Social Media

What is social media? Social media includes anything from videos to posts on websites such as wikis and blogs. Social media has allowed the common man on the street to tell other people about his experiences, or also to tell readers and viewers about interesting things that the person has seen. Another common form of social media in Singapore is the Straits Times Online Mobile Print, or STOMP for short. It is mainly used in Singapore to comment about short pieces of sensational news, including bad behavior displayed by Singaporeans.

Social Media provides a lot of advantages. It allows people to share their feelings and experiences to people. Thus, this will allow them to release their emotions and be heard. This apparent attention will result in the person feeling better, resulting in that person’s emotional security. It also allows people to find out more about the things happening in Singapore, and when the person realizes how easily bad behavior is reported onto STOMP, the person will try to improve his behavior, thus resulting in an improvement in Singapore’s image. Also, social media will promote active citizenship. Those using social media such as STOMP, when trying to find out bad behavior in Singapore, will actively seek out those with bad behavior, thus, they would be active citizens in Singapore by seeking out people who would bring a bad reputation to Singapore and publicizing in order to lessen such bad behavior from occurring again. Thus, they would help improve Singapore’s image.

However, these advantages may also have disadvantageous side effects. Firstly, if a great amount of bad behavior is shared through social media, and foreigners find out about them, it would ruin Singapore’s image. They would have a bad impression of Singapore, which, when viewed practically, would result in less tourists coming to Singapore, thus, decreasing profits for Singapore. Even if foreigners do not find out about it, many groups of people would be affected, because an individual does not represent himself, but represents his organization. If a foreigner reads about a man-on-the-street behaving badly, Singapore’s image will be ruined. If an Indian behaves badly, it will result in prejudice against the Indian community. If a student behaves badly, it would affect his or her school’s reputation. This all will result in unjustified prejudice against the organization. Furthermore, the person in question behaving badly, may not even view this particular post about his bad behavior. After all, there are tons of users using social media, and the person in question definitely will not visit all of them and find out that he or she had behaved badly.

What I think that users of social media in order to report sensational incidents should instead inform the person about his or her bad behavior instead of just reporting about it. This will prevent the person from being a hypocrite who just points out other people’s bad behavior but does not correct them. The person may still want to report about the incident, but if he added that he had corrected the person on his or her bad behavior, would that not instead make him be seen in a better light? Through actually correcting the person, the witness would also be targeting at the root of the problem and help reduce the problem of bad behavior in Singapore, thus that would truly help Singapore instead of just witnessing the incident and doing nothing about it.