Blogger slammed for calling NS a “slavery system”?

Nice headline by The New Paper (TNP) today on my two NS blog posts (On National Service and On Alex Liang):

Blogger slammed?

“While some neitizens agreed with him, most criticised him”?

I did an empirical coding of all the 415 comments (as of 8pm SGT, 9 Oct 2013) left on my two NS blog posts into four broad categories:

  1. Slammed NS
  2. Slammed Blogger
  3. Ambivalent
  4. Irrelevant

Here are the results:

Comment Type % of total comments % of total “slammed” comments
Slammed NS 249 60 77
Slammed Blogger 74 18 23
Ambivalent 27 7
Irrelevant 65 15
TOTAL 415

Should the headline be blogger slammed or NS slammed?

I will leave it to discerning readers to answer the question yourself.

If you think that I cheated or had been biased with the coding, please feel free to have a dig at the data and categorise them yourself. Feel free to share your results. Here is a link to the coding I did for everyone’s scrutiny. 

Btw, TNP did not try to contact me for this article. They just published it by picking all the most sensational quotes from my blog articles.

alvinology

Alvin is a marketer by day and blogger by night. He is a 100% geek who spends too much time surfing the web.

View Comments

  • never commented here before. but just want to say that i didn't see the point the article is trying to make. it's just an attempt to discredit you and make you look like a whiner. moreover, it appears the paper wants to trivialise your personal concerns and realities and i think that is despicable and malicious.

    your views of NS is your own and you get support as well as a bit of disagreement, but the way this has been framed is disappointing. if you feel you're treated like crap even though you have fulfilled your NS obligations, you have the right to feel so and say so. but your views (and the reactions) certainly don't deserve to be framed this way.

  • Alvin, I commend you for putting in such an effort to individually code and provide everyone with descriptive statistics of the comments that were in the previous post. Kudos to you for providing a clarification.

    Having said that, I don't believe the headline is wrong to say that you were slammed, the fact is there were people who did slam your views. Headlines are always written or phrased to catch readers' attentions. However, I certainly felt that the reporter did injustice to the responses to your blog post with the statement- "While some netizens agreed with him, most criticised him". That would be inaccurate reporting based on the statistics you have provided.

    I have not taken the effort to verify the accuracy of your coding, but I trust that it is accurate. However, I would like to make the suggestion for you to provide another way to analyse this issue, in that you take the 'individual' instead of the 'comment' as the unit of analysis. I notice some individuals have made numerous comments about the issue and 3-5 comments from an individual will certainly skew the statistics. If you were able to group the responses of an individual and then code the individual to one of the four categories, it would make for more objective statistics on your part too.

    Cheers.

  • @Jem: Thanks for the suggestion. I thought of accounting for individual comments too, but they seem to balance out. This is just a simplistic and non-scientific count to get a general sense of things.

    With regards, to the headline, I never said it was wrong. There were indeed people who slammed me. Nonetheless, if one were to do a simple count, wouldn't it be more newsy that there are more people slamming NS?

    Btw, most of those I labelled as "slammed bloggers" did not slam me directly. I just classified all the pro-NS comments in that category.

  • @alvin, Thanks for you clarification about the analysis. I did not imply that you said the headline was wrong. It was my opinion that it is not wrong and, although not direct and explicit, it was in response to the question you posed- "Should the headline be blogger slammed or NS slammed?".

  • @jem I added the line quoted: “While some netizens agreed with him, most criticised him” to my blog post. Thanks for pointing it out! :)

  • My first comment at your site but I felt that I have to give you encouragement.
    Taking on the establishment is surely going to invite all the main stream media to attack you because they are PAP's mouth piece. But I agreed with what you had to say in those 2 articles. Keep it up.

  • Alvin, have you played or still play, any sports? (those that involve running or using strength). Bowling is not sports it is a recreation like golf.

  • @SportsForHealth

    What is your point in asking this? How is it relevant to the debate on NS review?

    To answer you nonetheless, yes, I used to do competitive swimming and had competed and won medals for my unit during my NS days in the Navy.

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