Tuesday, March 25

What happens on the internet can impact your election results

I had a big argument many moons back with one of my editors, she said that the chatter on the internet has no impact on real life. I argued back saying that if I am willing to bash the keyboard on a political matter, then i am willing to vote differently. And if you as a political party are not engaged with me on this medium, why on earth would I know or talk to you?

But you ignore the internet at your peril, see here for what happened in Malaysia. I quote:

Malaysia's premier Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said Tuesday his "biggest mistake" in disastrous elections was to ignore cyber-campaigning on the Internet which was seized by the opposition.
The opposition, which was largely ignored by government-linked mainstream media, instead waged an enormously successful online campaign using blogs, news websites and SMS text messages. "We certainly lost the Internet war, the cyber-war," Abdullah said in a speech to an investment conference. "It was a serious misjudgement. We made the biggest mistake in thinking that it was not important," he said. "We thought that the newspapers, the print media, the television was supposed to be important, but the young people were looking at SMS and blogs." The comments are a major about-face for the government, which had vilified bloggers, calling them liars and threatening them with detention without trial under internal security laws.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

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