The Internet is an extremely powerful tool till that the government not only used it to ease the access of the transparency policy but to use it as a platform to gain votes for campaigns, especially nationwide election.
Take the Singapore General Election 2011 for example.
Social Media was such a strong tool that our Prime Minister Mr Lee used it to interact with the citizens. Seriously, I don't think it is 'cool' to do that, I would rather prefer the old way of
interaction via meet-the-people session in neighborhood markets or community centre.
But I can't deny the fact that the feeling is quite awesome when someone of such high rank actually reply your questions and answered to your suggestions.
Youtube, oh my youtube. My twitter and facebook timeline was filled with rally videos of all the candidates. How is this so?
Well, the spread of news via the Internet is phenomenal. I still remember on the night of the announcement of the results, I knew the results via twitter instead of Ch 5 News or CNA.
Yes, the traditional media is THAT slow in conveying news and they even filtered some of the necessary information that was provided but not announced to the public.
For example like how a certain candidate wish for a recount and stuff like that, it wasn't reported in the Live news at all. Instead, there were lame broadcast of all the actual rally support sites in various stadiums in Singapore. lols.
Without the Internet, YAM AH MEE won't be so famous now. I found a ridiculous but yet funny parody of Mr Yam on youtube. :D
Not only in Singapore, in other countries like USA or UK, people monitor their government via the web. And politicians used such platforms to give speeches and create interesting videos
to engage and pull their votes.
The next election would be 2015, by then I'm eligible to vote. I think that the usage of the Internet for politics won't be a 'new' thing. Instead, perhaps there would really be such thing as Internet voting for those Overseas vote.
Well, let's see!
No comments:
Post a Comment