National Conversation Case-Study: Conversation with PM Lee and #askSG There is no lack of criticism on Singapore and her government. Time (2007) says her politics are “paternalistic” and her social environment “straitlaced”. The Economist (2010) describes Singapore as a “nanny state, but it is by no means an indulgent nanny”. Just last year (2011), an independent socio-political blog was “gazetted” by the govenment. So it may come as a surprise to observers when the Singapore government embarks on a National Conversation. Initiated by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Long and led by Education Minister Heng Swee Kiat, it is an opportunity to “reaffirm what is good and still relevant; recalibrate in areas where we have gone off course; and refresh and innovate, and break new ground.”. Citizens can participate in the conversation either via Facebook, Twitter (#oursgconv), via organised dialogue sessions (which you need to signup for) or informal discussions.

National Conversation Case-Study: Conversation with PM Lee and #askSG Channel News Asia recently announced that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong would be engaging Singaporeans as part of the National Conversation directive, in a televised forum on 14th September. Together with Education Minister Heng Swee Keat and Members of Parliament Indranee Rajah and Dr Intan Azura Mokhtar, they would be responding to questions and points brought up by 50 invited guests, which include Singaporeans from all walks of life. Views are also encouraged to tweet questions using the #askSG hashtag, during the live interaction section.

Keyword choice was particularly important, as capturing conversations generated from the forum was particularly important. Though “Prime Minister” was rather generic, we included it as we could potentially filter it down to Singapore in the search portion. Additionally, we tracked the proposed hashtag #askSG to determine how widely used it was over the weekend.

There was a significant amount of entries recorded over the course of a month, with an average of 110 entries per day. Though most entries were not that influential, overall sentiment towards the programme was negative on a whole, with an average negative sentiment of -68.5%. The details also revealed that Microblogs were the most popular medium for expression, with close to 89% of all mentions coming from microblogging sites. However, a majority of these sentiments were negative, with an average negative sentiment of -73%. Ironically, 6.9% of chatter came from news sites, which carried mostly positive sentiments of 75%.

No. of

Entries

% of

Total

Sentiment

+ive/-ive

Singapore 449 100% -68.5% (-)

Media Type No. of

Entries

% of

Total

Sentiment

+ive/-ive

Microblogs 399 88.9% -73.0% (-)

News 31 6.9% 75.0% (+)

Blogs 18 4.0% 50.0%

Others 1 0.2% 100.0% (+)

National Conversation Case-Study: Conversation with PM Lee and #askSG

The negative sentiments found within microblogs can be explained somewhat with just a glance at the top 5 sites – all of these are Twitter users who were generally negative about the entire forum, and accounted for almost 15% of all total Twitter chatter. Additionally, the sentiment overview over the weekend showed that while sentiments were generally positive on 14th Sept when the forum was aired, opinions generally became worse as the days passed, culminating in largely negative sentiments on the 16th and 17th of September.

National Conversation Case-Study: Conversation with PM Lee and #askSG

Top 5 sites No. of

Entries

% of

Total

Sentiment

+ive/-ive

twitter.com/occupysg 16 3.6% -84.6% (-)

twitter.com/tocsg 14 3.1% -90.9% (-)

twitter.com/SGnews 13 2.9% -100.0% (-)

twitter.com/sgbroadcast 12 2.7% -66.7% (-)

twitter.com/TinPeiLingFan 11 2.4% -75.0% (-)

To obtain a better idea about the negative issues people were talking about, we took a look at only negative entries, which produced the top trending words above. According to our system, other than top trending words such as “National Conversation” and “Conversation with PM Lee”, “Kenneth Jeyaretnam” was mentioned very often as well. Results show that a post by Kenneth Jeyaretnam was frequently shared on Twitter, with the associated title “National CONversation” (the caps was deliberate in the posts). These accounted for a fair number of negative entries.

National Conversation Case-Study: Conversation with PM Lee and #askSG

In addition, there were several negative entries over the course of the weekend about the fact that there were quite a few members of the 50 participants who were obvious PAP supporters and members. This contributed to the increased negative sentiment, as the public decried the authenticity of the forum’s representation.

National Conversation Case-Study: Conversation with PM Lee and #askSG

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