In today’s era of ICT, it would be difficult to stop or prevent the rakyat from speaking up their mind. Now they have easy access to alternative media like the Internet (blogs, emails etc) and mobile phones (SMS, MMS etc).
The rakyat is now not obliged or restricted to listening or reading only from the conventional media like the television, radio and newspaper, what more when those channels were "controlled" by the Government. They now have more options.
The impact of Malaysians getting access to the alternative media can’t be ignored. It’s a fact that more Malaysians now owned mobile phones.
According to a recent report released by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), there are now 23.3 million mobile phone subscribers. That's roughly 86% of the Malaysian population !
Similarly, The Star (03/04/08) quoted a report by Utusan Malaysia that Malaysia now has about 500,000 active bloggers, ranking the country among the highest in the world after Indonesia and the European Union.
A research done by University Malaya media department lecturer, Dr Abu Hassan Hasbullah showed the power of blogs in influencing the thinking of the people, especially about politics. It showed that 70% of the recent election results were actually influenced by information the public read in the blogs.
And lately, we are starting to see some changes in the way our country is run. More and more politicians, especially those from the ruling party are now creating and posting their blogs in an effort to get close to the raykat. This provides a "relevant" channel of communications for the rakyat to speak up to their leaders.
In today's society, communications through the Internet like e-mails, blogs and community forums have become the in-thing. And it's good that the government has realized this, coz' if they don't, one day they'll soon be perished - or at least become obsolete & irrelevant ! The system will flush them out naturally. The same fate may applies to company & organization leaders as well ...
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