A lot has happened since PM Lee’s National Day Rally Speech in which a mandate was issued to engage the digital generation.

We still need to get our message across. We will use the new media, multimedia, podcast, broadcast, all these things which you get in the Internet, or somebody sends to you by email, I think our ministries, our agencies have to experiment, have to try it out.

While we struggled to decipher what “new media” was, blogs, podcasts and video-podcasts were a popular interpretation of the elements that made up the medium. Various blogging endeavours - some of which were pre-NDR started to take centerstage:

• National Library Board’s High Browse onlne, a book review blog that encourages members of the public to submit reviews,
• National Heritage Board’s Yesterday.sg, a blog that looks at yesteryear Singapore,
• Health Promotion Board’s Podcasts

to name a few. An extension of the increased attention towards new media resulted in the unveiling of the gahmen bloggers, a once covert group of bloggers in the civil service now thrust into the limelight (cue in dramatic music). Our very own Vanessa Tan was featured in a radio interview, while a few others made the papers.

In the National Day Rally speech, PM Lee also spoke about the need for government leaders, and not just government agencies, to engage the internet generation.

The Government has to adapt to the digital age. First of all, we need to find leaders who are of that age group, and that’s what we have been doing. That’s why in this election, we fielded a lot of people who are below 40 years old and we call them the P65 generation and they are reaching out to the young generation, understanding the young, being in tune with them, same wavelength, knowing how they react, how to move and motivate this group.

Just a few weeks ago, 12 Members of Parliament (all born after 1965) got together and launched p65.sg, a collaborative blog that started off a little jejune but has slowly gotten slightly meatier posts on weightier issues. Its launch came one the same day these MPs were seen on the evening news practising hip-hop for the upcoming Chingay parade.

So far the general opinion is that the MPs are trying too hard, and many called for them to just “be themselves”. Like the awkward exchanges on a first date, these hiccups are necessary before things settle in a comfortable communicative cycle (how’s that for alliteration).