To bare the soul so others may know …

Posted by Donna K under Blogging, News, Reflections
(4) Comments • (1413) Reads • Permalink

The Straits Times carried an editorial yesterday (ST Feb 16) commenting on this portal.

Entitled “Digital nostalgia come alive”, it credits the National Heritage Board (NHB) as running “some of the more creative websites”.

Commenting on yesterday.sg (YSG), The Straits Times said: “It has, of course certain inherent advantages over other official portals when it comes to being imaginative. It deals in history and culture, not the pressing and sometimes controversial concerns of public policy. Still this takes little away from its success in engaging a growing number of visitors interested in bits of Singaporean nostalgia. Creativity is a rare tribute among official sites”.

The paper while noting a move by NHB to engage a younger web-savvy generation, advised that: “To sustain and widen interest, however, it has to offer much more depth in content. Even as it reaches out to the young, it should not neglect older people, especially as sources of memories, before these fade and disappear completely.”

I couldn’t agree more.

The spirit of YSG is to provide a platform for (older ) people to share their thoughts and sentiments of years gone by. In a sense, their blog posts on this portal  should inspire the younger ones that there is much more to this little country than the whiz-bang technology that envelopes our lives today.

We have a collective web of heritage we should be proud of. And this is a lot more than what can be found in the pages of any academic history book.

We already know from surveys conducted by YSG that a majority of the readers are young – aged 35 and below and they are interested to know more about their roots. Such enthusiasm should be nurtured such that it could be passed from one generation to the next.

So really it is up to the elder bloggers to share their memories of a simpler time when we all had less but were still contented with the little we had.

When times were tough and money in short supply for parents (as was often the case in the 40s to the 60s), the kids found ingenious ways to make their own toys (an empty cigarette box with four bottle caps glued on as wheels, was suddenly turned into a battle tank). Then there was longkang fishing or climbing trees – you only needed some imagination to have fun back then.

Kids of today could learn a dose of self-reliance - you didn’t need any fancy electronics to have a good time.

But while those days are long gone and will never return, they shouldn’t be forgotten. So it is up to the older bloggers among us to share and rekindle such memories. In so doing,  they will give the kids of today a glimpse back in time.

Said The Straits Times: “Yesterday.sg offers via its online forum and blogging platform, another opportunity to capture grassroot memories as nostalgic and they are ephemeral. If executed well and sustained, the revamp promises to build an authentic tradition and a rich trove of Singaporeana.”

But how well this site succeeds, depends not just on the platform offered by NHB, but on us - the users.

In recording our memories on YSG, the site becomes an invaluable repository of personal experiences. In sharing these with the younger generation, we provide a richness of history that would live on long after our time has passed …

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