Election rallies are so old-fashioned « Yawning Bread on Wordpress - 0 views
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Criticalist wrote in a comment to Effect on election advertising amendments on non-party netizens: I can’t help but wonder why the rules have been relaxed, specifically what advantages would accrue the dominant political party? In the past, alternative media was largely the domain of opposition parties and discourse critical of the government, hence the need to impose restrictions on them.
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My default mode is to assume that the liberalisation — incomplete though it is — is designed to serve the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) interest, and that it is not altruistic.
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PAP rally in Tampines, 2006 general election. Photo by SunsetBay If I were the People’s Action Party (PAP), I wouldn’t even bother to hold a single rally this time around. Does one seriously believe that their poorly-attended rallies ever gained them more than a handful of extra votes? Workers' Party rally in Hougang, 2006 general election After my iconic photo from 2006 (above) broke the convention of mainstream media never to publish wide-angle pictures of rally crowds, the PAP will obviously have reconsidered the merits of holding rallies in future unless they can ensure sizeable crowds for themselves.
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In the old days, mainstream editors could be relied upon to block publication of any photos (of small audiences) that would embarrass the PAP, but netizens are only too eager to publish such pictures. The paradigm has shifted.
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A smart response, in my view, would be for the PAP to shift the paradigm again: No more rallies. Don’t create opportunities to be embarrassed. Once such a decision is taken, the subsequent question will naturally be: How else to campaign for votes? Clearly the answer will have to lie with new media. Perhaps a blitz of cool videos, catchy phrases that can be spread by mobile media and other tools which even I myself, not being state of the art in many ways, cannot anticipate. If indeed they took such a decision some time back, they would have spent maybe 18 months conceptualising and putting together such a campaign.
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Meanwhile the opposition parties have been stuck in their old ways (the Singapore Democratic party excepted) thinking in terms of market walkabouts and rallies in muddy fields, assuming that there will be little liberalisation of media rules.