Sunday, September 11, 2005

What Ephraim Spells For The Singaporean Blogsphere and Political Discourse

this has got to be the most classic moment in the history of the singaporean blogsphere. an amazingly hilarious episode that underscores the power and pervasiveness of blogs as the defining alternative medium in singapore.

it all started when this guy with a weird name ephraim wrote a somewhat ill-conceived and sparsely argued letter to the straits times forum complaining about how he was outraged at the use of expletives on rockson's blog after he decided to check it out upon reading a feature on some teen magazine which described rockson's blog as 'hilarious'. (the very fact that a 20+y/o post NS male would actually still read teen magazines is in my opinion, far more disturbing). *update: it appears that the magazine at question was Lime , i guess that makes it marginally less disturbing than if it was Teens or Teenage.* whether or not his argument was indeed cogent is really beside the point considering what happened later.

rockson then put up a post in response to this ephraim's letter which gave a tinge of suggestion that he might '..not blog so much now, wait kena more people complain'. that pissed the hell outta the teeming legions of rockson's readers and the subsequent furor was phenomenal, and perhaps even unprecedented to say the least.

within a day, there was an overwhelming outpour of comments in support of rockson on his blog either pleading him to continue blogging, flamming that ephraim fellow and it didn't stop at that. it was an amazing case of uncoordinated mass flamming with supporters of rockson like bengue fever setting up a new blog just to flame the ephraim fellow and some others even searching the entire internet just to find out the url of ephraim's blog to post on rockson's comments board, encouraging people to go flame his blog. one guy even went as far as to find out ephraim's friendster profile:

24 SLK said...

ATTENTION EVERYONE!! IVE FOUND EPHRAIM'S FRENSTER!! ITS THIS ADDRESS!! GO KAN HIS NA BEI CHAO CHEE BYE EVERI1!!!

http://www.friendster.com/user.php?uid=2966696

in less than half a day, ephraim's tag board was spammed entirely with rockson's ginna flamming him. the tags are fucking hilarious, and following it throughout the day in the accursed comp lab really cracked me up making my mugging day alot less torturous for me.

the tags ranged from the Rational...

anonymous:
ur blog is doing way more damage to young people with its inaneness, its "celebrities are gods" mode of thinking & its utter egoistical & boring writing style & its totla lack of social conscience.

Lalaland: Perhaps it was not wise to write such a holier-than-thou letter to the press was it? We dont begrudge you your views, but perhaps the medium through which you expressed them.

...to the Cryptic

phua bye: u think u sibeh zai, report the blog to ST is sibeh hiong, lim peh tell u, u wrong liao.. u go out arh, really becareful leh, if not better wear a mask, or not confirm sure kana whack by rockson's fanclub de. retard. trust urself to get involve in this.

anonymous you are a dead man, ephraim. Rest in peace...

...to those that question him on his sexuality and NS credentials (it's unbelievable how rockson's fans will go to great lengths, sieving ephraim's entire archive just to find flame fodder)

Ephraim is a Sissy: Hey sissy E-Frame Who kena BMT recourse, when are you going to write to the Straits Times again to complain about people "spamming" your tagboard ? Oooohhh, I'm sooo scared. Whatcha gonna do ? Set your Mediacorpse and PAP friends upon us, call the ISD ?

fucking cheebye: lancheow la fucker. serve NS they dont scold cheebye like puncutations arh? which unit were u in? music and dance company? fuck you ok cheebye kia. self denial, self righteous piece of shit. lancheow face


....and to the downright HILARIOUSLY inane!

24 slk: eh fcuk face.. wah lan eh.. ur face sibeh er xin leh.. if u go out people nvr whack u, sun will rise from ur mothers chee bye. bastard u are.


my personal favourite -

anonymous:
your blog is as boring as your stupid articles. U will never be Rockson type blogger because you suck your cock too much. Take $50 put in left hand. Masturbate with right hand. Then pay yourself ok!


somewhere along the line, a certain tagger LeNN went against the flow and defended ephraim using -wait for this- the very vulgarities which ephraim found offensive. a sharp eyed rockson's ginna discovered that the IP addresses of ephraim and LeNN were identical, so it must have been that ephraim fellow defending himself with a pseudonym. to be fair, ephraim might have had a legitimate reason as to why he was so peeved at seeing expletives (maybe the expletives reminded him of a ___ (insert random physical/sexual abuse) he suffered during his traumatic childhood, we'll never know). but the pseudonym tagging was just a blantant act of cowardice and it destroyed whatever credibility in defending his POV. and as i type, the flamming continues.

it seems apparant that ephraim is pretty comfortable and perhaps rejoicing at his new found notoriety. in that aspect at least, Ephraim has made his first giant step towards achieving his dream of becoming some journalist/singer/actor/random celebrity - having subscribed himself to the quinessential media-whore belief that negative publicity, is better than no publicity at all.

