Singaporeans are a well-connected socially networked lot.
When Straits Times first broke the news of the bee attack at Ngee Ann Poly yesterday, with 35 students and three staff stung and taken to various hospitals, I thought the story would be big and that there were going to be interesting reactions in our social media space.
So the kaypoh in me decided to run JamiQ, a social media software monitoring tool, to track the incident.
It didn’t turn out to be such a big story, but “Ngee Ann Poly” did manage to trend yesterday in twitter. The data, to a data geek like me, was interesting. Data from JamiQ showed up almost 250+ tweets on this topic since yesterday afternoon to today.
The biggest spikes were around 2pm, when the news broke on ST Straits Times, and initially consisted of retweets of the breaking news, queries on the safety of friends and family, and questions on whether this was why classes were shutdown at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic campus yesterday.
When it became clearer that it was not as serious as it seemed later that day, all the jokes started to come out:
“My friends from SP keep complaining that their school so boring unlike NP. E.g Flood, Bee attack” said one poster.
“Ngee Ann Poly on front page of wan bao for the bee attack. Lolol why our school so exciting?!” said another.
After the bees, the birds
Many people found out about this breaking story through STCom, Straits Times official twitter channel or through Google News, judging by the number of retweets of that story.
The interesting thing was that when people checked to see if “Ngee Ann Poly” was trending in Singapore (it was), people started spotting that “ITE Simei” was trending as well and asking why it was trending.
In fact, “Simei ITE” is still trending, and has been slowly trending for a few days. No mainstream media has picked up this story as far as I can tell though.
It turns out that the buzz on Simei ITE is a sex tape video of a sports management guy and his girlfriend doing the quick and dirty in a toilet stall. Yes, it sounds raunchy, but the video really isn’t much. I’ll leave you chee ko peks to find a copy of the video on the Net (Hint: try twitter search)
The point I want to make in this rambling post is that Singaporean youths don’t get their news from a newspaper. They get it by being directly plugged into the social network of twitter and FB. They receive, disseminate, create, mash-up, argue and poke fun at issues and topics that spread on social media.
This tweet on recent Singapore twitter trends captures this spirit: “Yesterday Ngee Ann Polytechnic, today ITE Simei. Tomorrow will be some JC lohh”
Disclaimer: I used to work for JamiQ but am no longer employed by them as I’ve moved to another company.
