Media and Library/Archive Research

When I was not busy with participant observation or interviews, I spent a great deal of time reading Singaporean news, as well as local and international tech news. I frequently did this while sitting in common areas around the university, conveniently combining such research and participant observation. I continue to read relevant news, although less frequently than I did during my fieldwork. Reading news provides me with insight into social, cultural, and political issues and debates in Singapore and their public presentation, as well as government policies and practices, and local and international technological and business changes and developments. This information is thus

significant for providing a general context for my research, as well as for seeing some of the changes and developments that are occurring in Singapore since I left in 2014. At the same time, news media in various forms provide a partial picture that is itself situated socially and politically in particular ways.

In relation to local news, I read mainstream state-owned Singaporean news media including the Straits Times, Asia One, The New Paper, and Channel News Asia. The first three of these are owned by Singapore Press Holdings, a publicly traded company with its

senior executives appointed by the Singaporean government. Channel News Asia is operated by Mediacorp, a government-owned corporation. While the government does not directly control these media outlets, there was a strong sense that what is published centres on and is shaped by government interests. While the same could be said of the Canadian Broadcasting Company in Canada, censorship laws are stricter and government influence over media is stronger in Singapore where removing controversial or offensive content from media in general is common, and journalists report various forms of self- censorship, as well as pressure from editors to limit coverage of opposing political parties and controversial topics (see, for example, Hicks 2013; Jaswal 2017; Leow 2016;

WikiLeaks 2009). I also draw on archives of these news sources provided online by Singapore’s National Library Board (http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/), which offer insights into historical policies and practices relating to computing in Singapore.

I also read Singapore alternative news media and commentary such as the Online

Citizen, The Breakfast Network (shut down December 2013), The Middle Ground

(established in June 2015 by some of the same people who ran the Breakfast Network, shutting down at the end of 2017), and The Real Singapore (shut down May 2015).19 _As suggested by these changing platforms, independent media in Singapore is small and struggles with many legal and administrative restrictions. The Breakfast Network, for example, closed when the Media Development Authority (a government board that

19 _{The Real Singapore (TRS) did not have the same favorable reputation as the other independent media}

sites mentioned, and has been critiqued for publishing unverified or false information and plagiarised

regulates media in Singapore) asked The Breakfast Network to register with the board and prove that they did not run with any foreign funding or foreign involvement. They

decided to close after finding the forms and paperwork overly onerous for a largely volunteer run, relatively new, and small news and opinion outlet (Tan 2013). These alternative outlets sometimes provide critical perspectives on and detailed analyses of government policies and practices, and also often cover topics less often discussed in mainstream news media, such as issues relating to foreign and domestic workers and LGBTQ communities in Singapore.

While I did not originally plan to read tech news, after asking students about their media consumption habits, I learned that many of them followed tech news more than local news (mainstream or independent). One of the more frequently cited sites for

following tech news was Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/), which is a social news aggregator and link-sharing platform focusing primarily on computing and

entrepreneurship, although members can share any link they find interesting. The site was established by the American startup incubator Y-Combinator and so provides

international (although largely American) tech news. For local and Asian tech news I came to read Tech In Asia (https://www.techinasia.com/), an independently run “media, events, and jobs platform” with headquarters in Singapore that covers tech and

entrepreneurship news primarily across Asia (TechInAsia 2016). These sites provided me with information about and context for understanding developments in the tech industry, future careers and goals that students could pursue, and insight into the relationship between computing education and industry in Singapore and beyond.

In addition to following news media, I collected and read a variety of Singaporean policy documents, particularly national policy and planning reports relating to computers and information technology. These are discussed in detail in Chapters 5 and 6 and

provide insights into how the Singaporean government perceives and plans information technology and its role in Singapore society. I also read additional policy documents that were either suggested to me or that I found to be of relevance. In particular, a few

participants had mentioned the “Population White Paper” as a significant document. This policy report is also discussed in Chapter 5 where I consider how technology policy in Singapore has sought to cultivate Singaporean citizens and workers to be entrepreneurial, creative, and risk-taking, while promoting and hiring “foreign talents” – workers and experts from abroad – as representative of these qualities.

Finally, I read curriculum documents relating to computer science at Temasek University, including university calendars from 1975 to the present, to compare the course descriptions and changing requirements for a degree in computer science from Temasek University. This historical exploration was not originally a significant part of my research plan, but as I considered the similarities among computer science in

Singapore, in Canada where I had done my undergraduate studies, and in the US, which I read about in the literature, I became increasingly intrigued about how this sameness was built and constituted. I thus also read the Curricula Recommendations that have been published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) joint with the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) approximately every ten years since 1968.

associations for professional computing and engineering. The curriculum documents are provided as guidelines or suggestions for computing departments around the world on what to include in their curriculum. I discuss these multiple documents in Chapters 4 and 5 where I explore this question of the historical construction and movement of computer science curriculum, and of computer science as a discipline.