In November last year, I was invited to give a TED talk at TEDxYouth @ Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore. The theme of the event was The Butterfly Effect, with talks focused on provocations for tertiary students (late-teens to early-twenties) to think more meaningfully about innovation, entrepreneurship, and advocacy.

My 16:57 talk is now up on the TED website here.

Alternatively, watch it on the TEDx talks YouTube channel here.

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In the talk, I issued two provocations and teased a few directions via a series of case studies from my research on Influencer cultures, meme cultures, and internet virality in Singapore:

If you are keen to delve into any of these case studies, or are an educator and would like to point students to some readings for further dialogue, I link to a handful here:

On the history and workings of blogshops in Singapore: Buymylife.com or Visibility Labour.

On Influencers and their online relations with followers: Perceived Interconnectedness or Agentic Cute.

On clickbait, shame, and scandal: Sex Bait or Cyberbullying or Influencer wars.

On Influencers and advocacy work: Minority Celebrity (race) or Homonormativity (sexuality) or Online Ajumma (age).

On memes: Meme Factories (COVID-19) or Meme Pages (Student Problems).

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Check out the TEDxYouth website for a full stream of the event, including talks by Cheryl Tan of the Singapore Mental Health Film Festival, Gary Lim (and Jordie!) of Dialogue In The Dark, Jasper Yap of Eezee, Lavinia Thanapthy of Inspiring Girls Singapore, and Morgan Yeo of Roger&Sons, as well as performances by some very talented Ngee Ann Polytechnic students.

Thank you to the organizing team for curating this meaningful event, to my trusty illustrator River Juno for the wonderful sketch work, to April Kleer at Curtin for the most wonderful coordination work, and to Brendan Ameduri at Curtin for very generously volunteering his expertise and time to ensure that this video could be produced professionally in light of COVID-19 contingencies. I am deeply appreciate of all of you for this wonderful experience.

/C