Tarn How Tan - Battle for Hearts and Minds: New Media and Elections in Singapore

Arun Mahizhnan

Rashomon Effect is what comes to mind when we look back to the comments on and interpretations of the 2011 Singapore General Election (GE2011). As in the 1950 movie Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa, where different eyewitnesses to an event offer very different testimonies to what happened, the results of GE2011 led to a number of commentaries that, while based on the same events, differed in their summations. Some in the Singapore blogging community claimed that the new media,certain political commentators pointed to the real life problems that remained unresolved or exacerbated in recent times as the main reason for the sharp drop in popular support for the PAP. Yet others argued that the growing disenchantment with the ruling party and incumbency fatigue after 52 years of rule by the same party were the underlying reasons for the inexorable decline of the PAP.

This book is an attempt to mitigate the Rashomon Effect and make sense of conflicting testimonies on the battle for the hearts and minds of the Singapore electorate during GE2011. It focuses primarily on the effect of Internet-related electoral activities to influence or win over the voting public. It attempts to explain the different uses of the new media by different players in the media sphere and analyse their impact on electoral behaviour.

To ground the book on empirical evidence, the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) took unprecedented steps to organise this particular study of a Singapore General Election and the role of the Internet and other technologies such as the mobile phone in the election. Though Singapore politics has been the subject of numerous studies, few have focused on the electoral process. Fewer still have examined the role and impact of the new media on elections. IPS itself has been paying attention to this phenomenon since 2001, when there were clear signs of Internet inroads into the body politic in Singapore and the elections in particular. However, they were nascent, if not simple, attempts at the use of new communication technologies by the government, the political parties, the public intellectuals, and ordinary citizens who sought to sway public opinion. The IPS research on the new media and GEs in 2001 and again in 2006 was also limited in scope. However, when GE2011 was announced early in 2011, IPS decided to mount the most extensive research to date covering several key aspects of Internet applications in electoral communications. It convened 15 scholars, at that time mostly from the National University of Singapore, the Nanyang Technological University and the Singapore Institute of Management University, specialising in media studies, information science and public communication. Each aspect of the study was designed to delve deep into the subject matter and provide hitherto unavailable understanding and insight.

The Institute of Policy Studies also launched the largest national survey to date of media use by the Singapore public in the electoral process. It covered 2,000 respondents and probed their media consumption patterns in gathering, using and disseminating political information related to GE2011.

When the initial findings from the 15 researchers were completed, they were presented to the public at a conference in October 2011. Those conference presentations were later revised and edited to form the current book. It represents the collective effort of concerned scholars who wanted to provide a better understanding of the role of the new media in the electoral process in Singapore. Hopefully, it would lead to further and deeper research into future elections.

One of the reasons why the Rashomon Effect is pervasive in discussions of the new media is the nature of the beast. It is so unlike any other media in human history that it poses tremendous difficulty in understanding what it is really about. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, both from Google, start their book The New Digital Age with this telling observation: The internet is among the few things humans have built that they dont truly understand. Part of the problem is the term media itself. Because media has been used for almost a century to collectively refer to the mass media made up by newspapers, radio and television, it has also become the shorthand for the cyber medium and the cyber content this medium carries. Therein lies one of the fundamental problems in our media space: the expectation that this medium must function the way the other two media print and electronic media do, when, in fact, the new media is not at all like old media nor can it behave likewise. New media is a different species altogether. The difference is not unlike that between Neanderthals and Humans, though there are some similarities between the two.