well as to the professionals belonging to this particular workplace. The methodological framework to determine the validity of the hypothesis and answer the research questions of this study is Corpus Linguistics, which is development of collection of texts in real world and natural occurrence. This methodology is used to determine the particular linguistic characteristics of language variation at a particular field. A specialized corpus was compiled from randomly selected documents published by different departments of federal government belonging to administrative and legal genres. The analysis of the corpus focused on three objectives; i). Generation of a wordlist of most frequent words in the corpus that are outside the General Service List and the Academic Wordlist, ii). Identification of collocations or word clustering with higher PMI, and iii). Spelling variations in the lexis.