When Wee Shu Min, the teenage daughter of a Singapore member of parliament stumbled across the blog of a Singaporean who wrote that he was worried about losing his job, she thought she'd give him a piece of her mind. Here's how the story began according to a news report on the CNN website: The first story involves Wee Shu Min, the teenaged daughter of a member of the Singaporean Parliament, who become the center of a national controversy about economic privilege and almost ended her father's political career because of something she had posted on her blog. Since two of them involve young female bloggers, these may be a truer picture of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild. I thought I would share them with you here because of the insights they offer into Singaporean culture and the ways that these technological changes are being understood in this country. As I have spoken to people here, three very distinct stories of youth "misbehavior" online have cropped up again and again as reference points for this conversation. Their children are going places and doing things that were not part of their own childhood experiences and they are concerned about ways that these decisions may come back and hurt them later. What is clear from my many conversations here is that parents in Singapore as in other parts of the world worry about what young people are doing online. What's Wrong with Singaporean Teen Bloggers? They are both knowledgible and thoughtful about the issues they confront as they transition from an era where there is tight control over the press to one where there is broad democratic participation in the blogosphere. Well, that's damning with faint praise, isn't it? Many of them have advanced degrees from elite institutions - many of them have doctoriates - and then approach problems with a calm and humane rationalism. Instead, they needed to find ways to help new bloggers develop a deeper understanding of their civic responsibilities.įrankly, the government officials I have met in Singapore are better educated than anyone I can imagine in the Bush administration. Tan argued that it would be impossible to hold onto old constraints on expression or to close off possible access to these new technologies, even if governments wanted to do so. Tony Tan, my host, the former Deputy Prime Minister and current head of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation, drew a comparison between the invention of movable type in the 15th century (and the print revolution that followed) and the invention of Movable Type (the bloging software) a few years ago and the profound impact it was having world wide. When I was speaking at the Singaporean National Library, Dr. That said, spending time here has given me a much more nuanced picture of what lies behind those stereotypes and of the ways that such a society is confronting the potential anarchy being brought about by the new kinds of participatory culture being fostered on the web. My first impression then was something like that planet in Star Trek: The Next Generation where one could be put to death for stepping on the grass. After all, one of the first things that I ever learned about this country was that the law specified that one could be thrashed with a bamboo cane for chewing gum in public. Singapore is so known for its work ethic and sense of decorum that I have joked off and on about marketing a series of videos of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild which consisted of school girls in uniforms throwing peanut shells on the floor of the Raffles Hotel bar with wild abandon before returning to studying for their exams.
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