Howard Lee

2024 was a tumultuous year that presented a complex global environment intricately tied with significant shifts in how we communicate. The rise of nationalist demagoguery, the unchecked spread of disinformation on digital platforms, the erosion of trust in journalism, and Generative Artificial Intelligence ethics have been the highlights of uncertainty and despair. Yet such an environment also invites introspection, measured critique, and the collaboration of minds to find the path forward. The Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association 2024 Conference (AANZCA 2024) was a cautious but resolute step in this direction. Themed 'Pause', AANZCA 2024 invited communication scholars around the world to take a step back and evaluate this moment of global upheaval with discernment and critical re-engagement. This special issue features AANZCA 2024 conference papers that focuses on citizenship and marginalisation, ethical AI usage, social media use in political astroturfing and advocacy, and journalism ethical boundaries.

In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Singapore grappled with an escalation of COVID-19 cases among the low-waged foreign workers living in dormitories. Singapore responded to the outbreak by implementing increasingly strict public health measures, which included a partial lockdown and movement restrictions of over 300,000 foreign workers. Our qualitative analysis of the texts created by three key stakeholders (the Singaporean government, local news media, and local non-profit organisations) at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories revealed the construction of contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives. These narratives manifested what our paper describes as ‘chaotic communication’, wherein conflicting and competing messages are crafted or used to build organisation-public or public-public relationships. We also propose ‘chaotic narrative spaces’ as a conceptual framework to illustrate how social, political, and organisational actors shape narratives about issues and influence the decisions made during a public health crisis.

In May 2021, Singapore Press Holding (SPH), the country’s newspaper conglomerate, announced its restructuring into a not-for-profit entity in response to the global decline of the news industry. The government pledged an annual S$180m budget to the new SPH Media Trust (SMT), raising concerns about the ability of the news entity to break away from government control, but these were dismissed with political assertions that editorial independence had ‘always existed’. This paper analyses the government-led public discourses surrounding SMT, highlighting a two-prong narrative approach: obfuscate the social role of the media in Singapore, and downplay the need for accountability over public funding for SMT. Applying a Foucauldian framework for evaluating discursive practices in governance and measuring these narratives against public service journalism scholarship, this paper probes the constructed determinants of journalism’s social role in Singapore. It proposes that similar evaluations can be applied to discourse about journalism in other societies.

Singapore won early kudos for its ‘gold standard’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic back in February 2020. It was praised globally for its ability to activate an effective contact tracing system. Riding on this success, the government introduced ‘TraceTogether’, a mobile phone app to enhance contact tracing efforts, using a technology that leverages the Bluetooth feature on smartphones to track proximity between users and record their physical encounters. This paper contends that the roll-out of the app is a form of ‘technological opportunism’ to enhance greater bodily surveillance over its citizens during a time of crisis. The low number of downloads of the app initially (at 20%), before persuasion-coercion strategies were applied to lift the take-up rate to 90%, belies the assumption that surveillance is genuinely widely accepted. This paper details key responses to the app in Singapore, and the government’s decision to make it mandatory during the heart of the pandemic between 2020 to 2022. It considers the implications of technological opportunism, taking advantage of a pandemic to continue in the journey of turning citizens into what Michel Foucault would refer to as ‘subjectified bodies’ to be traced, tracked and codified.

Civil society in Singapore has existed in the interstices of society with frequent instances of conflict with the government. The ruling People’s Action Party government has had a long history of quashing its political opponents, and this same approach has influenced how the government deals with social-political dissent, ranging from human rights groups being gazetted and their funding source curtailed, to opposition politicians and free speech advocates sued for libel and contempt of court. This paper examines how the Singapore government has made two significant moves towards online media that appears at once restrictive and accommodating towards dissent. The first is the increase in legal and regulatory burdens on the media, while the second is a perceptibly generous invitation for media freedom advocates to discuss and debate about such legal frameworks. We contend that this dualism, far from signalling inclusive governance with a firm hand, only affirms the Singapore government’s authoritarian tendencies towards media freedom advocates. This paper juxtaposes the evolution of narratives of dissent between the 2013 Amendment to the Broadcasting Act to the 2019 public debate on the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA). We explore the dynamics of resistance and posit that, even with the enlarged space for free speech in Singapore, the practice in public discourse points to further curtailment of such free speech.

In the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore rolled out TraceTogether; a contact-tracing mobile app that uses proximity sensing to track the movements of its population. TraceTogether was initially voluntary, and used solely for contact tracing. By December 2020, the system became mandatory. This sparked a mass adoption that made TraceTogether possibly the most successful application in Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. When it emerged in January 2021 that the data had been used by the police for criminal investigation, images of a totalitarianism sprang to mind, where technology permits the state an invasive awareness of the movement of individuals. In this paper, we defer from common arguments that Singaporeans are intrinsically trusting of the government or have been conditioned to accept ‘Big Brother’ modes of surveillance. Instead, we argue that the success of TraceTogether reflects a Singapore society that, through the rationalisation of surveillance, willingly participates in their own surveillance. In uncovering the genealogy of media discourse that surrounds TraceTogether, we highlight that it is the regular practice of voluntary surveillance, of subscribing oneself to the apparatuses of state control, rather than specific technologies, that characterises the Singapore surveillance state. We describe a matrix of reason, layered-on and normalised through media discourse, that exemplifies what Foucault has termed ‘governmentality’, which asserts a government’s power of control not over, but within, citizens.

The wealthy and ‘smart’ city-state of Singapore was one of the first to develop a mobile tracing app called TraceTogether during the coronavirus outbreak. It then pivoted towards developing a wearable tech device in order to reach all 5.7 million residents, brushing off concerns about privacy and surveillance. This article tracks the development of TraceTogether and engages in critical debates that have ensued around the use of the app, namely around the twin implications of privacy protection and the conduct of surveillance in a panoptic and auto-regulatory society that privileges socio-political discipline and control. With health crises and pandemics becoming more commonplace, more people around the world are being persuaded to wear some loss of privacy to trust ‘smart’ technologies to aid us in fighting enemies that are deadly and invisible. Singapore could already be offering a glimpse of how this can be done now, and in the future.