HARDESH SINGH, 32

Hardesh Singh is musician, producer, and all-round good fella. I started working with him through designing PopFolio (with Bright Lights At Midnight), an online music distribution platform that marked the start of his venture into web media. Since then, he’s rolled out Poptopus (a music widget that makes money for blogger, musician, and developer alike) and more recently, PopTeeVee—a multi-channeled web TV that will have new content for each day of the week.

What’s important about these endeavors is that it’s thinking about the nature of content for a new generation of audience: “information snacking” (bite-sized morsels of entertainment like The Fairly Current Show, or TFCS) and “user-generated content” (democratising—and also professionalising—content creation). Even though broadband penetration in Malaysia hasn’t reached critical mass (which it probably will, given a few more years), people like Hardesh are staying well ahead of the curve and getting ready for a shift in consumer trends.

On another level, the Do-It-Yourself culture, along with the viral component of the work (through Facebook, embedding on blogs, forwarded emails), is very liberating when compared with how traditional media works. It goes to show that if you have something good on your hands, you don’t need a lot of money to get it out to the public. You just need to put your mind—and your back!—into it.

Finally, what Hardesh and people like him are doing is really attempting to answer the questions that a webbed world asks: in an age where technology is unfettered and information is unbound, how will we shape our contemporary landscape(s)? Or to put it in another way, now that we can do (almost) anything, what will we do?

Fahmi Fadzil is the host of The Fairly Current Show.