Author:
Meng Choon TanJuly 25, 2012
Author:
Meng Choon Tan
Commentary
A 24 year-old male introvert in Colorado, US walk into the local premier of the latest Batman movie – The Dark Knight. Without any rhyme or reason, he went into a shooting spree, firing into the audience during the screening started – killing a dozen of people, including a 3-month-old baby – and injuring well over 50 other people as well as causing trauma to the other survivors in the cinema as they witness the horrifying event unfolds.
A video of the event was soon posted on the Youtube, which showed the cinema goers rushing out, some bloodied, some confused – but all shocked. The video went viral and this event soon found its way into the debating agenda of Michael Bloomberg [1], an independent challenging the upcoming Presidential election, which started pressuring the incumbent President Obama and other competing candidate Mitt Romney on their stand on the hot potato topic of gun control in US. This may obviously be seen a gesture to score a political point in the minds of the voters as he competes for the role as the next in line in the business of democratic government.
Closer at home, the inquisitive mind of a frequent visitor [2] of a popular local online forum picks up from the news that a government agency has purchased a batch of bicycles to assist in their day-to-day work. What began as a question on why this agency would spend so much on a bicycle led into a series of investigative search and analysis on the internet on the procedures, people, companies involved in this public tender procurement and his revelations on the forum on the relationships between these people involved. Although the authorities were quick to the defense of the purchase decision initially – it was soon apparent that this was perhaps not business as usual. At the time of writing this article, the officer in charge of this procurement department has been suspended from work pending further investigation. Soon, it will be of no surprises to that the current opposition parties starts using this incident as example of the increasing public scandals plaguing the current government and to trumpet the fallacy of the current ruling party’s government’s strategy of high pay and high integrity.
In both these 2 incidents, it is apparent that the overt availability of the internet and how pervasive is the public engaged with the available social media platforms today has fundamentally changed the way of how politicians compete in the business of a Democratic [3] Government [4].
As far as the general principles of “By the People and For the People” has persisted through the evolution of the republic democracy, never have governments across the world has had to subject itself to the expected accountability of today. The level of public scrutiny, the expected transparency and the 24-by-7-continuous feedback and criticism has opened up avenues of attack by competing parties, each jostling to capture the mindshare of the people by championing for the righteous cause of the people.
This increasing availability of relevant informationsources for political, economic, social, and demographical events that potentially affect the country has intensify the challenges from the competing parties, whom increasing has access to the arsenal of informational weapons, each aiming at discrediting the merits of the current ruling parties.
The continual trend of politicizing of events by politicians as they compete for acceptance by the people may hence lead to the increasing fragmentation of opinions among citizens, as everyone feels the entitlement of their personal voice and their opinionated disagreements.
And the irony of it all?
What started as the altruistic objective of the internet was to develop a global platform capable of sharing information to those who needs it and to collaborate with others remotely to bring about more good and innovations to the world. However, at the current rate it is developing into, this tool of collaboration may soon lose its original intentions and leads to further polarization of people than in creatingsocial integration – leading to an ultimate collapse of the business of government.
Appendix
1. Bloomberg says Obama, Romney should debate gun control.
2. CSI attempt: nParksBrompton procurement process ended up with a dodgy winning bidder!
3. Definition of Democracy, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
4. Definition of Government, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia