<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR>Cause or gripe - more take it online
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Netizens increasingly using the Web to seek redress, mobilise help </TR><!-- Author --><TR><TD class="padlrt8 georgia11 darkgrey bold" colSpan=2>By Gwendolyn Ng
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Fund-raisers (anti-clockwise from top left) Ding Duo, 24, Zhang Zhiwen, 23, Niu Ziru, 23, Luo Weiwei, 24, Zhao Yuqiao, 23, Han Xue, 24, and Fu Rao, 24, used the Internet to help raise money for leukaemia patient Zhang Xiaoou's treatment. -- ST PHOTO: SAMUEL HE
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->At the peak of her life, 24-year-old National University of Singapore (NUS) science undergraduate Zhang Xiaoou found out she had leukaemia.
The news came as a bolt from the blue. The final-year Chinese national student, who is here on a Ministry of Education scholarship, has insufficient insurance coverage to meet the expected $400,000 treatment bill.
Her father, an administrative officer based in China's Jilin province, earns only $449 a month and her mother is unemployed.
The future for Ms Zhang looked bleak until she confided in a friend who penned a blog detailing her plight.
That one entry started the ball rolling. Within three days of the diagnosis, her extended network of friends in Singapore started an official website - blessxiaoou.net - and a blog - blog.sina.com.cn/blessxiaoou - to appeal for cash donations.
So far, through online contributions and donation booths set up at NUS, they have raised about $100,000 for the Dean's List student who was due to graduate in May with first-class honours. It is a quarter of what is needed for her treatment.
'Using the Internet, we're able to reach out to more. People from all over the world want to help her,' said fellow Chinese national Luo Weiwei, 24, who is part of the fund-raising committee and another final-year science student.
More netizens are going online to propagate causes, raise funds and seek redress for unpaid salaries, against rogue housing agents and even for broken hearts. Called the 'human flesh search engine' phenomenon in China, these digital campaigns where netizens hunt down perceived wrongdoers, from adulterers to insensitive young adults, have long been prevalent there.
After last year's Sichuan earthquake, disgruntled netizens unearthed 21-year-old Gao Qianhui from Liaoning. Upset that her online games were stopped during the mourning period, she had posted a five-minute video blaming the victims. Netizens dug up her personal details and she was later detained by the police for investigations.
The most sensational cases here so far still come from Chinese nationals, but Singaporeans are fast adopting their own, somewhat tamer, style of cyber activism.
When her four-year-old goddaughter Charmaine Lim was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer last month, Miss Jolene Loh took her grief online. The 27-year-old education executive started a blog titled Feisty Princess Charmaine, detailing the spread of neuroblastoma - a cancer of the sympathetic nervous system that afflicts children - from Charmaine's liver to her bone marrow.
The blog garnered over 22,000 hits, e-mail from Britain and the United States from people sharing personal experiences, and even anonymous donations. She declined to reveal the amount raised, emphasising that the family is not out to raise funds or seek publicity.
On Singapore forums like fuckwarezone and personal blogs, it is not uncommon to see users posting their gripes along with the contact details, full name, workplace, and even identity card number of the person who offended them.
Beyond airing grievances, netizens also band together online to seek financial redress. A photographer, Mr R.X. Lim, was owed about $1,200 by an event management company. After many fruitless attempts to get paid, he turned to the popular ClubSNAP photography forum, which has 15,571 active members.
=> BEST PAID govt in the world CHOR BOH LAN again?
'I posted my complaint online to make it difficult for the company to con others; also, to make the event director aware that I was not going to let the matter go,' said Mr Lim. His post generated 94 replies and 6,597 views, including many from people who were also owed money by the same company. Some netizens even dug out the director's photo and uploaded it to the forum.
Mr Lim and four others eventually decided to take the matter to the Small Claims Tribunal in January, but the event director did not turn up at the hearing. Nonetheless, the tactic worked and the money owed was paid.
=> Idea on how to make the Papayas work?
Another group of online activists are those who have been scammed by blog shops or shopping sprees on forums.
On the Straits Times' Stomp portal, a netizen who goes by the monicker JustSomebody posted about unlicensed blog shops selling contact lenses as a public-service warning on Feb 12.
In about a month, the post generated 291 replies and 5,482 views.
It was in reaction to a Sunday Times report on the risks of buying contact lenses online that was published on Feb 8. JustSomebody also e-mailed the Ministry of Health (MOH) for clarification over the matter and posted its reply on the forum.
All this action was taken before MOH announced on March 9 that it would be sending warning letters to unlicensed blog shops to stop the sale of cosmetic contact lenses.
Also evident among the Net activists are those who have suffered at the hands of rogue agents, unscrupulous landlords or tenants from hell. At least 100 complaints can be found on property website sg-house.com under the 'Disastisfaction Expressed' section.
Property agent Stanly Chua, 29, posted the address of a landlord at the classified ads website singapore. gumtree.sg last December. The latter was allegedly collecting deposits despite already having accepted a tenant from Mr Chua. The last he heard, the landlord had been arrested.
Sufferers of broken hearts or those whose relationships have gone sour are also turning to the Internet for revenge.
One such case is penned by chinagirl08, supposedly a 25-year- old woman from China. In her post, the private school student - who moonlights as a nightclub hostess - alleges that she was cheated by a 34-year-old married man whom she met at her workplace about four years ago.
After a sexual relationship lasting five years, during which she had an abortion, she said their relationship came to an abrupt end when he dumped her for a 17-year-old China hostess.
Spurned, chinagirl08 posted intimate details of her relationship. In a report in Chinese daily Lianhe Wanbao in January, the parents of the alleged love cheat denied the rumours and said their son was still happily married.
Many acknowledge that the truth can be pretty elastic on the Internet given that netizens have a free rein to post behind the cloak of anonymity. Experts said this should be borne in mind when surfing and that the grievances aired are not new, merely made more conspicuous by the Internet.
Dr Cherian George, assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, said: 'We should just leave alone some of the distasteful content and not work ourselves up into a moral panic. Perhaps society always had such ugliness, but the Internet just made it more visible. The best thing to do is to ignore it and trust in the good sense of the majority.'
[email protected]
=> Why no mention on Sammyboy, Wayang Party, etc?
<HR width="50%" SIZE=1>
Nothing new
'Perhaps society always had such ugliness, but the Internet just made it more visible.'
DR CHERIAN GEORGE, assistant professor at NTU's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, on the publicising of grievances
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Netizens increasingly using the Web to seek redress, mobilise help </TR><!-- Author --><TR><TD class="padlrt8 georgia11 darkgrey bold" colSpan=2>By Gwendolyn Ng
</TD></TR><!-- show image if available --><TR vAlign=bottom><TD width=330>
</TD><TD width=10>
Fund-raisers (anti-clockwise from top left) Ding Duo, 24, Zhang Zhiwen, 23, Niu Ziru, 23, Luo Weiwei, 24, Zhao Yuqiao, 23, Han Xue, 24, and Fu Rao, 24, used the Internet to help raise money for leukaemia patient Zhang Xiaoou's treatment. -- ST PHOTO: SAMUEL HE
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->At the peak of her life, 24-year-old National University of Singapore (NUS) science undergraduate Zhang Xiaoou found out she had leukaemia.
The news came as a bolt from the blue. The final-year Chinese national student, who is here on a Ministry of Education scholarship, has insufficient insurance coverage to meet the expected $400,000 treatment bill.
Her father, an administrative officer based in China's Jilin province, earns only $449 a month and her mother is unemployed.
The future for Ms Zhang looked bleak until she confided in a friend who penned a blog detailing her plight.
That one entry started the ball rolling. Within three days of the diagnosis, her extended network of friends in Singapore started an official website - blessxiaoou.net - and a blog - blog.sina.com.cn/blessxiaoou - to appeal for cash donations.
So far, through online contributions and donation booths set up at NUS, they have raised about $100,000 for the Dean's List student who was due to graduate in May with first-class honours. It is a quarter of what is needed for her treatment.
'Using the Internet, we're able to reach out to more. People from all over the world want to help her,' said fellow Chinese national Luo Weiwei, 24, who is part of the fund-raising committee and another final-year science student.
More netizens are going online to propagate causes, raise funds and seek redress for unpaid salaries, against rogue housing agents and even for broken hearts. Called the 'human flesh search engine' phenomenon in China, these digital campaigns where netizens hunt down perceived wrongdoers, from adulterers to insensitive young adults, have long been prevalent there.
After last year's Sichuan earthquake, disgruntled netizens unearthed 21-year-old Gao Qianhui from Liaoning. Upset that her online games were stopped during the mourning period, she had posted a five-minute video blaming the victims. Netizens dug up her personal details and she was later detained by the police for investigations.
The most sensational cases here so far still come from Chinese nationals, but Singaporeans are fast adopting their own, somewhat tamer, style of cyber activism.
When her four-year-old goddaughter Charmaine Lim was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer last month, Miss Jolene Loh took her grief online. The 27-year-old education executive started a blog titled Feisty Princess Charmaine, detailing the spread of neuroblastoma - a cancer of the sympathetic nervous system that afflicts children - from Charmaine's liver to her bone marrow.
The blog garnered over 22,000 hits, e-mail from Britain and the United States from people sharing personal experiences, and even anonymous donations. She declined to reveal the amount raised, emphasising that the family is not out to raise funds or seek publicity.
On Singapore forums like fuckwarezone and personal blogs, it is not uncommon to see users posting their gripes along with the contact details, full name, workplace, and even identity card number of the person who offended them.
Beyond airing grievances, netizens also band together online to seek financial redress. A photographer, Mr R.X. Lim, was owed about $1,200 by an event management company. After many fruitless attempts to get paid, he turned to the popular ClubSNAP photography forum, which has 15,571 active members.
=> BEST PAID govt in the world CHOR BOH LAN again?
'I posted my complaint online to make it difficult for the company to con others; also, to make the event director aware that I was not going to let the matter go,' said Mr Lim. His post generated 94 replies and 6,597 views, including many from people who were also owed money by the same company. Some netizens even dug out the director's photo and uploaded it to the forum.
Mr Lim and four others eventually decided to take the matter to the Small Claims Tribunal in January, but the event director did not turn up at the hearing. Nonetheless, the tactic worked and the money owed was paid.
=> Idea on how to make the Papayas work?
Another group of online activists are those who have been scammed by blog shops or shopping sprees on forums.
On the Straits Times' Stomp portal, a netizen who goes by the monicker JustSomebody posted about unlicensed blog shops selling contact lenses as a public-service warning on Feb 12.
In about a month, the post generated 291 replies and 5,482 views.
It was in reaction to a Sunday Times report on the risks of buying contact lenses online that was published on Feb 8. JustSomebody also e-mailed the Ministry of Health (MOH) for clarification over the matter and posted its reply on the forum.
All this action was taken before MOH announced on March 9 that it would be sending warning letters to unlicensed blog shops to stop the sale of cosmetic contact lenses.
Also evident among the Net activists are those who have suffered at the hands of rogue agents, unscrupulous landlords or tenants from hell. At least 100 complaints can be found on property website sg-house.com under the 'Disastisfaction Expressed' section.
Property agent Stanly Chua, 29, posted the address of a landlord at the classified ads website singapore. gumtree.sg last December. The latter was allegedly collecting deposits despite already having accepted a tenant from Mr Chua. The last he heard, the landlord had been arrested.
Sufferers of broken hearts or those whose relationships have gone sour are also turning to the Internet for revenge.
One such case is penned by chinagirl08, supposedly a 25-year- old woman from China. In her post, the private school student - who moonlights as a nightclub hostess - alleges that she was cheated by a 34-year-old married man whom she met at her workplace about four years ago.
After a sexual relationship lasting five years, during which she had an abortion, she said their relationship came to an abrupt end when he dumped her for a 17-year-old China hostess.
Spurned, chinagirl08 posted intimate details of her relationship. In a report in Chinese daily Lianhe Wanbao in January, the parents of the alleged love cheat denied the rumours and said their son was still happily married.
Many acknowledge that the truth can be pretty elastic on the Internet given that netizens have a free rein to post behind the cloak of anonymity. Experts said this should be borne in mind when surfing and that the grievances aired are not new, merely made more conspicuous by the Internet.
Dr Cherian George, assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, said: 'We should just leave alone some of the distasteful content and not work ourselves up into a moral panic. Perhaps society always had such ugliness, but the Internet just made it more visible. The best thing to do is to ignore it and trust in the good sense of the majority.'
[email protected]
=> Why no mention on Sammyboy, Wayang Party, etc?
<HR width="50%" SIZE=1>
Nothing new
'Perhaps society always had such ugliness, but the Internet just made it more visible.'
DR CHERIAN GEORGE, assistant professor at NTU's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, on the publicising of grievances
