All the questions in this post are rhetorical

Having been pretty busy of late (What’s! On! Xiamen! isgoingtobetheofficialguidebookforthe World! Choir! Games! Thatseriouslyrocks), I’ve not been keeping up to date with important Singapore news, such as that headline grabber of some bloody interactive website the Straits Times has launched to make up for the crappiness of their news one.

Do you feel a rant coming on?

Fucking hell, what’s this “celebrity bloggers” pap? You know who a real celebrity on the blogging scene is? Someone who’s done the time, someone who works hard on their website and spends years honing their voice, not to be famous, but because they just love doing it. These journalists and MTV “Veejays” are merely (barely) famous people (and don’t even get me started about the lone existing blogger of the lot, blogwhores are not “celebrity bloggers” either) used to subvert the genuine independence of personal writing online and create a virtual, but very confining set of “rules” for what a “good” blog should be.

The thing I loved about blogging in Singapore back then was that virtually no one knew what the word meant. Now it’s become this ridiculous trend, this thing that the powers that be have decided must be co-opted into the nation’s approved-of culture. Why can’t they leave anything alone? The fun of personal sites and writing is that it’s freeform, it’s not bound by any rules or guidelines. Now they’ve got fucked up blogging competitions in SCHOOLS, they’re starting up this ludicrous Stomp blogging thing, soon they’re going to have courses for blogging and then they’ll start scoring blogs nationally along some scale with points for how many pertinent topics are covered with each post. It’s like ‘O’ level maths in words.

I’m from what might be considered the old school of blogs when it comes to Singapore — I’m not the first blogger in Singapore, but I’m definitely one of the early ones. Blogging becoming popular is one of those things, it tipped and people really got into it, I have no problem with that. I was tickled when Kristen’s site, Krisalis, was mentioned in an article in a Straits Times supplement years ago. But why oh why oh why does this government (or whatever “privatised” media or institution) have to stick their nose in something that, in my opinion, is an intensely personal expression of the self? Even my mother (who is allowed to be nosy about my life, she is my mother after all) doesn’t read or care too much about my blog. She knows it’s there, she might check it twice a year or something to see if I’m saying anything embarrassing, but she mostly lets it be because it’s MY thing.

And what the hell wrong is there with that?

• 19 Jun 2006

• Thinking