Singabloodypore

In response to the article below I post the following abstract of a paper presented recently at the Politics Web 2.0 International Conference held at the Royal Holloway University yesterday.

At one level the PAP have little to fear from the Singapore blogosphere - the discourse of communitarianism dominates online, (data gathered in 2006). The PAP have also made inroads into the political blogosphere by gaining 'access' to certain professional group blogs and their very own P65 is becoming an important node in the flow of information. Many may claim to never have heard of it on the street, but online is a different story.

And as for the Singapore Democtatic party website being declared Singapore's most popular political website it rarely appears as a node in the online social network.


The Singapore Political Blogosphere: What Form of Public Sphere?
Steven McDermott (University of Leeds)

Abstract

This paper is situated within the wider framework of the internet being the greatest force for democratisation the world has ever seen (Pitrodi 1993), and at the same time another means for disseminating propaganda, fear and intimidation in Singapore (Rodan 1997). This paper analyses the discourse and styles of discourse of the Singapore political blogosphere. Focusing on an event in 2006 and extracting a corpus of 29 blog posts, I will ask ‘which blogs are the key-players?’ and ‘what discourses and styles of discourse appear in the Singapore political blogosphere?’ The blogosphere in question is isolated from the global blogosphere and clearly demarcated by referring to Hurst (2006) and Yu-Ru Lin et al (2006). I have targeted blogs for textual data analysis using social network analysis uncovering the key-players of the Singapore political blogs with higher levels of ‘closeness centrality’ and ‘betweenness centrality’ (Nooy et al 2005). This study of a single event in 2006 provides an exploratory analysis of the position that the non-democratic nature of Singapore society shapes the development of online public spheres. It questions whether the internet engenders democracy or the dissemination of propaganda, fear and intimidation. I tentatively assert that the Singapore political blogosphere acts as a means of reinforcing the discourse of ‘communitarianism’ or ‘social cohesion / survivalism’ (Beng-Huat Chua 1997).