Just Bitchin: Dot Blog Dot KL

There are all sorts of bloggers. The ones who make the biggest headlines tend to be those dealing with serious issues. Corruption on the “fifth floor,” SMS scams, freedom of speech. You know, the stuff that will change the course of this nation's history—though sometimes so cryptically worded that you wonder if even the bloggers themselves understand what they're writing about. Maybe global warming is affecting the brains of all the little birds.

When it comes to serious blogs, I'm not just talking about middle-aged men who work as mysterious “consultants.” Young Malaysians—many of them good-looking and hip—too enjoy discussing matters of national consequence. Look at The Cicak, an earnest publication that hopes to be a tropical Socratic gadfly, powered by the thoughts and words of Ivy Leaguers and Oxbridge alumni (with the odd flighty lifestyle journalist thrown in) who are bent on creating “A Better Malaysia.” Kudos to them.

For the rest of us, we're content to sift through the never-ending insipid chatter that floods our RSS readers and Web browsers. From the primeval muck of this murky gossip pool rises a few, highly evolved creatures, to the top of the food chain. These bloggers hold winning tickets in the genetic lottery—or can at least afford a trip to Bangkok to take care of Nature's unkindness. They have straight white teeth (getting increasingly stained by nicotine), hair with some degree of bleaching to make it appear lighter than it is, and the latest “togs.”

They are bloggers like KinkyBlueFairy (who freelances for this magazine!), her sidekick KinkyPugKevin (as well!), blackjettas.blogspot.com, absolutely-fuzzy.com, and I'm sure many more I have yet to discover. Unlike someone like, say, Kenny Sia, who writes genuinely funny posts, these bloggers mainly offer columns of pictures and promises of cameos by F-list celebrities.

Sure, social climbers everywhere use blogs. But in a town [sic] as small as KL, particularly in circles as small as the English-educated upper middle-class, a blog used for self-promotion can be a deafening megaphone blast to your eardrums.

It's not quite the equivalent Manhattan's media fishbowl, but the young, rich and good-looking in this town can make quite an impact with a blog and a Flickr account.

We have seen this happen elsewhere, in a city much like our own—except cleaner and with functioning public transport. That place is Singapore. A year or two ago, the Singaporean blogosphere exploded in inane chatter, as bloggers discussed whether or not Dawn Yang, a camwhoring sylph, has had plastic surgery. Singapore is a far more insular society than Kuala Lumpur can ever hope to be, owing to its islanded populace. Interest in Dawn was so intense that she was the top search term in Technorati, which tracks global blog traffic and subject matter. Bloggers in larger countries were amazed that tiny Singapore could top the ranking, especially over such a mundane topic. Yet the lessons of this notorious episode were clear. Given enough thumbnail pics and posts about what you had for lunch (or more importantly who you had lunch with), you could achieve global superstardom—if only among the blogging masses (then there's the national phenomenon Xiaxue, who is on a different plane altogether).

In Kuala Lumpur, few bloggers have such aspirations. Also, the majority of the country doesn't read English anyway, and Internet penetration is low, as famous e-consultants will tell you. No, ambitious KL bloggers must be content with local notoriety, but that’s often more powerful than global fame. Looking for a free pass to Zouk? Just wink at the door bitch—he reads your blog too, hoping for a mugshot now and then.

But these famous-for-being-famous bloggers, like their patron saint Paris Hilton, are not all bad. There must be something that attracts readers to them, right? Isn’t that what all trashy popular culture products are made of? Just like watching people get fired by Donald Trump on TV, people read these blogs for a flash of self recognition—the somewhat glamorous, bleary-eyed pics and endless shout-outs to semi-celebs are just the icing on the cake. It's the mingling of confession and sin, guilt and punishment, that fuels these shamelessly self promoting blogs—and the endless reverberations in that echo chamber known as the Klang Valley, of course.

Wong Joon Ian is a journalist in China. His blog is at pigpog.livejournal.com but it hasn't been updated in awhile.