Abstract

The transformation of Singapore as a creative economy in the last fifteen years or so has been enabled by key transformations in the new media landscape. This chapter examines these policy developments and regulations over new media in general, and on television and the Internet in particular. By critically mapping its new media ecology across its creative economy, this chapter has two aims: first, to elucidate the innovations of its new media developments that have earned the city-state the reputation as the world’s first cyber-city; second, to demonstrate its distinct mode of regulation through the practice of illiberal pragmatism. Illiberal pragmatism describes the regulatory milieu where new media decentralization and control have occurred concurrently; it is marked by an ambivalent governmental logic of liberalism and non-liberalism; and undergirded by a pragmatism that forms the commonsense ideology of the state’s performance principle.