********************************************************************************

Yet beyond the sheer humour of the whole shebang, there are some pretty plausible negative repurcussions on the singaporean cyber community.

Firstly, as evident in the militant fanfare surrounding xiaxue and rockson (though unlike the former, i just can't see how anyone can possibly dislike good o' rockson), it makes us wonder if the singaporean blogsphere is moving in a direction that is intolerant to alternative points of views. as described in my previous post, the advent of idiotic and unconstructive anonymous flammers on 武则天 's blog makes the whole point of using blogs as a means of discourse, a much less interesting affair when one is constantly spammed wif ridiculous comments.

Secondly, and more pertinently, i'm rather concerned the demonstration of the media prowess of blogs through the ephraim affair might actually invite unwanted attention or perhaps even intervention upon the singapore cyber community.

in the light of how singapore's media coverage is disproportionately skewed against opposition politic parties, several moderate opposition politicians such as Goh Meng Seng of the Worker's Party or perhaps Malaysia's Lim Kit Siang have been quick to exploit the growing popularity of blogs as an avenue of political expression and jumped on the bandwagon. Bearing in mind that the Singapore General Election is due in less than a year, the advent of political blogs has become a considerably effective tool for political publicity.

moreover, since whether or not an individual's weblog is a 'political website' or more importantly whether the Singapore Broadcasting Authority has jurisdiction over singaporean webpages which are hosted on foreign domains is still essentially a legal grey area. it may even allow opposition politicians to circumvent the various institutional limitations on political discourse over the internet, such as the 2001 amendment to the Parlimentary Elections Act , or the legislation requiring all 'political websites' to register themselves with the SBA.

so how does ephraim fit into the equation? a common theme evident in quite a few pro-rockson flammers tags was that ephraim has almost become a euphemism for the catch-all determinant of discontent brewing in the lives of the flammers. ephraim simply offered himself as a convenient face and name for the singapore's anonynmous bogeyman, a focal point of singaporean subdued frustration. these tags on ephraim's tagboard would give u a good illustration:

Ephraim is a Sissy: Hey sissy E-Frame Who kena BMT recourse, when are you going to write to the Straits Times again to complain about people "spamming" your tagboard ? Oooohhh, I'm sooo scared. Whatcha gonna do ? Set your Mediacorpse and PAP friends upon us, call the ISD ?

jay christ: Confirm liao, Diaphram Loy is a PAP bootlicker and sycophant. Better dun let me see you outside hor...

And of course, the anti-PAP sentiment comes as no surprise considering that some of these flammers were also directed from sammyboy.com. But considering that beyond the bengish language, the content in the majority of Rockson's posts actually bears some political undertone and satirical criticisms on the ruling government, the sheer scale of the demonstration of popular support for the views which Rockson stands for, underlines the fact that the Rockson has become a personification of the heartland discontentment. And for the first time, the teeming Singaporean masses has had not only a folklore anti-hero, but also express issues close to the heart of the average singaporean in a very palatable way. Rockson has certainly come a long way since he was first featured on 武则天's blog . And ironically, the Rockson phenomena is somewhat the creation of the Singaporean Bureaucracy ever since he was featured on the Straits Times during the NKF scandal.

if past records are anything to go by, as evident in the past implementations of legislations such as the Political Films Act. The PAP government has had a rather effective knack at implementing measures that limit political publicity. And should the increasing pervasiveness of political blogging be deemed as threading the periphery of the OB markers, we may be staring at a less optimistic future for political discourse on the Singaporean blogsphere. It is perhaps for this very reason, to avoid the roving eye of the OB patrols, that tomorrow.sg actively chose not to feature the juicy details of the Rockson/Ephraim affair and opting in favour of the mundane, OB friendly tags. no one know how exactly any limitations on political blogging can be done, but with the will, there probably is gonna be a way.

13 Comments:

Blogger mooiness said...

Holy smokes dude ... u wrote this at nearly 3 in the morning?! What substances have you been ingesting to be this lucid at that hour? ;)

Speaking of tomorrow.sg's selective postings, wtf is up with that blog of the son of an ex-Prez of Sg!? Why is his worthy of mention? At first read, it's nothing more than a rich playboy's mundane diary of what he's doing and who he's seen with. Fuck that.

p.s. might have to turn on your word verification thing - you are getting comment-spam. :)

Sunday, September 11, 2005 4:56:00 PM  
Blogger the virgin undergrad said...

i've been running on Redbull for the past 3 weeks and it's really fucking up my bio clock. Arggh, i hate mid sems!

yeah tomorrow.sg is getting less of of an interesting place of late. in fact, it has almost become an advertisement space for indie events.

