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bki Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 169 (2013) 431-456 brill.com/bki The ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past Kevin Blackburn Associate Professor, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore [email protected] Abstract In Singapore, there has been a ‘democratization’ of memory through heritage blogs and Facebook, YouTube clips of reminiscences about the past, as well as the state sponsored web-based Singapore Memory Project. Many Singaporeans are recording and making public their own memories through the digital media. Is this material mainly nostalgia rather than sources of the past that can give us a greater insight into what happened? Do these memo- ries provide counter-narratives to the official version of the Singapore past, which is known as the Singapore Story? Keywords Singapore, memory, blogs, YouTube, Facebook Memory of Singapore’s past is undergoing what has been called a rapid ‘democratization’ through blogs and Facebook, videos of reminiscences put up on YouTube, as well as web-based memory collections, such as the Singapore Memory Project, which aims to collect five million memories of Singapore. Ordinary Singaporeans can now much more easily record and make public their own memories that previously would have remained private and gradually forgotten. When the state-run Singapore Memory Project was first announced in the Singapore Parliament on 12 March 2010, Irene Ng Phek Hoong, historian and a member of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), outlined that ‘the project must be democratic: everyone could share their memories of Singapore’ (Irene Ng 2010:4330). During 2011 to 2012, Singapore’s major English language newspaper, the Straits Times, when reviewing the trend of members of the Singapore public recalling © 2013 Kevin Blackburn DOI: 10.1163/22134379-12340064 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:02:32PM via free access 432 Kevin Blackburn the past and making public their memories indicated that there has been a ‘democratization’ of Singapore memory (Straits Times 6 and 9 August 2011, and 15 February 2012) Singapore-based sociologists Roxana Waterson and Kwok Kian-Woon have made the case there is a ‘democratization’ of recounting the past as it has shifted from ‘the recorded past toward the remembered past’ (Waterson and Kwok 2012:11). What has been happening to memory in Singapore is similar to what has occurred in the broader international context. French historian Pierre Nora was among the first to write in the 1990s on how memory had ‘expanded prodigiously’ so that it has become ‘democratized’. Nora explained, ‘Nowa- days who does not feel called upon to record his reminiscences or write his memoirs?’ He described how ‘everyone has gotten into the act . The less extraordinary the testimony, the more aptly it is taken to illustrate the aver- age mentality’ (Nora 1996:9). Cultural writer and critic Andreas Huyssen has also noted the growth of ‘obsessions with memory’, or ‘memory-mania’, that has produced ‘a memory boom’ (Huyssen 1995:3, and Huyssen 1999:191). For Huyssen and Nora, the explosion of personal memories was eclipsing collective memory that had been formed within the ‘unifying framework of the nation’ (Nora 1996:6). The work of the Popular Memory Group in Britain has also shown that the frameworks for collective memory become fractured as individual counter-memories start to emerge from subalterns or the subordinate classes (Popular Memory Group 2011:254-60). Huyssen and Nora attributed the ‘democratization of memory’ to the processes of modernization and globalization. Huyssen wrote that ‘our con- temporary obsessions with memory in the present may well be an indica- tion that our ways of thinking and living temporality itself are undergoing a significant shift’ (Huyssen 2003:4) In the twenty-first century, the growth of the digital media, in which individuals can record their memories and upload them, accelerated this trend. Andrew Hoskins, a memory studies theorist, has commented that ‘what was once scarce and underrepresented from the past, and in the past, has been made visible and accessible in our emergent post-scarcity culture, for example the digitalization of memory’ (Hoskins 2011:269-280, and Hoskins 2012). He addressed the implications for archiving digital memories in the ‘post-scarcity’ culture, drawing atten- tion to what he called the ‘tension between the volume of material gener- ated and our capacity to consume it’ (Hoskins 2012:1). Hoskins and other memory studies theorists have listed a whole range of channels of the Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:02:32PM via free access The ‘Democratization’ of Memories of Singapore’s Past 433 digital media that store memories, such as online collections of mementos, uploaded digital photographs, memorial webpages, blogs, online museums, digital