LETTER | Hobbies are a great way to foster political engagement among young people. It is often the medium that translates awareness to action. Having hobbies that are mainly driven by a kind and passionate community will encourage young people to be interested in civic engagement, such as activism.

Even though the hobby could have little to no correlation to real-world politics, participatory cultures that form around interest-based activity could develop individual participants’ sense of agency and interest in civic participation in issues they care about. Interest-driven participation was reported to be strongly associated with higher levels of participatory politics.

Hobbies facilitate political engagement. People who are part of interest-driven groups that form around hobbies, games, and aspects of popular culture often come from a broader range of political perspectives, skills, and experiences.

Interaction with a diverse group can expose one to a range of opinions and attitudes, stimulating thought and deliberation around issues. A straightforward example would be a debate club or Toastmasters. In addition, interest-driven groups are frequently characterised by a participatory culture where participants become part of networks and develop skills and orientations towards participation that may well advance their civic and political engagement.

For me, it was music and the Internet community that helped me understand better the injustice and structural discrimination faced by people of colour, particularly the Black community in America. The call for equal rights and representation in the LGBTQ community, unequal wealth distribution, racial segregation, social profiling, and the validity of secular-religious beliefs… all these I learn from music.

Often, music serves as a medium for story-telling for artists and musicians. My hobby of listening, collecting and dissecting music has made me more politically engaged than most of my peers. Some of the greatest music published in the last decade were politically charged: To Pimp A Butterfly by rapper Kendrick Lamar, Joy as an Act of Resistance by post-punk band Idles and 2020 by English folk singer Richard Dawson.

With regard to the earlier point of civic engagement tying together with interest-driven activities, not many Malaysians indulge themselves in committing to a local community-driven hobby. Local interest-driven cliques are very small in numbers, concentrated in one metropolitan area and are not tight-knit. By far, the most widely distributed and most frequently practised hobbies are sports-related.

Following that, Malaysians who are interested in less popular activities have to depend on the Internet to connect to others who share similar passions. There are more barriers to connecting to an online community than a live community. For me, the online music community was a welcoming one (for most parts) but still took a year and some to adjust myself and feel comfortable participating in.

The music and vinyl collecting community in Malaysia is a very niche one but very passionate and opinionated. I remember listening to a BFM radio interview with Amir Abd Hadi, a founding member of Liga Rakyat Demokratik and Parti Muda. He mentioned how much punk rock music, such as Rage Against The Machine, and his moments when he was playing in a band fuelled his activism journey. To any punk rock or alternative genre fans, this is nothing too out of the ordinary. A lot of music generates curiosity and self-posing questions among its listeners. Even the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama, posts an annual list of his favourite music of the year.

To sum it up, a great but not decisive indicator of civic engagement is to see if youths are particularly engaged with the interests and hobbies they like doing. Currently, Malaysia has very little of that. In truth, any club or interest clique would help someone grow closer and more concerned for the community they are in. To start off, let us not ostracised and bully anyone for having interests that are relatively "out of the norm" in Malaysian standards.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.