Sunday, September 11, 2005 5:31:00 PM  
Blogger Sheena said...

Great post, dude. Nicely balanced, informative, and I like your way of taking subtle digs at people without stooping to the level of flamers (but then again most of them can't even string 3 words together into a grammatical sentence). Great job!

Sunday, September 11, 2005 7:42:00 PM  
Blogger socute333 said...

vir

wah you actually wrote a dissertation about this ephraim-rockson saga... very well researched but think you should concentrate more on your studies and not this kind of wu liao stuff... having said that i actually like rockson

Sunday, September 11, 2005 8:00:00 PM  
Blogger the virgin undergrad said...

merenwen> thanks, it's just one of those hilarious episodes that really makes the whole blogging experience so interesting

hiao auntie> its the sheer boredom and frustration of exams that drove me to blog i guess. one more day...so near yet so far, sigh. hey, aren't u having assignments as well? lol

Monday, September 12, 2005 12:20:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very nice post and very analytical too. I agree with what you wrote. Today's Forum has a reader pointing out one of your points: i.e. Rockson is the voice of the marginalised. And that people read his blog because he has substance not because he is vulgar.

Monday, September 12, 2005 7:27:00 AM  
Blogger sÞ¡ηηєє said...

wow ur this post is like a writeup at stratittimes... an analysis of Singapore Community towards blogging.. or I shold say "There's still mankind or singaporean spirit in Sinagpore?" and "Not all singaporeans are afraid to stand up for others!!"

good write up really, i enjoy it :)

Monday, September 12, 2005 11:17:00 AM  
Blogger ahxing said...

Haha. I'm hovering between amusement and sympathy for this fellow in question. Moved his blog of 3 years amid strings of tirades from rockson's gung ho fans; the price to pay for playing good guy against the almighty rockson. God knows whether he deserves it all.

This episode distinctly displayed the staggering influence of heavy-weight bloggers. In this case, rockson had doubtlessly flexed his muscles over cyber space.

Anyhow, nice analysis of the rockson vs ephraim saga. Pleasant read.

Monday, September 12, 2005 11:22:00 AM  
Blogger the virgin undergrad said...

anonynmous> yup that is very true, rockson is definitely an ah beng who can think critically.

spinee> thanks, i'm glad u enjoyed it.

ahxing> speaking of the muscling, the most amazing thing is , unlike a similar episode about a year back i think, when xiaxue posted a link of someone who supposedly plagarised her blog and asking her readers to go flame the other girl; rockson never suggested that to his readers.
the entire flame campaign happened as a readers initiative with various offering to post info about ephraim's blog/email/friendster etc. if the subject matter was a political issue instead, the scale and nature of the flamming will definitely give the government some pressing concern which also spells bad news for the blogsphere.

Monday, September 12, 2005 1:38:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Firstly, it's cathaRsis, not caRthasis little one.
Anyway, I just chanced across this on tomorrow.sg

It's really quite simple. A media circulation should never have featured a crass blog however 'hilarious' it is. Don't get me wrong, some posts are funny and I read it too. The crux however lies in the fact that most magazines in Singapore are general publications.
I've worked in the editorial industry, and I can tell you that the article was probably dumped it in as a quick fix to lack of content, period. The editors were obviously not doing their job of reviewing content AND making sure their writers come up with articles that pertains to their image and readerbase.

If anyone thought it was a bona-fide promotion of blogging, think again. In fact many of the media-exaltation of blogs these days are simply that - easy content that interests the audience.

Monday, September 12, 2005 2:53:00 PM  
Blogger the virgin undergrad said...

anony> thanks for the spelling check, never would have bothered to check it out.

since u spoke about ur work experience in the editorial industry (which i'm assuming to be in singapore), just outta curiousity, would u feel there's a strong culture of self-censorship in the journalism/publication industry?

Monday, September 12, 2005 10:20:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

no problem. I liked your review anyway.

*Didn't realise I ended up writing an essay. Had it published on a blog instead for future reference: http://soliloquy-of-fall.blogspot.com/2005/09/q-would-u-feel-theres-strong-culture.html

Tuesday, September 13, 2005 2:42:00 AM  
Blogger the virgin undergrad said...

max> i replied to ur blog

Wednesday, September 14, 2005 12:02:00 AM  

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