Oon Yeoh

This article was published in The Edge Financial Daily on March 12, 2008

The Internet hardly figured in the 1999 General Elections although that was the year Malaysiakini was born. The Internet was supposed to make a difference in 2004, though it proved not to be the case. Did it make any significant impact in this year's breakthrough polls which saw the Opposition make unprecedented gains?

The answer is yes and no. Yes, in urban areas and no -- or rather, only indirectly so -- in rural areas.

City folks who have access to the Internet largely shunned the mainstream press which went into maximum overdrive to support the government during the campaign period. It was so bad that in one popular daily, practically every government story was positively glowing while the few opposition stories that appeared would inevitably be about discord and conflicts.

What the connected urban folks did was turn to Malaysiakini, Malaysia Today and a whole assortment of blogs to get their information. A brand new website called MalaysiaVotes.com, helmed by former employees of The Edge and theSun, also emerged just for the elections.

The Centre for Public Policy Studies distributed a series of Policy Fact Sheets via e-mail to "super nodes" – people who are likely to forward the fact sheets to many others. The idea was to give recipients a chance to make an informed decision.

Figuring out which famous politician was in town to give a ceramah would be challenging without the Internet as many of these events are scheduled on the fly. But it was listed there on the politicians' official websites.

That's mainly for the city folks. Rural folks who don't have access to the Internet did not benefit from online media or blogs or e-mailed fact sheets. But they had something else that they could rely on – the vernacular press.

In the case of Malays, they had Harakah. For the Chinese it was various Chinese-language newspapers which gave more and fairer coverage to the Opposition.

When I was in Penang, I asked Jeff Ooi, the country's most prominent blogger, whether the Internet helped him in his campaign. Again, it was a yes or no answer. The Internet played a key role in campaign financing. He managed to raise over RM100,000 from online donations.

The folks of Jelutong, where he contested, however, had barely heard of his blog and even fewer had ever visited it. "The vernacular press helped me a lot," he says. "They gave me a lot of coverage once I announced that I was contesting here."

Ceramahs were also crucial. Like his compatriots in DAP and Keadilan, he pressed the flesh during the day and held multiple ceramahs in the night.

When I visited his makeshift campaign headquarters, which he shared with three other candidates, I asked one of the volunteers, a 43-year old salesman named William, how he had come to know of Jeff. What he told me was quite typical. He had never even heard of him before nomination day much less visited his blog.

Yet, he knew about the Lingam video and the Negarakuku controversies. It was by attending ceramahs and reading the vernacular press that he knew about all these things.

Still, it was through the Internet (via YouTube) that the public got to view scenes of judge fixing and hear a controversial rap version of our national anthem. Had this been the 80s or even the 90s, such things would not have made as much of an impact and the printed press – vernacular or otherwise – might not have picked up on them.

The one common denominator that urban and rural folks have is SMS. And people made good use of it, which can be considered a form of New Media as well. Some political messages were serious ones, listing out reasons why you should or shouldn't vote for a certain candidate or party. Others were more light-hearted, making fun of various politicians. I've lost count of how many "Samy" jokes I've received.

So, how vital was New Media to the opposition's success? I'd say it played a more important role than ever before but it was not critical. This can be seen by the fact that almost all the Net-savvy opposition candidates suddenly stopped or severely limited their blogging activities the moment campaign period began.

"Jeff's blog was updated only once every two or three days and they were really short entries," notes Kashminder Singh, editor of Mobile World and Surf magazines. "Many of them clearly felt going down to the ground was more important. They all won, so evidently it was the correct move."

Things will be different the next time around though. In 2013 or thereabouts, there will be a glut of broadband in this country and handheld devices capable of receiving streaming video will be commonplace. Everyone will have them because even cheap phones will have such capability. Then, even the rural folks won't have to rely on the vernacular papers or attend ceramahs in person to know what the candidates are all about.