QotW8: Yawning Bread

A true mix-cultured Singaporean, Au Waipang was brought up in an English-educated environment, with Chinese culture embedded. He is one of today’s baby-boomer, having born in the 1950s. He could be my dad, for they are almost the same age. He runs his own “little” business, mainly in marketing, business development and corporate affairs, for practical reasons like feeding the family, but his passion is still in writing on politics. Even as in most people’s views, business clashes with activism, he pounces on the opportunity to explain that there is a political reason for business to exist. “Work and goals give people meaning and satisfaction in life. Families are fed and children schooled … The competitive effort to make better products, give better service… inventing new things entirely, is what creates wealth. [Wealth] on an individual level for some, but … wealth for whole societies too.” Business, to him, is necessary more for running a society than making the most profits.

He writes under the pseudonym “Yawning Bread” and owns and maintains the website yawningbread.org for the past 11 years, since 1996. Because that is not a blog, I cannot find the ranking in Technorati. His Google page rank is 5/10. My blog only gets 2/10. Newyorktimes gets about 9/10. Guess he is halfway there in popularity. He generally writes about gay news: real people and real events, mostly from a political point of view. He is self-confident in his writing and tackles contradictions head-on. In his About-me, one would think being sexually-oriented towards his own sex would make him an underdog, but he defies that altogether, “I have never been "confused", nor ridden with guilt and conflict.”

His posts, although controversial and liberating in some point of time, does not really create democracy. Quoting theonlinecitizen, when mrbrown got really popular with his article in TODAY, he was sacked. But he was allowed to continue his criticisms towards the government in his blog, “which has a much narrower and more limited audience.” Like mrbrown, Yawning Bread has a limited audience too. Most of these posts goes to mailing lists or feeds subscribed by homosexuals. He is “preaching to the converted.” There is no awareness unless from the ones already aware of the problem. Rheingold said “virtual communities could help citizens revitalise democracy, or they could be luring us into an attractively packaged substitute for democratic discourse” (Rheingold, 1993: 276). To me, I think Yawning Bread is the latter. For God’s sake, his website is not even in the Review of The politics of Singapore’s new media in 2006. He must not have controversy enough. Or not gotten sacked because of his website before. Or the government has not found out about his website yet, because the circulation is too low.


References:

Au, W. P. (2003, July). About me. Yawning Bread. Retrieved March 23 from http://www.yawningbread.org/aboutme.htm

Thornton, A. (2002, October). Does Internet Create Democracy. Does Internet Create Democracy. Retrieved March 23, 2007 from http://www.zip.com.au/%7Eathornto/thesis_2002_alinta_thornton.doc

Giam, G. (December, 2006), Review - The politics of Singapore’s new media in 2006. theonlinecitizen: a community of Singaporeans. Retrieved March 23, 2007 from
http://theonlinecitizen.com/2006/12/31/review-the-politics-of-singapores-new-media-in-2006/