video broadcasts, online archives, condolence message boards, and many more (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins, and Reading 2009:4). It all provides a vast memory archive that is distinct from history. The distinction between history and memory has been carefully delin- eated by Huyssen and Nora, who have studied the shift from history to memory. Huyssen argued that history has given the past grand narratives while in the ‘memory boom’ the proliferation of memory has provided a ‘memory archive’ in which there is a seductive ‘trove of stories of human achievement and suffering’ (Huyssen 2003:5). Memories in this archive are decontextualized with no narrative to provide them with their context and explain the past. Nora suggests that memory blurs the boundary between past and present while being manifestly subjective. History attempts to narrate through analysis an incomplete reconstruction of a distant and objective past (Nora 1996:3). Digital memories have had implications for the notion of heritage as well as history, according to Lisa Giaccardi, a computer scientist working on the new social media. She has argued that personal memories uploaded on to the new social media have ‘broken down boundaries or limits to what herit- age can be and how it is intended’ (Giaccardi 2012:2). These personal memo- ries have become expressions of what the individuals recording them see as their personal heritage, such as childhood reminiscences and photographs. Heritage critic David Lowenthal points out that heritage, like memory, is distinct from history, as its concern is the present. Heritage uses the past to affirm a sense of identity rather than to dissect the past. He argues, ‘History explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time; heritage clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes’ (Lowenthal 1987, and Lowenthal 1996:x-xi). History is about investigating the past in terms of the historical actors being motivated by thoughts, ideas, and feelings that are not the same as those in the present but are shaped by the historical context of the time. Heritage links the present to the past, suggesting that historical actors behaved and felt the same way that people do today. Is the plethora of memories of the past that has come to the fore in Singapore during recent years more like heritage, evoking a sense of nostalgia and belonging, or do these memories make clearer what actually occurred in the history of Singapore? Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:02:32PM via free access 434 Kevin Blackburn Blogs and Facebook Pages on Singapore’s Past Worldwide, blogging started to take off in 1999 when the software called Blogger was developed. Initially, academic historians from the universities were the majority to take to blogging on history, but that soon changed. Nick Poyntz, a well-known British blogger who started blogging on history as a postgraduate student, discussed this transformation in 2010: ‘Academ- ics, however, are now firmly in the minority when it comes to history blogs. One of the blogo-sphere’s great attractions is its democratic form’. Poyntz added, ‘Some of the most fun, stimulating and intelligent history blogs are run by independent researchers and enthusiasts who devote their spare time to reading and researching history—in short, people with a passion for the past’ (Poyntz 2010:37). Around the world, local history has been a beneficiary of blogging about the past, as it provides a site for the storage of memories and stories about small communities that would be not published in books or journals (Anderson 2012:20-3). It has been very easy for many individuals to start a free blog about the past using the most common free-of-charge hosts, WordPress or Blogger. Blogs allow the participation of their readers, which history books and journals do not. Access to blogs is also easier because of the penetration of the internet. Thus, there is the potential for a greater democratization of discussion of the past because anyone can set up a blog and anyone can contribute their comments to the discussion. In Singapore, blogs exert a strong influence over public opinion because internet penetration is high. A 2011 Nielsen survey revealed that the per- centage of the population in Singapore who access the internet regularly is one of the highest in Asia. Two thirds of Singapore’s population above the age of 15 uses the internet. This is much higher than the Southeast Asian regional average of 38 percent. Internet penetration in Singapore is highest amongst the country’s youth, with 97 percent of 15 to 19 year olds online. This gradually drops off to 33 percent for Singaporeans aged 50 and above. Amongst online Singaporeans, 80 percent access the internet daily, reading blogs and Facebook.1 Blogs about the past in Singapore have tended to be set up by enthusiasts, who are just ordinary people, not well-known academic historians.