How media is consumed everyday in Singapore
“More write to ST Forum,” said a recent Straits Times headline dated 29 April 2010. Contributors to the Straits Times’ Forum pages had sent in around 24,300 letters last year, more than double the number in 2000. While the Straits Times attributed the growth in contribution to itself being a living, breathing, active member of the community, it failed to highlight that the growth in contribution is also a result of increasing awareness and interest in social-political and economic issues affecting the Republic.
The emergence of social media
The increasing awareness and interest also manifested via the proliferation of blogs and other forms of social media where discussion and debate on issues affecting the Republic, whether it is on the economy or social cohesion at stake, are taking place outside the Straits Times. Such discussion and debates are also known as national conversations. Social media has considerably lowered the barrier to participation and thus empowered individuals to claim a stake on national issues through participation in national conversations.
The most notable example of national conversation in recent time is the saga of the Association of Women for Advocacy, Research and Education (AWARE) that took place last year. AWARE was initially steeplejacked by a group of women from the Church of Our Savior. However, through public campaigning and strategic manoeuvres, the previously outgoing executive committee led by Dana Lam was able to win back the members’ mandate.
During the AWARE Saga, members of the public expressed their outrage that the secular space in Singapore has been violated by the steeplejacking act. On the other hand, there were other members of the public who defended vigorously that secular space does not imply non-participation of religious groups. Meanwhile, news (including first hand information) and bite-size commentaries were posted on mailing lists, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The volume of coverage of the AWARE Saga on the Straits Times paled in comparison to the public generated content. For the first time, the Straits Times cannot frame the debate taking place in this particular national conversation.
Framing national conversations
Framing the debate is particularly an important move in propaganda programming. It offers two strategic advantages – firstly, exercising functional fixedness over its participants; secondly, being a moderator. Functional fixedness refers to the mental block that arises from the fact that one element of a whole situation already has a (fixed) function which has to be changed for making the correct perception or for finding the solution to the problem. Functional fixedness limits the scope of discussion on top of existing measures such as out-of-boundary markers.
Being moderator allows one to set the tone and the flow of the debate. More importantly, the moderator assigns time and space to participants. If deemed necessary, the moderator rejects participants and decides which participant has the final say on the debate topic. The Straits Times played this role at the aftermath of the AWARE Saga. About two weeks after the AWARE Saga hit a high-note ending at its highly anticipated extra-ordinary general meeting, the Straits Times published an interview with the Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng detailing the stand of the government.
However, there were 2 factors that undermined the Straits Times’ attempt to frame national conversations throughout the AWARE Saga. Firstly, social media provided a plethora of channels that were instant and accessible. Straits Times no longer enjoyed the monopoly of being the sole information provider on the AWARE Saga. People who were interested or affected by the saga were not only paying attention to social media channels, they themselves also became participants by becoming ordinary/associate members of AWARE or become an advocate simply by expressing their beliefs.
Secondly, there was a disconnection of values between readers of the Straits Times and participants in the AWARE Saga. As a family-friendly newspaper, the Straits Times carries perspectives and judgments shaped by traditional conservative values. On the other hand, participants in the AWARE Saga tend to have liberal leaning, so they would not prefer Straits Times as a platform to communicate their ideas and positions.
These participants were even more unlikely to rely on Straits Times as an information provider in the presense of alternative information sources. In fact, during the AWARE EOGM, the web traffic due to The Online Citizen’s live coverage of the AWARE EOGM was so huge that the The Online Citizen’s server crashed several times during the day. The participation not only pulled individuals emotionally deeper into the saga, further reinforcing their beliefs intrinsically, it also locked them into a particular mode of participation – through social media channels. In another words, the Straits Times had a limited role in influencing their actions.
Moving forward
National conversations are no longer centrally hosted by the Straits Times. Blogs and other social media channels have evolved from objects of curiosity to competing hosts of national conversations. This evolution is mainly driven by increased accessibility to technology brought about by reducing cost and the ease of use. This led to the decentralisation of national conversations, and what the decentralisation of national conversations revealed is that there is a market of readers whose values are not aligned with the traditional conservative values eschewed by the Straits Times.
These readers were not parachuted into Singapore. They always have existed in Singapore. Institutional barriers (e.g. Newspaper and Printing Presses Act, Censorship Policy), which favour the monopoly of the Straits Times and its parent company Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), have not only impeded the formation of more liberal newspapers to cater to these readers, they also prevented liberal and progressive values from shaping the outlook of the Straits Times. The perception that Singapore is a homogeneously conservative Asian society, which has been championed by the Straits Times for many years, is now in fact challenged.
According to the Media Development Authority, these institutional barriers are in place to protect incumbent media players from overseas competition. However, the same institutional barriers prevent Singaporean entrepreneurs from competing in the local media market to meet the diverse demands of the reader population. In another words, such selective protectionism leads to Singapore putting all its eggs into one basket – a poor economic strategy that reflects no accountability to new generations of entrepreneurs.
Some proponents of protectionism may claim that commercial competition leads to unnecessary duplication of efforts within Singapore’s media market. Yet at the same time, it is the duplication of efforts that actually contributes to the resilience of the media market. If the SPH finds itself unable to operate profitably, healthy market competition would assure that a substitute for the Straits Times or the Singapore Press Holdings would already exist. The welfare of the media consumer would not be undermined.
Last but not least, thanks to social media, diversity is now recognised as a celebrated facet of the Singapore society. And as part of diversity, national conversations will continue to decentralise as different social media channels compete against each other through product differentiation. However, it is not necessary in the interest of these social media channels to carry Government participation in national conversations.
In order to create incentive for the Government to interact with social media channels outside its control, the proprietors and administrators behind the social media channels have to challenge the relevance of the Government to its electorate. The lack of government participation may actually spur more interaction among the electorate. Hence, the government may do well by considering feedback from social media channels without explicit participation.
Social media is the great equaliser. Posting one’s views crap or cool in the Internet is one step, but spreading it among your friends and friends’ friends and making it viral in the social media age, that potentially undermines the Jedi Mind Trick the PAP tries to use via SPH and pals. w00t Caveat – some people can’t tell the crap from the cool in the social media and its montage of diverse views. Heh.