making peace with thy emenies

and so the interview with Serene Luo went on phone instead of the "less stilted in person" method. My apologies for returning Serene's calls late that night, been working so long and so late for the past months that 11pm did seem early to me. The interview went somewhat cryptic as my work was occupying my mind that period. a Pavilion apologies. (geddit a million? a pavilion? hur hur hur someone stop me)

If you people have the pre-conceived idea that journalist are very irritating and very probing then your wrong xia. Or maybe she's just the execption, afterall she is "best consumer journalist" award one leh, no shite okay i do my homework one. Serene sounds very pleasant on the phone and she's the rare few that actually tells me that i laugh like a hyena. Yes hyena, blame Disney's Lion King on Laserdisc for that.

And then I had to reply to few questions via email. so here's what i said. Very poorly written GP stuff like so if your eyes droop as you hit the third word just skip it.

-Flying the flag and being patriotic is not considered particularly hip or cool.
As a fairly young person, did that not cross your mind?

oh no, the words hip and cool are so overused and severely over-rated. My friends know very well that I have taken a dislike to the almost profane c-word; I even avoid it when describing the weather. Anyhoo, I think flying flag is a very nostalgic thing for me since I have been doing it since young, clearly remembering hanging the flag outside the flat with my grandmother. Being patriotic isn’t supposed to be something un-hip or for the older generation, there are young people who are patriotic and I’m not referring to the over-the-top kind of zealots but the people who supported the lions during the Malaysia Cup hey days, the ones who wear red to school on national day, the people who bother to wait hours for NDP tickets, aren't all those acts of patriotism or love for one's country. Maybe patriotism is too uncomfortable a word for the unprepared "hip crowd" of youngsters who clearly have a tendency for following herd culture, that word is probably too old fashioned.

- If there weren't the Internet as a platform, would you be doing other patriotic things? Like yelling "I Love Singapore!" at a National Day Parade or hanging out the flag and persuading all your neighbors to buy one too?
So how is the Internet different?

if there were no internet platform? That’s like asking if the light bulb wasn't invented. Of course I’ll be doing other patriotic things but maybe not yell out proclamations of love, there are many ways to profess one's patriotism and spread it. The internet is somewhat different in that sense. For example, hdb flats have ringlets installed outside their flats so that everyone can hang their flags in that predetermined spot, the end result being a very grid like and almost boring layout of flags, some CCs even plan out which unit to display so that they create some "interesting but usually very kitschy" facade. Whereas in the internet there is no hdb, there is no ringlet and thus people come up with various ways to express their patriotism, like the iamsingaporean meme. The internet reaches out to a different crowd of people and it being less restrictive in that sense allows for a more ways to be patriotic.

The post that started it all.