Politics and Social Media in Singapore

Abstract

This chapter sets the socio-political context for the empirical examination of two Singapore-based comedic videos in the following two chapters. Given the country’s tightly regulated media spaces, the expression of free speech is considerably curbed in the eyes of its critics. It is therefore timely to interrogate the agency of its people in enacting voice in the digital vernacular discourse, particularly in the online subpolitical terrain. By delineating the socio-political development of the city-state in this manner, readers will gain an insight into how Singapore-based social media producers have to calibrate their performative tropes to successfully avoid the ire of regulators. This knowledge will enrich the understanding in the ways power circulates and reconstitutes itself in the performative digital culture. Accordingly, this chapter first begins with an outline of Singapore’s state ideologies and the development of its system of political rule in the 54 years of its nationhood. With this background, the chapter then focuses on the modus operandi of the state machineries in regulating free speech in various mediatized spaces. In the second part of the chapter, I consider the agentic potentials of the people both in response to a past government policy that was unpopular and, more broadly, in the way they participate in online subpolitical activities. In the latter, I focus on the instrumentality of humor as a central trope in such subpolitical performances.