Well known journalist and author, Thomas Friedman may have popularised the phrase “flat world” in his award winning book “The World is Flat” to advocate the idea of globalisation but two decades earlier, Alvin Toffler had already conceptualised and prophesied the revolutionary changes in the 21st century – a global society that is being shaped and fuelled by communication technology. It should be obvious that Toffler is not the only futurist around. There are dozens of other scholars and authors who have produced similar kind of works. But none has captured the public’s imagination as powerful as Toffler’s. It has been 33 years since the publication of Alvin Toffler’s most celebrated futurist book, “The Third Wave” (first published in 1980), widely considered as the most important publication in Toffler’s trilogy, which included “Future Shock” (1970) and “Power Shift” (1990). It is timely that we re-look and re-evaluate some of its major themes, especially in the context of new media...

Here's another ancient unpublished article. "There are probably hundreds of books and journals on Nazi propaganda, but at least one that is brief and worth mentioning is the one by David Welch, "Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community", published in the Journal of Contemporary History, 2004. The purpose of this paper is to study how did the Nazi attempted to influence public opinion by means of propaganda, to analyse the key themes of propaganda and to observe whether or not there is a gap between the image of society in Nazi propaganda and social reality. All this were done by analysing the responses from two major sections of the community – the industrial workers and German youth. One of the key themes of Nazi propaganda was to influence the public opinion through propaganda. According to David Welch, he wrote that the concept of national or people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) was a key element in the ‘revolutionary’ a...

Note: The following blog post was drafted about two years ago, but for some reasons it went unpublished until today. I left it as it is, save for a few minor editing (paragraph 8 onwards). Rereading the blog post, it looks like we have progressed very little. Malaysia is still very much divided along political and racial lines. Issues pertaining to race and religion continues to dominate the media headlines as well as online and social media discussions.  ----------------------- At the time of writing this post I am currently halfway (2013 note: completed) reading  Dominique Moisi 's excellent piece of work, " The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World ". Though there are several glaring factual and interpretive mistakes (especially concerning Malaysia and former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's speech) it doesn't affect much of the author's main thesis; particularly on fear, hope and humiliation, an...

Three days before the 13th General Elections, a Bernama reporter called up asking me to do some predictions on a possible cyber attack. And so I responded as per the report below. But, this may sound very cliche, politically, but I must say that I was either misquoted or the pleasant-sounding reporter over the phone didn't really get what I was trying to say. But I don't blame the reporter anyways. Ha ha. KUALA LUMPUR: CyberSecurity Malaysia has given assurance that the cyber security in Malaysia is still under control despite concerns over the increasing number of cyber attacks during the 13th general election process. Its chief executive officer, Dr Aminuddin Abdul Wahab, said CyberSecurity, Royal Malaysian Police and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission were always monitoring the situation to ensure peace in the cyber world. "Internet users need not to worry. All of them, especially the adults, can help maintain peace in the cyber world by adher...

Former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir's recent comment saying that Malaysia "has no ideology" has generated a few debates and discussions on the Internet. Of course that statement is debatable. I can agree to some extent. You have to understand the context of his argument. I think what Dr Mahathir was trying to say is that the government does not subscribe to any fixed political ideology. Take for example the Communist China. In reality China is no longer a communist or socialist state, though they are often proud to claim theirs as "Chinese-style socialist". But in actuality it is pure capitalism. What separates them from the American capitalism is that in China it is a state-controlled economy, while in the US, private enterprise. Malaysia, on the other hand, though we have never officially or politically claimed ourselves to be a socialist state, key elements of socialism and populism existed in some of our economic structures and policies. As a matter ...

Today is kind of a happy day for me because I have finally figured out how to purchase books and stuff from Amazon.com! I know I'm a bit late on this. I always prefer to buy books "offline" but sometimes there are certain books, especially old and used ones, that you can't find it in any of the local bookstores. I've been meaning to buy cheap second hand books from Amazon.com for years but the problem is that Amazon doesn't ship books to Malaysia! But thanks to VpostAsia.com and comGateway.com for providing the solution! How it works is that the moment you register with any of the two websites above, you'd automatically be given a US address (e.g. Portland, Oregon). So whatever books or stuff you buy from Amazon or any US-based online shopping site, it will be shipped to your US address first before Vpost or comGateway ships it off to your local address. Basically that's the theory. I haven't tried making any purchase yet. But I have read ...

When I signed up to Last.fm 6 years ago I never thought that one day I would find it useful or at least something that I can blog about. So, thanks to Last.fm for keeping my music statistics for the past 6 years. Today's blog post is about my kind of music. I'm not so good in explaining about the kind of music that I listen to for the past decade or so. Some of my uni friends find it a bit odd that I can listen to songs from Siti Nurhaliza to punk rock. In attempting to answer myself, I think the reason lies in the fact that I'm not a fanatic of any genre, though I admit that while growing up, especially in my early 20s, I was heavily influenced by punk rock, emo (eg Dashboard Confessional, The Used, Taking Back Sunday, The Early November etc), indie rock (The Strokes, The Hives, The Postal Service and most other "The" bands), post-rock and a little bit of melodic hardcore (e.g. Alexisonfire and Atreyu). Punk rock bands like Mxpx, Nofx, The Ataris, New Found Glor...