Sintercom : experiment in online civil society

Abstract

This essay hopes to analyse how the self-styled Singapore Internet Community, Sintercom developed, and through its activities, contributed to the opening-up of civil society in Singapore in the 1990s. Sintercom the website was started in 1994, only to shut down in 2001 – along the way, it faced challenges internal and external. It specifically sets out to engage in a more detailed examination of specific Sintercom projects in a chronological order. This is to highlight the website and its projects as an experiment in civil society – by its creators, users, the government and other actors. It concludes that Sintercom’s experiment did open-up civil society space, at least on the Internet, although at the same time, the government’s experiment with what it saw as a “Light Touch” style of regulations using Sintercom as a testing-ground (due to its prominence in the 1990s Internet) also seemed to have succeeded at that point.