iBlog, iPodcast: The rise of citizen journalism using tech
MONDAY mornings were mundane for Malaysian Jeff Ooi. He would get up, go to work and analyze data about telecommunications companies.
But why did this business analyst for an advertising company find himself at the Selangor State Criminal Investigation Department (CID) on February 28, 2005, instead of going to work Monday morning?
That morning, Ooi was interrogated by the CID. He was under investigation for a probable crime under Section 298A of the Penal Code of Malaysia which carries a penalty of two to five years' imprisonment. Ooi was threatened with detention under the Internal Security Act, which allows for detention without trial for up to two years. He also faced prosecution under the Sedition Act of Malaysia.
Anyone can be charged with sedition, and journalists are known to have had their fair share of such charges. But Ooi was not a journalist. Even as journalists use the proverbial pen as a weapon mightier than the sword, Ooi was not trained in the ways of the traditional media professional. And yet he wielded a weapon equally powerful.
And so for two hours, he found himself being interrogated in prison that morning.
Later on October 23, 2005 in Singapore, 24-year-old photographer Lee Johnson almost got slapped with a three-year jail term and a fine of up to 5,000 Singapore dollars for violating Singapore's Sedition Act. What could he have done to get the Singapore government's attention?
How did the voices of Ooi and Lee reach government in the first place? What medium did they use?
These two private Asian individuals had something in common with many others across the region. Ooi and Lee were not part of traditional media, and yet they got the attention of hundreds of thousands of people. In so doing, they also got the attention of their respective governments which -- using citizens' vulnerability to strict state sedition and censorship laws -- slowly began to squeeze at that open wound.
So what do an advertising analyst and a photographer have in common? Ooi is a blogger. Lee is a podcaster. They used new media but they did not get training on the methods employed by traditional media people such as newspaper journalists, radio announcers or TV reporters. Neither do they appear in any traditional medium like newspapers, radio nor TV. Still, their voices were heard, resulting in the near-filing of sedition charges for Ooi and Lee. In the case of Ooi who has been blogging for three years, his online journal entries were first noticed by Malaysiakini, a news website that is purely online with no traditional media counterpart. His blog called Screenshots was linked to the news website in April 2003, expanding Ooi's readership base. However, it was on October 3, 2004 when he was first noticed by the mainstream press, being lambasted in an editorial of the New Straits Times which is owned by ruling political party Umno (United Malays National Organization).
On September 30, 2004, Ooi posted on Screenshots his views about Umno. The discussion outlined the contradiction between the values of Islam Hadhari, a theory of government based on the principles of Islam, and the alleged corruption of the ruling Malaysian party. But in mentioning dominant party Umno in his blog, Ooi ran against the government itself and hit a sensitive spot. The Umno party's New Straits Times naturally retaliated, slamming Ooi in its October 3, 2004 editorial. Soon, Ooi's name was in all the major newspapers in Malaysia. Ooi did not relent in questioning Umno policies, and eventually was drawn into a word war with New Straits Times Group editor-in-chief Kalimullah Hassan who referred to Ooi in an editorial as a "mere unknown blogger."
Four months later on that fateful Monday morning of February 28, 2005, Ooi was brought in for questioning by the Selangor State CID.
The New Straits Times Group has banned its employees from reading Ooi's blog. Today, the New Straits Times and sister-publication Berita Harian continue criticizing Ooi in behalf of ruling party Umno. The New Straits Times alone has a nationwide readership of 429,000 a day. Ooi fought back through his blog, which gets about 15,000 visits a day.
But this was not a battle of who had more readers. The point is how the blog of an individual citizen, through his own funding and effort and with no training in media, could in a span of three years merit the attention of a well-established news corporation like New Straits Times which has been around since 1845. Why would the newspaper even care? Why would its owners, the ruling Umno party, even worry about what a "mere unknown blogger" said? Why would a big newspaper publishing group issue an order not to read the posts of one particular blogger?
