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Remember Sondra?
Well, the A-list bloggers / editors over at Tomorrow.sg decided to do two thing to remember her, which included:
– keeping her blog going (i.e. web hosting fees)
– printing a book consisting of her blog posts for her family and friends
As this initiative required hard cold cash, the editors decided to ask the blogging community to donate to the Idle Days Fund. While this seemed like a simple, kind gesture, a flame war brewed in the comments on that particular post. If you take the time to look through the comments, you’ll see the different points of views (and personalities) emerge.
One of the pertinent points expressed by readers was about an apparent “blogger class divide”. Readers felt that tomorrow.sg was meant to be a public forum for the Singapore blogosphere, and as such, they felt that editors were inappropriate in publicizing this project on tomorrow.sg. Instead, they suggested that it should have been a private project organized on one of the editor’s own blog. Are we looking at a case of elitism? I don’t think so, simply because Tinkertailor did mention that it wasn’t suppose to be a big hoo-ha.
Still, it was only after her death that I learned more about Sondra. From then on, I felt that her credentials speak for themselves: She did her part in building up the Singapore blogosphere. Thus, perhaps the cause of the flame war was that her impact on the local blogosphere was best felt by the editors at Tomorrow.sg, and intrinsically less so by the typical local blogger who might go “Sondra who?”.
Whichever the case may be, a flame war surrounding the death of someone definitely isn’t the best way to go. Realize that “taking no action” is also a form of action. Likewise, holding back your aggression may sometimes be a more potent form of expression. Getting back on Tomorrow, if you don’t subscribe to the idea of the Idle Days Fund, ignore it and look at other things on tomorrow.sg which interests you. If you do wish to help even if you don’t know Sondra (like me), then you definitely know how to do your part.
UPDATE: Apparently more bloggers, including IZ Reloaded, revealed that Tomorrow’s editorial actually exposed La Idler’s private identity without her prior acknowledgement! Is this a major boo-boo on the editorial’s part?
UPDATE 2: This quote bakes my cake: “of self-deceit and lies“, while this word makes my day: “Autocracy” (See Wikipedia definition).
UPDATE 3: Mercermachine wrote: “And in 20 years, people will look back on Tomorrow and mark it as one of the turning points of Singaporean society from authoritarian and overly conservative to democratic, and possibly socially liberal. It will be one of the benchmarks of the maturing of Singapore into a first world nation not by economic standards, but by social ones.”
- While this looks to be overtly generous to the Tomorrow editorial, I agree with the author that we are all going through a growing process. Much like the old days of soc.culture.singapore, we evolve with the medium. Be it tomorrow.sg, nextweek.sg or nextyear.sg, we are defintely more socially aware than ever before. Consequently, from these baby steps, we’ll grow to be a more socially matured society.
