15 - Control-shift: The Internet and Political Change in Singapore

Summary

NET-IMPACT

One night in May 2006, a Singaporean man went to Hougang town to attend an election rally organized by the opposition Workers’ Party. He found the rally site impenetrably packed, so he tried to get a better view from an adjacent apartment block. The lift lobby was full of other people with the same idea, so he climbed the stairs. Only on the thirteenth floor did he finally find some space in the open corridor overlooking the field. He took photographs of what he saw below: a sea of people surrounding a brightly lit stage. He listened to the opposition candidates talk about rising medical bills and other trials of life under People's Action Party (PAP) rule. Later he observed how one elderly man near him was moved to tears. Then, he went home.

It was what Alex Au did next that cemented his place in the story of the 2006 General Election. He posted his report of the rally, “On Hougang Field”, on his blog, Yawning Bread.1 His photo of the crowd was picked up and passed around online with the kind of enthusiasm reserved elsewhere for exposés of sex scandals or high-level corruption. Like these more sensational genres of news, the image of Hougang field was not supposed to go public. For more than two decades, the national newspapers and broadcasters had obeyed an unwritten rule never to show wide shots of opposition rally crowds, which are usually more engorged and energized than the ruling party's events.

Websites such as Alex Au's Yawning Bread blog showed that the elite media could no longer dictate what would go public in Singapore. Their impact, however, should not be exaggerated. The profusion of independent writing and video recordings during the election campaign did not have an appreciable effect on the outcome. The PAP was defeated only by the two incumbent opposition Members of Parliament; it secured two thirds of the popular vote. The lack of any immediate impact on PAP hegemony is not surprising. After all, the independent online media was not revealing anything that the public did not already know. They were not uncovering government misdeeds. Au's Hougang Field picture did not contain new information; it simply held up a mirror to the public. Any consequences of such media activism would be long-term and subtle.