Term 2 Week 4 Task 4

New Media – Power to the people or threat to stability? Discuss this in the light of the arguments raised in the two articles and substantiate your ideas with examples of your own. Your response should consist of at least two content paragraphs and be at least 300 words long.



New media of the new age gives people a say in everything under the sun. With the new media, people are able to write online diaries - blogging. Blogging promotes freedom of speech. It allows people to voice out their own opinions and to argue for any controversial topics raised. Political issues which are once out-of-topic to mouths of many are now openly discussed in blogs. Bloggers are given a room to shout out their point of views. Living in this IT-dominating era, we have more choices of what to do and what to say. People possess the power to say anything they want "freely". This new media brought to us not only convenience but also promotes decision-making. Through online forum, people are now able to participate in decision making and offer their ideas. It serves as a platform to press freedom and an opportunity to develop media careers. Feed backs and comments can be exchanged through blogs and forum.

Another form of new media, the Short Message Service (SMS) are omnipresent. In advance developing country like Singapore, almost everyone carries a mobile phone. People use mobile phone to keep in touch with their loved ones or business partners locally or globally. SMS is even more commonly in use by teenagers. Informative and entertaining messages are sent via the SMS. New media helps in connecting the people in the universe together. It is a power to the people.

However, new media brought not only pros but cons too. With the new media, people are free to express their feelings on anything and everything. They may be insensitive towards what they post and end up being sued. For instance, last year, two teenagers posted some religious remarks on their blogs and they got fined by Singapore government. Many countries also start to imprison cyber-dissidents. For example in the article, some bloggers and journalists were imprisoned for posting materials found offensive to Islam. Some had being sentenced because of posting political issues online. This acts as deterrence to many potential cyber-dissidents.

Due to the increase in fake news and untrue articles, some countries come out with the government censorship which blocks or closes any websites or blogs containing trace of untrue information or offensive contents. Take for example, China demanded Google to filter off any anti-government websites before it is allowed to be set up in China. More examples are the banning of all political websites advocating Western Sahara's in Morocco and publications mentioning women's rights in Iran. In some places like Ethiopia, blog hosting servers are appearing. They are inaccessible to many. This is to completely wipe out the place for any dissident discussions.

I think that new media is more of a power to the people than threat to stability. The number of people using the media as personal leisure and for business purposes far outweighed the number of people for illegal usage. Thus I think the government should not block the blogs entirely. They should encourage its people to post more online thoughts so that they are aware of how its population thinks of them. Creating disorder in the country by bloggers should be deterred but that's only a handful of them. Therefore, in conclusion, I strongly think that new media is a power to the people not a threat to stability.