Freetopia

Sunday, August 28, 2005

Is Blogging an alternative plan of Freedom of Press in Singapore[1]?

The main purpose of blogs is to enable individuals to have a space to express their own opinions and views about important and not-so-important matters around them. In the US especially, blogs have actively been used for political purposes. For example, Garett Graff was probably the first blogger to be given a daily White House pass based on his blogging of Washington news media.

Singaporean bloggers tend to focus more on personal and daily issues, some of the more popular local blogs. However, there are a few which are dedicated to topics related to travel, culture, language and technology such as Commentary Singapore and Singapore Ink. This in itself is an issue that seems to be widely discussed within the Singapore blogging community.

There are two possible reasons for the lack of politically related activity of Singaporean bloggers in comparison to their counter-parts in other parts of the world.

Firstly, as stated by Dr Randy Kluver from the Singapore Internet Research Center it could be that Singaporeans are not very interested in politics or secondly, Singaporeans just need more time to develop into 'citizen jounalists' as explained by Mr Brown, another popular Singaporean blogger.
Singapore has over 22,000 registered blogs ranking it as one of the top ten countries with the largest number of registered blogs according to Bloggers Blog. In Iran alone surprisingly, there are more than 100,000 registered blogs according to Time Magazine.

refer to http://www.ntu.edu.sg/sci/sirc/index.html

In addition, the third possible answer is valid. Namely that politics, in Singaporean has as a result of media attention on defamation cases and banning of NGO memebers from speaking, has been 'criminalised'. < Link >

Now we are here. Is it possible as alternative plan of Freedom of Press in Singapore?