About Media's social responsibility in Singapore and the disconnection with Overseas Singaporeans

I read with enthusiasm about a MP's recent comments on the quality of Mandarin dramas in Singapore.

Singapore is a small country with a very incompetitive media market and it should be time for the monopolistic players to see themselves as trend setters and channels for educating the public rather than mirroring and portraying the society in an often exaggerated fashion. There is a huge need to look beyond securing viewership and reducing the role of media to that of a profit driven enterprise. Media has its social responsibility.

I have been living away from home 4 years now and although I live in a part of the whole that doesn't use Mandarin at all, my command of the language did not deteriorate all thanks to my daily dosage of Taiwanese programmes that are made available conveniently by online websites. I am not sure if the day would come when I decide to switch to local programmes/dramas but I certainly would not like to if I am greeted by the ugliness of the Singaporean qualities, the very shallow usage of language and the uneducational and non-nutritious content. Programmes need to be stimulating and mind provoking, letting us learn something new, be it an idiom, a vocabulary, teach us terms that we are familiar of only in English and tell us what they translate to in Mandarin, etc. Singaporean programmes are guilty of not doing that.

And for your information, local TV programmes are not available on xinmsn to overseas viewers anyway. And this is so much for the government's call to connect overseas Singaporeans. Given the number of Singaporean overseas, it is time for the OS portal to rethink their role. I do not need to receive mails that consolidate information that I can get as long as I am IT literate and read the Singapore news everyday. Connecting Singaporeans require infrastructure that we currently do not have and need to build. Having one event per year and hoping that the patriotism stays is a joke. The OS portal is a mean that would probably of higher interest to students abroad who need contacts for socialising. For adults who care about things happening in their country (e.g. voting rights for Overseas Singaporeans) and would like to contribute a wee bit, may I ask where the channel is? What are the policies that support Singaporeans abroad (housing? citizenship?)? Is the policy on single citizenship still relevant today?

Do more, speak less.