It really makes one wonder how people over there come up with the strangest ideas. After the Electric New Paper’s Blog idea, which AFAIK has failed to provoke any meaningful conversation in the blogosphere whatsoever except for a few snide remarks about how ridiculously lame the whole concept of a mainstream media outlet to sponsor bloggers, the Straits Times has decided to jump on the bandwagon too, with its website Star Blog.
There are a lot of things that just don’t look right with this sitch, and one of the most glaring ones is the star-studded lineup of involved bloggers. Or lack thereof, perhaps. Kway Teow Man, check. Dawn Yang, check. And of course, Xiaxue; check. But who are the rest of them?? Nick Fang is a journalist, Ju-Len is a freelance writer turned entrepreneur, and May and Choy are MTV hosts. Sorry dudes, I. have. never. heard. of. any. of. you. Bloggers, yes; star bloggers, hardly. “Star bloggers” is either some silly marketing name aimed at glitzing up (and not to mention simultaneously demeaning) the nature of conversations online, or some self-laudatory praise which doesn’t really live up to the expectation of the star-studded cast that such a moniker conjures up.
The moribund state of the Electric New Paper Blog reflects the incompatible nature of the top-down approach so commonly espoused within the Singapore establishments that gives the impression of a well-oiled propaganda machine. The blogosphere is about spontaneity, not script.
Which doesn’t mean that established MSM outlets are fundamentally incompatible with blogs per se. There are some ways to do it right. For example, Seed magazine, a popular science periodical, has managed to pull off a wildly successful coup in the blogosphere by paying for bloggers to move to their ScienceBlogs portal. (I, alas, am too timid to risk running afoul of US immigration policy by entering into a writing contract with them. Tempting as it is, one has to be careful when you’re here as an international student, especially in the era of Homeland Security.) If you’re even the least bit interested in contemporary science, ScienceBlogs has blogs that pretty much cover the gamut of modern science. Check out for example some of my favorite recent writings on the chemistry of Red Bull, the biology of maternal effect genes, the physics of launching a 2 kg hunk of precious metal into space, and the biology behind sleep, just to name a few. Yes the people behind Seed do things like a weekly Ask a Scienceblogger column, but such contributions are a small fraction of the overall content of Scienceblogs, not the dominant feature as they are in the Singapore implementations.
It’s the freshness, the spontaneity, that appeals. It is precisely that which disappears once you get someone to tell you what to write about, instead of on the subtle level of prompting or suggesting.
As with so many things, the devil is in the details. And like so many things Singaporean, the helicopter view is simply not detailed enough to execute any kind of consistent implementation that isn’t a pale shadow of the things wanted. Having a lets-jump-on-the-bandwagon-I-know-we’re-late-to-the-party-and-missed-out-on-the-uptide-but-better-late-than-never attitude that characterizes so many “innovations” in Singapore. And so is the lets-stomp-on-everything-with-a-size-1,000-shoe force of governance that steamrollers away opposition and dissent. Disagreement is for real; it’s part and parcel of intellectual ferment that is characteristic of democracy. Blogs are good for that because people write dissenting opinions all the time. People disagree, they have heated written conversations (yet another oxymoron that heralds a sign of the times), some kind of consensus is reached, and the next thing comes along. It’s unscripted, it’s live, it’s here and now, it’s wabi-sabi. Perfection is stasis, and stasis is death, which is why the quest for perfect blogs will never be successful. A blog is about me, now, not about some ideal form of expression. And this is why it’s not possible to keep singling out überfamous bloggers like mrbrown and Cowboy Caleb without somehow destroying the quintessence of what made them interesting to begin with. By putting them in the limelight, their opportunity to remain in the liminal transience of here and now is diminished, and turns them into something new; perhaps, something less interesting.
This is why my independence appeals to me. Let’s keep it real, please.
Update 200606211250: HTML formatting errors corrected
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