Singapore bloggers and Internet regulations

A group of Singapore bloggers hold public forum on Internet freedom and regulation.

They want, amidst others, “a guarantee of freedom to use the Internet to discuss political issues and promote political views”. Hm…wishful thinking?

PR Academy Conference 2008

I attended the PR Academy Conference 2008 a couple of weeks ago. The focus was on new media:

“Strategic Communication: Communicating in a New Media Environment”. It seems that new media is all the rage now, esp in the field of PR and advertising.

Well, there were some good speakers and some not so good speakers. In fact, with a couple of speakers, one couldn’t help but wonder if they had any experience with new media at all, or if their interpretation of new media was aligned with the rest of ours.

Anyway, I thought that the GOH Dr Vivian Balakhrishnan gave a pretty good speech on the differences between traditional and new media, and how the content and distribution of content has changed over time. He also mentioned the need to make presentations visually interesting and also short.

Now, I’ve been wondering – there’s been so much talk about the young today (digital natives) who are impatient and who can only take in bite (byte)-sized information, and how they would be bored easily with any long lectures or notes. Now, could this be a chicken and egg problem in that because we think that people today are not able to handle longer texts, that we give them shorter ones, and in so doing, are we also not creating a whole generation of people who can only text SMSes and Twitter their ideas in 140 characters?

A colleague who also attended the session raised an interesting point – would we need to talk about new media in a few years’ time? Are we discussing this so much because we are in the transition stage between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ so to speak, that in a few years’ time when ‘new’ media becomes ‘older’, we no longer have to garpple so much with it? Hm..interesting.

That brings up another point – do we define new media as anything associated with Web 2.0? And like the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘post-modernism’, there will crystallise a specific definition to go with those terms? Or will the term ‘new media’ encompass the constantly evolving changes that take place? So, anything that’s new media is ‘new media’!

Another interesting observation I made is that often, it’s the digital immigrants who talk about and study new media. A number of speakers so far who talk about new media at the conferences I have attended are clearly digital immigrants. 

Could it be that digital immigrants, having lived through the changes, are in a better position to study and talk about the transition? Or could it simply be that the digital natives are too busy using new media to talk about it or analyse it? For them, could it be simply a following of the famous adage – Just Do It!

Any comments, anyone?

Twitter Writing Contest Results!

About a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Twitter Writing Contest organised by Copyblogger.

Well, the results of the Twitter Writing Contest are out and posted in Copyblogger’s latest posting.

Alas, yours truly didn’t win the 8GB iPod!

But here are the winning entries, taken from Copyblogger:

First Place:

Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

 

Second Place:

Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head.

 

Third Place:

When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven.

 

First Honorable Mention:

Happily sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her revenge.

 

Second Honorable Mention:

The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes.

10, 000 hits!

This may not mean much to anyone else but me, but thought I’d just like to announce that Blogscapes has passed the 10, 000-hit mark!

Frankly, when I started the blog late 2006, little did I know then, that the compulsion to maintain the blog and write regular posts would be with me, and so it has! Here’s to 10, 000 more hits!