Using Facebook to Cultivate Political Awareness Among Singapore Youth free essay sample

Political awareness refers to the recognition and acquisition of either theoretical or practical political knowledge for our discussion. As the main purpose to cultivate political awareness is to help young voters make informed decisions during various elections, only information related to ‘civics’, that is â€Å"the study of the government with the attention of the roles of citizens† (Hebe, 1967), is considered political knowledge in this paper. We believe that political awareness should be raised for youths of age 13 21; thirteen is the age when most teenagers start acquiring maturity of judgement (Smith amp; Handler, 2007) and 21 is when they acquire the legal right to vote. Young voters should then possess sufficient political awareness to make wiser decisions when casting their votes. Social media is widely recognized as a form of online media that makes communication more interactive. Social media allows users to create and share contents for purposes like social networking through the use of Internet-based applications. Online social-networking refers to the use of websites such as Facebook and Twitter which provides social-networking services (SNS) for users to communicate, share information and maintain online social relations. A recent Singapore study (Russel, 2011) reveals that Facebook, a representative example of SNS, is the third most popular online source for election news and updates after Yahoo and Channel News Asia. There are 2,589,600 users on Facebook, making up half of Singapore’s total population. 1. 2. Current Situation The low political awareness among the youth in Singapore has been a long-existing problem. â€Å"I don’t know and I don’t care†, a typical Singaporean response implies the causes of the problem. One of the reasons that the youth do not gain enough political knowledge is because of the lack of engaging and interactive platforms for information sharing. As a result, few youths are interested, in addition to their poor knowledge in politics. It is important to tackle their disinterest and cultivate political awareness by disseminating related information on engaging and interactive platforms. According to a recent survey by Straits Times, 36. 3% of Singaporeans prefer Internet as their source of local political news. 33% of Singaporean Facebook users are the youths aged 13 – 24 (â€Å"Facebook Statistics Singapore†, 2011), as shown in figure 1. Therein hints the great potential of Facebook at disseminating information to the youth. In the following section, we will further evaluate the level of success of our recommendations using Facebook as a tool of information dissemination. Aged 13-24: 33% Aged 25-44:49% Others:18% Figure 1 User Age Distribution on Facebook in Singapore 1. 2. 1 Case Study: Use of Twitter in South Korea The South Korean political culture had been centered on Confucianism and subjected to bureaucratic-authoritarian rules, resulting in the struggle to cultivate a participant political culture. In fact, studies (Hong, 1998) revealed that majority of South Koreans (52. 7%) are unwilling to engage in politics. Despite the reluctance to be involved in politics, parliamentary elections held on June 2010 had held the highest voter-turnout since 1995 (54. %). A great percentage of this increase is attributed to the increase in young voters, aged 20 – 40, who are largely influenced through SNS. Twitter had played a relatively major role in bringing the Korean’s attentions to voting. A group of politically-aware youths had urged the Korean community to vote, mostly via Twitter. The result: more people saw the reminders and did as urged. The factors to success in garnering votes (especially among youths) are as goes: i. The increasing number of people with smartphones increases the convenience of using Twitter to share information on the go, via these mobile devices ii. Koreans followed the trend of using Twitter to connect with politics started by Barack Obama, President of the United States 1. 2. 2 Comparing Twitter in South Korea and Facebook in Singapore The choice of featuring South Korea in the case study is reasoned by the similarities between South Korea and Singapore, and Twitter and Facebook. A high level of similarities would hence ensure greater chance of success in our recommendations. Political culture reflects the mindsets of the youth regarding political issues, hence is a pivotal determinant in the success of promoting political awareness among the youth. South Korea tends to a subject political culture, while that in Singapore tends to a mid subject-parochial one. The features of both cultures basically demonstrates some inactivity and lack of initiative towards political issues, hence are largely similar. The ubiquity of Twitter and Facebook respectively in South Korea and Singapore is another deterministic factor. Twitter is widely used among South Koreans, resulting in an efficient spread of message to raise voter-turnout. Facebook is, likewise, widely used among the Singaporean youth, which could lead to a similar level of efficiency in spreading political awareness. The features of Twitter and Facebook would also affect how users receive political information, likewise influencing the level of efficiency of spreading political awareness among the Singaporean youth.