On the 20th October, a seminar on social media have been organized by AZAM or Angkatan Zaman Mansang at Grand Margherita, Kuching. Together with some other bloggers from Sarawak Bloggers (SB), I’ve been invited and attended the seminar which has been a very good sessions especially because there were some of the big names in Social medias (old and new) gave their talks. All of the presentations have been very inspiring and informative. A lot of things have been highlighted during the seminar as it was emphasizing on the role of socials medias and the responsibilities of netizens, “Seminar on Social Media and Society: Promoting Responsible “Netizenship”" the title says it all.

The speakers for that seminar were:  Dr Anilo Arao (University of Philiphines), Professor Salleh Buang (Former Federal Counsel in AG’s Chamber), Wan Abdillah (SSMA), Mdm Alice Wee (Chairman of KDJA), Mr Ahmad Nor Hisham (MCMC), Mr Cyril Dason (Sarawak Bloggers) and Dato Ahirudin Attan or famously known as Rocky Bru.

Sarawak Bloggers, Fiza, Cyril, Fahri, Nazlan & Yours truly with Datuk Nuraina (left) and Rocky Bru (4th from left). (Thanks Nazlan for the photo)

To mention all the interesting and important points during that seminars will take a long lenghty post but I will summarized them in 4 important points.

1. Bloggers and social media users have to have good ethics and should know the literal do’s and don’t's of using new medias. This is to create a healthy virtual social medias enviroment which can help elevating the standards of information delivery and sharing among netizens. All social media users need to be mindfull of what they post and updates. Screaming for attentions in social medias is not a good thing and netizens are advised to not to claim what they’re not as well as not to claim to be a specialist if you are not in the internet.

2. All people are encourage to be more positives towards social medias and their users as not all of them, especially bloggers, are writing negative things. This can create a mutual respects between netizens and their readers or other users. Plus, nowadays, internet have been part of our life/cultures and need to be used the right way.

3. MCMC did not monitor the internet unless there are complaints forwarded to them. So, the one who actually monitor the internet is the users because the complaints mostly come from users. As highlighted during that seminars, what is illegal offline is also illegal online.

4. Traditional medias and new medias can work together mutually to ensure good delivery of informations. Even now traditional medias have started to join in the new medias bandwagon.

There are many more things highlighted during the seminar but to capture them all here might need several pages posts. So those above are the main key things that need to be noted by social medias’ users and readers. This is to ensure good understandings towards the social medias and not to see it as a tools for abuse.