It’s time the Singapore government took blogs as seriously as the mainstream media, writes Andy Ho in the local paper, The Straits Times. Bloggers should be flattered and worried too.
As anyone who reads the local papers knows, they are good but rather like old boys from the same school. There are similarities. I am not saying they all speak with the same voice — one may be more businesslike, the other more chatty — but it’s not like Britain, say, where conservatives can read the Telegraph and the liberals, the Guardian.
Singapore media are more alike each other maybe because it is such a small island, with just over four million people.
Blogs, on the other hand, give people space to write what they wish. It may be too personal, too quirky to be published in the mainstream media. Nor may the bloggers want to.
And being taken seriously means one must be on one’s best behaviour. Who will then snigger or cry out loud: "The emperor has no clothes"?
I know there are moves abroad to make bloggers more responsible. Singapore has prosecuted bloggers for racism. That is okay.
But should blogs be taken as seriously as the mainstream media?
I guess Andy Ho’s article in The Straits Times today was a follow-up to a recent controversy which I mentioned yesterday. I wrote: "The authorities weren’t at all amused when a popular local blogger known for his sense of humour wrote something cheeky in a freesheet recently. Such nonsense wasn’t acceptable in a paper read by the general public, said the authorities, though it might be okay in a blog with a limited readership."
I think the authorities were right. Blogs should be taken a little more lightly than the mainstream media. With a few exceptions, they don’t have the same traffic.
Andy Ho, by the way, made a sweeping generalisation when he said "the blogging world has no professional writers, no publishers". Think of Andrew Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, Peter Stothard, who is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Dave Barry, Chris Anderson, there are any number of professional writers who blog. And the blogosphere has no professional publishers? What about Nick Denton? Really, a newspaper article should be better informed.
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Hey, I agree with you. In fact, I think Blogs ARE changing and ‘taking’ over the media! I’ve set up a blog to track the the most popular bloggers ~! Feel free to drop by~
Anyway, I think Andy Ho is tagging good use on bloggers to attract readers to StraitTimes.