The above title is one of the blatant method of self-marketing that I so despise. The fact that you are here because of the title, is a demostration which I will talk about later in the entry.
The real title is, On blogging and the Media War
It all began with opendiary.com, a simple online diary concept, that unlike paper diaries at that time, allow you to share what you wrote with friends.
Then came blogger and many similar sites. A few years later, blogging took off in Singapore, one of the slowest to adopt any developments in the IT world.
At that time I always thought that blogging is for girls.
I was in The Chinese High School, and very few people write blogs. Almost all the girls I know owns a blog, and that, I later realise, is only because given my shy nature (ahem), I know very few girls.
For some reason I can’t quite remember, I started my first blog on blogspot when I was in secondary 3. That coincidentally was the period of time when I was most into computer and stuff, turning out windows applications at a regular interval with so many bugs I am ashamed to look at them now.
For many at that time, blogging was not a serious pursue. For most it was just fooling around and writing lots of junk on the internet. For some it was a perfect outlet for the lonely soul. For some it was to share their views with the world.
In around 2004 digital cameras became cheap commodity. A huge number of digital cameras were snapped up by consumers during that time. Even Creative, with their zero expertises in digital cameras, decided to make quick bucks with lousy cheapskate china OEM cameras. Apparently it works. It was a good year for Creative.
Being cheaply and easily available, female bloggers soon found good use for them. Snap snap snap. Camwhore everywhere. Upload on the blog. I have no idea what is their reason for doing so. Born from this was an online form of “perverticism” (a self-invented word). Cyber-perverts would wander the web in search of photos posted by unsuspecting girls to satisfy their little brothers. Sggirls.com raised in popularity due to the huge amount of photos with accidental exposures uploaded by faceless warriors. Some girls who are so stupid, they deserved to be pitied. With personal particulars written on blogs by these girls, our homegrown cyber stalkers bag larger and larger prizes.
I am a guy, so this little back alley of blogging does not concern me. I blogged. And I blogged. And then I noticed that ironically, while writing is a form of recording ideas, the act of writing itself allows even more ideas to form. I love the feel of giving my mind a little work out. I write and write, and as I write, I pondered on more things. And as a result, I write even more. I wrote everything and anything that comes to my mind. It was freedom of speech, pure and simple.
Because of the ease and freedom that blogging provides, and the oppressiveness of our society that is felt by people across all age groups, the number of bloggers grew and grew. Rumours, scandalous news, political criticism. Things were ballooning out of control as Singaporeans weren’t quite ready to be responsible for all the freedom that was available to them through blogging.
Freedom of speech is a form of power. With that comes responsibilities. A couple of Singaporeans soon learn that the hard way. They used words photos to make a mockery out of other’s religion. They were given a little vacation behind bars.
From this, my attitude towards blogging changed. With so many people now blogging and so many people reading blogs, all kinds of bloggers are going to offend all kinds of blog readers. Human beings are individuals, and while we seek one another’s company in small groups, we were never meant to be so connected to each other. Fame wars, bloggers threatening to sue bloggers, people making outcry over what someone has wrote. While Singaporeans ask for freedom, they could not tolerate freedom by others to give alternative views. And that is just a small part of it.
With blogging, the “middleman” (mainstream media) is out of the picture. If an accident happen along PIE at 0800hrs, one used to wait until the evening news before being aware of it. With blogs, anyone who passed by the place of accident can just snap a few photos and upload them within minutes. Mainstream media, with their many guidelines and need to play the role of the government or country’s voice, could never offer as many alternative viewpoints as that of blogs. Local politicians, either because of their absolute incompetency for more than 40 years or because of the doings of some organisation in power, who have never really gained much airtime on TV other than their constant problems and arrests, can now bypass the mainstream media and reach the people through blogs. Likewise, people with alternative political viewpoints or criticism of the established government can communicate and broadcast their message through blogs.
To any government except one that wishes for its own demise, this is bad news, and something must be done. A cloud of fear settled on bloggers. Mr Brown and his suggestive essay! The arrest of Gopalan Nair! The whole crap about “anonymous voices on the internet holds no weight” and then changing the tone later when it was admitted that some agents were paid to post anonymously in local newsgroups and forums to correct thinkings that were off track.
It is things like this that killed me off. I feel that I can no longer blog freely. What I can do is to settle on doing things at a smaller scale, like exposing various lies Anderson Junior College has perpetrated to the media. There were so many red tapes that many times I have written a nearly 500 word entry only to find it too “dangerous” and decided to delete it.
The media had won the war.
Many other bloggers are experiencing the same, and blogs loses its appeal to a large mass of people who wishes to read about differing viewpoints on matters, and hoping to find others with thinking similar to them.
Like a factory (society) producing figurines (people) out of a mould, the one or two who are different are solitary and the internet and blogs allows these real individuals to connect and communicate. This is now no longer possible as the factory is now actively sourcing the internet for defects.
The political and the “thinking” aspects of blogosphere has died. What I call “no-brainer” blogs like
http://www.krisandro.com/ and many such others filled in the void smoothly. In fact, it was so successful that blogging became even more popular than it once was, with more and more what I call the cyber-busybodies as the catalyst. These people simply love reading blogs of strangers detailing what those strangers did and the places they visited for entertainment.
And with Singaporeans, it is always about money. And with Singaporean bloggers, it is largely the same. Nuffang, Advertlets, Blog2u. All singing the same tune and Singaporean bloggers blindly biting the hook. Because you display the ad provider’s ad while the provider source for advertisers, the ad providers enjoyed free ads from tonnes of bloggers. True that some did make a fortune, but those are far and few between.
And then comes along a cheapskate publicity campaign thought of by many commercial entities, known as the “bloggers event”. Invite a few people to visit a place or try a few products, and you get eyeballs on your product or place of interest worth a few thousand dollars for only a few dollars. And bloggers invited to the events actually feel “honored” to be invited to those events, with those not invited trying their best to be so..
The existence of sites like ping.sg also had a part to play in forming the blogging landscape. It does not take a 3 years old to determine that people on that site will choose to read blog entries based on their titles, and many bloggers began to sensationalise their blog entry titles, even to the extend of having no relation to the actual blog entry content, in order to attract visitors. There are also those who source the internet for juicy news and post it on their “blog” to attract visitors and earn advertising dollars.
The act of blogging has evolved and blogs along with it. I, being what I call a “first generation” blogger would have my blog buried by the onslaught of the “no-brainer” blogs, but I will not betray the true spirit of blogging, by blogging truthfully, honestly, not for profit or gains, but to share with readers what I am really interested in, feel strongly about, or wants to say. That is all.
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