From its early beginnings in internet chat rooms in the 1990s, social media has significantly changed Singapore’s sociocultural landscape by generating new virtual communities alongside new politics, vocabularies and aesthetics. By providing a more pluralistic landscape for marginalised voices, social media has become an alternative media for discourse.
Spanning approximately half of Singapore’s 60 years of independence, the digital platform has played witness to most of the evolution of Singapore society and can therefore be used as historical framing in the areas of public journalism, digital communities and activism, and linguistic and cultural expression.
Join speaker Dr Liew Kai Khiun in discussing the milestones of social media in Singapore, and explore his more historicist approach to understanding and documenting digital cultures as archival texts and historical material.
Dr Liew Kai Khiun is a scholar of transnational media and cultural circulation in the context of East and Southeast Asia. He has published several articles on early social media, digital advocacy and journalism, internet youth culture, political memes and online discourse.
