trends in ge-postings

here's a quick overview of my thoughts concluded from my observations of people's postings in the internet at large, from my facebook account and from my interactions with my friends. i must state here that the limitations of my observation was in the fact that a large percentage of active personalities in my facebook that made these postings were gay and that my conclusions may be skewed towards this particular group of individuals. nonetheless, i thought it would be interesting to pen some of these observations.

like it or not, factors that were less tangible and/ or objective were important areas that mattered a lot to my friends. people's persona, habits, sexuality, looks, personal attributes, etc were all cited/ expressed in writing or concluded from postings. there is also a consistent behaviour across all sexuality when it comes to being influenced by specific individuals/ personality as opposed to being influenced by policies/ party lines. on the other hand, people who were exposed to policy making tend to be more calibrated in their comments and were more forgiving when it came to harsh policies.

here the run down of my conclusions:

• senior officers who have been involved in policy-making tend to be more objective in their views about the policies raised during the built-up to election day. their postings suggest they see things more objectively and accepted the fact that there was no such thing as perfect policies. rather, all policies comes with pros and cons and whichever solution was adopted, there must be trade offs. having said this, it would be wrong to suggest this group of people were totally accepting of difficult policies. rather, when there were disagreements, it was expressed objectively and the views expressed were clearly targeted at the issue and not the person. this was in stark contrast to a senior non-commissioned officer who remarked "i don't care, i am a tax payer and i pay them. they are the ruling party and i expect them and their policies to be perfect".

• non-commissioned officers (regardless of how senior they were) who were not involved in policy-making tend to be more emotional in their views. their views tend to be more narrowly scoped towards specific single stand alone issues rather than as a systemic whole. their postings tend to be very personal in contrast to the views expressed by senior officers. their posting patterns and trends do not differ much from those "civilians" at large. to some extend, i suspect those in the forces were even more critical given the many sweeping statements i read/ hear (an example as reflected above).

• there is a larger number of my gay/ bisexual friends who expressed liking for anything that is anti-ruling party. many click "like" for any parties that came their way other than the ruling party itself. many clicked "like" for all the opposition parties (and leaving out the ruling party). these people seemed to have a closed mindset and that anything related to the ruling party is bad and that there is no further need to discuss further.

• there was a superbly strong sense of anti-ruling party in my facebook page. so much so that everything they (the ruling party) said or did was deemed inappropriate, regardless of the fact that the same was done by opposition parties. eg one posted that "the ruling party are wasting money while they could have channelled the funds for producing their manifesto to help the needy" when he recieved the manifesto from the ruling party. he did not make the same comment when he recieved the same from opposition party.

• people who post comments against the ruling party tend be expect nothing less than perfection from the ruling party. as for their expectations of oppostion parties, not a single person posted anything. all tend to be more forgiving. one even justified for the opposition's lack of plans as "to be expected".

• many people i interacted with could not give me any clear reasons why they oppose any specific policy. a couple of them even get angry and raised their voice at me (so much for objective agree to disagree start of the conversation). there was an occasion when i had dinner with a group of friends and the gathering ended very awkwardly when some of the members got emotional.

• many reposted contents from youtubes, online political sites (particularly temasek review, and online citizen), as well as other ngo sources to support their causes and beliefs. for example, one posted an article from marua (an ngo) citing that based on coverage (expressed in inches per article per party), the mainstream media had been unfair to opposition parties. when queried how the statistics would look like if the statistics were divided by total number of candidates fielded instead of per party, he couldn't answer.

• sexuality played a part in peoples' choices (if the views expressed in their postings in an indication of their choice of party they align themselves to). this was noted particularly when there was a gay candidate. it was observed that more of my gay friends clicked "like" for dr v (the one from the opposition party) and many also posted comments about him being potentially the first gay mp to speak for gay persons. the number of people clicking "like" spiked the day the video was released. one friend was so excited about it he smsed me to take a look at it. another one even posted praises for dr v's speeches and followed his rallies closely. in contrast, no straight friends of mine "like" dr v. their views about the various parties seemed to be more generic and reflect the trend seen amongst the larger population (eg liking nicole seah, skewed towards wp, and so on)

• almost all who posted actively in my facebook liked nicole seah. many also expressed dislike or contempt with tpl. one even went to the extend of saying that "he totally despised" her. when queried why or what did she do to him that warrant such a strong comment, he couldn't give any specific reasons other than she's inexperienced, couldn't give a proper speech and has a kate spade bag. as to why they liked nicole seah, responses vary from "i don't know, i just like her", to "she a good talker", to "she's pretty".

these were some of my own observations and what i hear when i interacted with my friends, both online as well as face-to-face, during the built-up to the election day. to me, it reflected the poor job that the ruling party had done to engage people on the ground. these day, people are better educated. thus, people need to be better engaged. for all policies, there will never be a win-all. all policies come with trade offs. some people will fall off the cracks. for all policies, as much as there are people who agree, there will also be a whole lot of people who disagree. but if explained properly, people who disagree, could possibly accept. but if it is not explained properly, people who disagree will never accept. in fact, even for people who agree, they may not be totally convinced and the level of acceptance can be questionable...

such are the challenges of people engagement. and as in all communications, there is the "u" n "i" elements in the centre of the word. even if the ruling party want to engage, the people on the ground must want to listen. and as of now, my sensing is this - people are no longer interested to listen to what the ruling party wants to say, to them, everything the ruling party says are tantamount to "lies" and "propaganda", everything that the opposition says are "correct". this is made worst by the fact that often, people do not see the distinction now know how to draw line between party politics and government policies. this, again is to be expected given that the ruling party has been in power for such a long time, people has already seen them to be one and the same. so, with cynicism, everything that the government do become percieved as being done to preserve the ruling party's grip on power.

such are the challenges. and it is difficult to do nation-building when there is such a mindset.

let's see how things go from here.