THE NEED TO CHANGE AND ADAPT IS NOT DIRE FOR THOSE IN POWER?

Umar Mukhtar

If you are politically an Islamist and PAS does not fit your aspiration anymore, you will join GBH. Almost the same ideology but rehashed and recycled to fit in the present political environment. It’s called re-inventing your political struggle.

The parties that don’t do that like UMNO, MCA, MIC, Gerakan are on the way to the cemetery. At least the DAP which still hawk 60’s Chinese chauvinism and has not changed one bit, see it fit to allow younger leaders to do the same things but in a different way.

It seems that the BN parties actually believe that everything about them are evergreen. No matter if the environment has changed considerably with science and technology, they are oblivious to what these changes bring.

For example, the advent of electronic mass communication has no effect on how they think of the new society that it has created. They use it too, but in the manner they are used to. To them it’s a new mode. That’s all. So SMS, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp are just electronic tools of surat layang and outrageous propaganda. The result is embarrassing.

The new societies impacted by these new methods of communication develop a differing style of thinking, of analysing, of interfacing with the world around them. That should be studied so that the modus operandi of influencing opinion leaders can be modified. But nah, UMNO prefers to banish things it doesn’t understand with the powers vested in it as a ruling government

Hence, regulations after regulations are mooted to mute the new media. UMNO has been reduced to competing against its detractors by carrying the big stick. Seems like it does not know any other way, having lost it over the fifty over years of being a fat slob of a government.

But it can’t beat the progress of modern-style living and against the tide of a thriving international community of netizens. Not being able to ban and censor, it’s usual weapons, it resorts to being an ostrich burying its head in the sand. The world around it is abuzz with things they chose not to understand, and the party wakes up every five years blaming the people of not being loyal to its aged doctrines.

So now they have appointed and old man as minister to navigate through the new media. And his first knee-jerk act is to curtail internet belligerence with more regulations. Well done. If successful, the new media will be as tame as the useless mainstream media. But he won’t be successful simply because his approach is that the Internet is a pest and must be beaten down. Not to embrace it and conquer it. Too much hard work!

The internet is neutral, just as Spencer Chapman wrote that the jungle is neutral. The best way to survive in it is to engage it intelligently. The government party is expected to be an active participant. In its haphazard way, it does. But it forgets about the new society the Internet has created and still communicate in the old-fashion paternalistic way.

What a waste. Anybody who can press the alphabet on the keyboard is its paid cybertrooper. No thinkers to engage detractors. No debaters. Only parrots who think that the English language is just an English version of the Malay language. Pathetic is too mild a description.

It is losing the cyberwar bad. Instead of trying harder to win, it now wants to control it. The excuse is that the cyberworld is not about lawlessness. Who says it is? It is regulated just like the normal world. That’s why we have the MCMC to facilitate such that wronged parties are be able to right any wrongs it suffers in that world.

Not just to help Service Providers to rip off the public. Oh yes, we know about that.