Lee of Singapore could probably relate to what Ooi went through. On September 12, 2005, the Singapore government invoked the Sedition Act -- the first time in 10 years and the first time for an online case -- to charge with sedition bloggers Nicholas Lim Yew, 25, and Benjamin Koh Song Huat, 27, for posting allegedly racist comments. On September 16, blogger Gan Huai Shi, a 17-year old student, was charged on seven counts of "promoting ill-will" in Singapore under Section 29 of the Sedition Act. It is a known fact that, charged with sedition, Singaporeans face prison terms of up to three years if convicted. Lee said he did not know any of the three bloggers, but he was questioning the all-encompassing Sedition Act and how it was used against them.
Lee said the Sedition Act had never before been used in Singapore against individuals, and that the three bloggers were separately charged as individuals in September. He believed this law was being used to attack individuals' right to free speech. In protest, he put up a podcast at a blog called TheDiatribe which he jointly constructed with friends. The blog was a personal one and was not political in nature, but Lee felt so strongly about the September sedition cases that he made a digital recording of his comments and turned it into a podcast so that, quite literally, his voice would be heard. Little did he know that, during the heat of the issue in Singapore, the Media Development Authority would also train its sights on him.
Lee was "gently reminded" by the government that he, too, could be subjected to charges of sedition if he continued to go where he was going. Lee tore down the podcast from TheDiatribe blog and left the other non-sensitive and non-political ones untouched.
Lee admitted that he had, indeed, been censored and came close to being charged with sedition the same way the three bloggers were in September. Still, he could not understand why the government would be afraid of his opinion because, he said, his podcast was not popular anyway and he was merely updating it as a hobby.
Indeed, what were they afraid of? Why would a government have an individual podcaster's views be censored?
Here we see state pressures clamping down on citizens. We are not even discussing freedom of the press here, for Ooi and Lee are not press people. But in these two examples, the same forces are clamping down on individuals. Why would individual citizens' views affect others when they do not have the reach of traditional media like newspapers, radio or TV?
Or do they?
Perhaps individual citizens are already empowered to the point that governments are realizing that, through new media such as blogs and podcasts, they could already rouse the rabble that are online.
Perhaps government is realizing that, like views from traditional media, views from the grassroots are also becoming influential, necessitating control measures before their influence and power become even greater.
On the traditional media front, why would established newspapers like New Straits Times pick on a lone blogger like Malaysia's Ooi? Could this also be acknowledgment that individual voices, with the help of new media, are gaining in strength and deserve an audience? Could it be that traditional media feel threatened?
"Sometimes mainstream newspapers pick up topics that are being discussed in blogs and develop them into stories," Ooi said. "So they get developed as news items in mainstream -- they start from blogs then are picked up by mainstream media and then hopefully they reach the pinnacle of administration. So we hope government becomes responsive through blogging efforts."
So now we see an upward direction in the information flow, or what citizen journalism advocate Dan Gillmor refers to as "bottom-up communications." From the citizens, views are expressed through new media such as blogs and podcasts. Media pick up those news and views and put them onto the mainstream. From the mainstream, the bloggers and podcasters get recognized and hopefully those views would be heard by state and economic leaders.
"We need to promote blogs and promote grassroots journalism," said Ooi. "We need to dismantle the power paradigm, that is, the power talking down to the people. It has to be the other way around."
In concrete terms, Ooi and Lee were not just bloggers and podcasters. Citizen Ooi was questioning Umno policies in Malaysia and citizen Lee was questioning the Sedition Act of Singapore.
An upward spiral of views from the grassroots to decision makers requires two things: realization and acknowledgment. Traditional media, government and commerce should first realize that the top-down approach no longer works in a connected knowledge economy where information cannot be monopolized nor restrained. Then comes acknowledgment that yes, indeed, the individual voices of citizens matter and that the agenda should be set by them.
Perhaps that is why censorship and sedition charges are being thrown at individual bloggers and podcasters. Perhaps they are growing more and more influential, and the old power base is being threatened.
We'll discuss this next week. (INQ7)