Malaysian politicians need to rise up with the digital reality and collaborate with social-political new media practitioners to extend constituencies beyond their silver-haired circle of loyalist voters. Never before has the need to connect with today’s digital-savvy consumers been so crucial to winning campaigns for a high-income economy aspirant nation state.

Thanks to information technology, the possible spectrum for ideological debate in Malaysia has been widened a little especially since the advent of e-mails, blogs, SMSes, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all of which have dented the traditionally unidirectional political messaging and campaigning that voters have been subjected to.

In the 2008 general election, Barisan Nasional’s campaign machinery relied heavily on staple activities, concerts and gatherings held on the constituency grounds which were then amplified by the mainstream media and their publications.

Pakatan Rakyat on the other hand, focused on organising political forums and cheaper online tools. Through blogs and their bloggers, Pakatan’s machineries worked early on the netroots’ constituency via the Internet platform to shockingly deny Barisan their traditional two-thirds electoral win.

According to Wikipedia, ‘Netroots is a recent term coined to describe political activism organised through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services’.

The term netroots, made popular by Howard Dean’s 2004 US presidential campaign which spawned many young activists, is derived from the word ‘grassroots’.

Netroots has also used to describe a political or social movement stemming from the efforts of ordinary people rather than established leaders. Such movements are typically generated from within the blogosphere, the democratic and user-created media segment composed of bloggers. (Whatis.TechTarget.com)

Netroots are becoming a silent power in Malaysia’s changing demographics. Experiences from the 12 th general election tell stories of how blog articles were willingly digested, read, shared, printed, or just simply distributed via conversations to the ‘kampung’ folks back home by the netroots turned carriers.

It need not matter if one’s ‘kampung’ is in rich Selangor or remote Perlis. The netroots unconventional outreach demonstrated that they have the potential to reshape the argument and terrain of Malaysian democracy.

Today, it is easy to leave a mark on oral history for Internet posterity or to remonstrate a local government minister for his uncool remark that ‘Twitter and Facebook are tools of the West that can erode Malaysian culture’ and allow indignant netroots public to culminate their feelings and reactions into a hot global Twitter conversation in just three days. To the consternation of politicians, the Internet has successfully empowered individuals to take control of the means of communication for themselves and create content that is almost immediately available to the world.

One good news for the sake of democracy is that the netroots public is not clearly under the control of any one person or clique. Many netroot bloggers describe themselves as progressive and they have carved their own unique influence that is not committed to any programme of fundamental political and economic reform in the conventional sense.

One shouldn’t be na ï ve, though, to think that netroot bloggers all share a common ideology. If they are united by anything, it is their harsh criticisms of the government, their shared anger at a political party’s leadership failures and corruption and their rough analysis of how politicians could do better.

Impressions-wise, netroot bloggers and blog readers aren’t much like the idealised citizens that most politicians dream for. In the cyber-world, they can be unruly and thrive by engaging in vigorous arguments and debates. There is clearly an opening for political parties to start or renew engagement with the netroots constituencies and capitalise on it as a different form of direct engagement and public deliberation.

So instead of issuing numbing political slogans or lamentations of political parties attributing their troubles to the machinations of their adversaries rather than to their own failures or sheer misfortune, why don’t they just get to work with the netroots as an outreach connector to reach constituents beyond their traditional voters neatly segmented by race, association or party membership?