Category: Media

Social Media

The Government should let the hotel open a bak chor mee stall

Demarcating the Boundaries of Mainstream & Citizen Journalism

We live in a brave new world. With the advances of internet technologies, citizen journalism has been touted to be an alternative challenge to the mainstream media. Recent events such as the Singapore Elections 2006 and the Mr Brown affair have created ripples that can tilt the balance on the Singapore government’s control of the internet. In this article, we analyze the issues that are discussed in the political roundtable organized by Straits Times (ST) last Tuesday. The discussion centered around three themes; one, mainstream media vs online (or new) media and two, regulation and control of both media by the government and three, freedom of speech and expression in the new media.

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What if there is a Blogger Registration Act?

Recently, a Civil War is happening in the universe of Marvel comic books. In this major crossover event, it is no longer about super heroes fighting against an ultimate villain, but among themselves. The series centers around a newly enacted Super-human Registration Act. The act when passed into law, would require all persons in the United States with superhuman abilities who wish to use those abilities to fight crime to register with the federal government and receive proper training as law enforcement officials [1]. The Act divided the super heroes into two camps, with Iron Man taking the side that all the super heroes should reveal their secret identities and Captain America champions the privacy and rights of the superheroes to keep their identity secret. In a thought experiment approach, I examine the implications of having a Blogger Registration Act in Singapore.

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Aggregators, Blogs and Credibility: The “ABC” for Citizen Journalism

In the recent IPS post-elections forum, the impact of the internet on the 2006 general elections has been discussed. One metric which the study did not manage to address is the issue of the bloggers’ credibility on this new form of citizen journalism. In this article, I review the emergence of group blogs (aggregators & congregators) and explain how they can be important in closing the credibility gap in blogs, and indicate directions for future research in this area.

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