Quite aside from the horrifying circumstances of Qandeel Baloch’s murder, those who don’t use social media or those not particularly familiar with it, might be forgiven for being baffled at the phenomenon that she was.

Qandeel was probably the first true female internet celebrity in Pakistan, in that her celebrity had nothing to do with any achievement beyond her provocative presence on social media.

There have been other social media-aided celebrities — the ‘Eye To Eye’ singer Tahir Shah, the ‘One-Pound-Fish’ man Shahid Nazir, the camp self-promoter on YouTube from Sialkot Awais Lovely and the Twitter-braggart ‘Prince’ Affan bin Saqib, for example — but Qandeel was probably the first woman to achieve fame solely through social media.

Unlike other women who have used social media as a tool to advance their existing careers in film, television or music, Qandeel took the opposite route.

She was reputedly a singer but her only known foray into singing was as a contestant on Pakistan’s Pop Idol programme where she was eliminated in the initial audition stages.

She was also said to be a model but had never actually worked as a model in anything until she became famous through her Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts.

In fact, even her identity as ‘Qandeel Baloch’ was basically constructed through social media — which is why there was increasing scrutiny about her origins as her notoriety grew: what her real name was (Fouzia Azeem), whether she was even from a Baloch tribe (she apparently wasn’t) and her marital history (an apparently abusive, short-lived marriage that produced a child).

What set Qandeel apart from other internet sensations in Pakistan was that she was a flesh-and-blood woman, not simply a faceless, pretend-woman, of which there are, of course, plenty on social media.

It was unfathomable to a lot of Pakistanis that a real woman could be as brazen or shameless about her sexuality publicly, because her entire persona was built around flaunting her body, talking about sex and being in-everyone’s face.

The comments on her Instagram feed — which had hundreds of thousands of ‘followers’ by the time of her death — were probably 30 per cent from voyeurs getting a kick out of this but were overwhelmingly from those attacking her for “being a disgrace to Pakistan and Islam.”

What’s, of course, interesting is the fact that people would still follow her feeds or make the effort to come to her pages only to abuse her.

Her persona was so unimaginable for a Pakistani (of course, they are used to such personas from the West or even from India) that there was even speculation about whether she was, in fact, originally a man who had undergone a sex change.

For many, that would have explained everything.

What’s interesting, sociologically, for Pakistan is not that there are constructed personas on social media — very common phenomena around the world — but how transgressions of socially acceptable behaviour are seeping from the digital realm into the real world and influencing how they are viewed and debated.

This is all the more remarkable given that internet penetration in Pakistan is still estimated at below 18 per cent; more than 80 per cent of the country’s population does not even have access to social media platforms.

Certainly, much of Qandeel’s output on social media — pictures and videos of herself in various forms of undress, thoughts about sex and sexuality, commentary on the hypocrisy of well-known people — is still verboten on mainstream media or even in polite company.

And yet, people were discussing her among themselves in private gatherings around the country and on social media itself; even television and the print media had been forced to acknowledge her.

Of course, TV and print referred to the content of her posts only obliquely, if at all. When they referred to her as ‘a model’ they never clarified what exactly people might have seen her in.

Until, of course, the Mufti Qavi brouhaha, which allowed TV to run fairly sanitised photographs of her with the cleric and to peg her as the woman who brought Mufti Qavi down. Incidentally, in and of themselves, those photographs — whose ‘scandalous’ high point was Qandeel donning Mufti Qavi’s karakuli cap — would mean nothing, divorced from the context of Qandeel’s online persona.

There have always been transgressive people in society — people who flout traditional social norms — but they never had the ability to come into contact with the huge numbers of people that social media platforms now afford them.

Had Qandeel Baloch existed in the pre-social media age, it is more than likely that most people would never even have heard about her.

Social media is transforming society and media in ways that have not been studied at all in Pakistan. Consider Qandeel’s origins and trajectory: a poor girl from a small village in the remote and largely feudal Dera Ghazi Khan area, who goes on to become a national and, to a certain extent, international sensation, purely on the basis of her force of will and ability to project herself.

Irrespective of the means employed to achieve fame, it shows the power of social media to cross class, linguistic and ethnic barriers in today’s Pakistan and its increasing ability to dictate what the mainstream media — and thus the larger national population — takes notice of.

It’s a brave new world and mainstream Pakistani media is mostly playing catch-up.

Hasan Zaidi is a journalist, filmmaker and cultural commentator.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 7th, 2016

Explore the series:

• Part 1: The phenomena of Qandeel Baloch: Misbehaving women
• Part 2: The phenomena of Qandeel Baloch: Dishonour in death
• Part 3: The phenomena of Qandeel Baloch: The brave new world of Pakistan’s social media
• Part 4: The phenomena of Qandeel Baloch: Changing women ─ Moving into public space
• Part 5: The phenomena of Qandeel Baloch: Did the media kill Qandeel Baloch?