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E-Community… and its story
From USJ to USA:
Jeff Ooi to speak at Harvard Law School
USJ.com.my founder Jeff Ooi gets invite from Harvard Law School to speak at its international conference on Internet to be held at Cambridge, Massachusetts, next month. He will cite USJ-Subang Jaya as a model for cyber-citizenry.
Posted on 08.25am Nov 26, 2004
By usjXpress Team
Email: edteam@usj.com.my
Subang Jaya, November 26:
Jeff Ooi, labelled as the "unknown blogger" by certain mainstream media, has been invited by the Harvard Law School as a panellist speaker at its international conference on Internet which will be held at Cambridge, Massachusetts, next month.
The conference, "Internet & Society 2004", is organised by Harvard Law School's research arm, Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. It will discuss many issue-based Internet campaigns, emerging business models and new technologies that are affecting politics throughout the world.
The conference, titled "Votes, Bits and Bytes", will also look at the blogging phenomenon and how it has affected the political and media landscape.
One of the highlights of the conference on Dec 9 is to look at South Korea's OhMyNews.com portal as a case study of Internet's influence over politics.
Joining Ooi in his panel discussion on this case study will be Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo; Stephen Ward of the University of Salford and Oxford Internet Institute; and OhMyNews founder Oh Yeon-ho.
The session will be chaired by John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Centre.
OhMyNews is a collaborative online newspaper with a readership of two million and more than 26,000 registered "citizen journalists". It catapulted the influence of Internet over politics in South Korea and the portal has been credited with playing a key role in sweeping President Roh Moo-hyun to power.
On Dec 10, Ooi will partner Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, a.k.a.
Hoder, to lead international bloggers in a session on promoting the global blogosphere. This session will form the input for Global Voices Online, a cyber-movement which the conference is aiming to establish.
"We will be looking at how to leverage blogs as a new medium for expression and to mutually benefit each member of the 'cyber-community' in a globe-spanning context, no matter they are from Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Kenya or anywhere else," Ooi told usjXpress.
"We will almost certainly discuss pitfalls such as governments – and the military in certain nations – who feel disconnected from the blogging phenomenon and who misunderstand its role.
"We will also look at challenges like technical hurdles, government censorship, and language problems experienced by bloggers from different environments, and our input will then be channelled to Harvard Law School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their research programmes," he added.
Fifth Estate
For Ooi, OhMyNews' increasing relevance in the South Korean socio-political landscape, and the Berkman Centre conference itself, are compelling indicators that online media and weblogs have emerged as the "Fifth Estate" after the conventional Press.
The Star In-Tech, November 23
In Nov 18 blog entry on Screenshots, Ooi presented a compelling case about the emergence of the "Fifth Estate", citing an article in the highly-respected journal Foreign Policy, entitled "Web of Influence".
The research paper, presented by two academics who are bloggers themselves, illustrates how bloggers have affected politics and traditional media. In 2002, Trent Lott had to resign as the US Senate majority speaker after bloggers revealed his inflammatory remarks on racial segregation.
More recently, in the run-up to the US presidential elections, it was bloggers who pinpointed that the documents used by CBS News' Dan Rather in his supposed exposé on how President George W. Bush shirked his National Guard duty, were in fact forgeries.
"Bloggers are the Fifth Estate," Ooi said.
Malaysian Perspective
Ooi himself began his Screenshots (www.jeffooi.com) weblog in January last year, first focusing on ICT (information and communications technology) industry issues as well as governance in the public sector, but later expanded it into a "media watch" blog of sorts because he felt that Malaysia's mainstream media was not examining issues in a critical enough manner.
"The organisers recognised me as 'a strong advocate for knowledge society driven by the Internet', which I quite agree," said Ooi.
"From the Malaysian context, I would emphasis that the MSC vision has lodged us on the steep curve to leap-frog into the First World era," Ooi said. "This is supported strongly with well-defined legal framework and timetable, and a relatively democratic environment."
"As we move along in achieving Vision 2020, some numbers, however, are not coming up strongly to support realising the vision," he added.
Hence, for all his belief in the impact blogs are making, Ooi readily admits to the fact that Malaysia still has a long way to go before the so-called "Fifth Estate" plays a dominant role in the Malaysian psyche.
Blogs may be affecting changes in the United States and South Korea because both countries have high Internet penetration rates, Ooi said.
"I do not think Malaysia will ever reach the kind of critical mass the United States has in terms of influencing public perception – at least, not in the next five years," said Ooi.
The statistics show that Malaysia is behind the curve, he added.
Ooi quoted MCMC figures to substantiate Malaysian outlook in the cyberspace:
- PC ownership is only 16.7% of a population of 25 million, much lower than the 40% penetration rate in developed countries;
- The Internet penetration rate is at 11.4%, and the broadband penetration rate is less than 1%.
"You may say that the online community in Malaysia is meagre, feeble and minuscule," Ooi said.
"Bloggers can only target the niche audience of Internet-dependent people – I call them knowledge workers – hoping that their sphere of influence can expand and ultimately lead to a participative community in cyberspace," he added.
"When it's my turn to speak, I will skip the portion on technological innovations and ownership of intellectual properties and patents, but to focus on the building of a "blogosphere" in Malaysia.
It's a goal that Ooi has been working towards for several years.
Way before he began his Screenshots blog, he had already formed a grassroots movement by founding the USJ.community (www.usj.com.my) portal in 1999.
In 2000, the portal, operated on Open Source software and without any financial grants, went on to win a series of awards, including the prestigious PIKOM Internet Award for Best Community Website, and the @My Malaysia Internet Award 2000 for Best Community Development Website.
Despite having an outreach to a "niche" audience, Ooi has certainly garnered attention from the greater public and powers-that-be.
In October, some daily newspapers ran a series of articles attacking Ooi for "publishing" seditious views. In reality, the views were posted on Screenshots' forum by a visitor who was in fact later banned by Ooi for breaching the forum's terms of conduct – days before the said newspapers went to print.
During the heat of the brouhaha in some mainstream press, one politician even threatened Ooi with detention under the Internal Security Act.
Ooi has taken all this in good stride amidst the fact that the issue garnered international publicity, including a protest on his behalf by Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.
More details:
- Star In-Tech: Pushing the 'new' Fifth Estate
- Malaysiakini: M'sian blogger to speak at Harvard conference
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