State, Society and Information Technology in Asia: Alterity between Online and Offline Politics is concerned with the manifestations of an argument that context matters. In the Introduction to the collection, Alan Chong and Faizal Bin Yahya boldly assert that thick local contexts filtered the effects of information technology on politics and political economy. The result: an “Asian connected society … [that] is likely to be differentiated from the rest of the world” (p. 4).
Information technology, as defined in the book, encompasses the industrial and business environments leading to the development of computer and phone technologies and the use of these technologies for a myriad of political, economic, and social purposes. The Western-oriented formulation of the promise of the information society centers on the production of a global dialogue of liberalization and the leapfrogging of various stages of industrialization undergone by Western Europe and North America. The authors, however, argue that the Asian IT-facilitated landscape differs from this view as it reflects more local qualities even as it shares certain Western characteristics.
To understand how different the Asian connected society is from others, the book offers “alterity” as an explanatory alternative to the view that information technology will inevitably lead to a Western-flavored modernization and liberalization of all societies. In this examination, alterity is understood as a “condition of privileging the hitherto marginal and subterranean aspects of a capitalist world order through the capabilities of information and communications technologies” (p. 1). The concept brings attention to the “unique social and political uses being made of IT in the service of particular offline and online causes that are filtered by pre-existing social milieus” (p. 2). Accordingly, alterity can be seen when one compares Chinese and Korean policies and uses of the internet vis-à-vis those in the USA and Western Europe.
Why would information technology be embraced differently throughout Asia? Chong and Yahya identified four pre-existing political trends that would help explain why. First is the psychological politics around embracing technologies in different historical and cultural contexts, including those shaped by generation, rural-urban, and income divides. Second, political conditions and government intervention vary, and so do their effects on business and capital, with governments in Asia playing a very important role in providing infrastructure and shaping the preferences of business. In contrast, in the more developed economies and in the West, the private sector has mostly replaced government in the development of IT. The third trend relates to the values, from cosmopolitanism to nationalism, that are fostered in the internet community which, in turn, influence IT usage. Asian governments are treating IT as a good that could be placed under nationalist control, in contradiction to the Western paradigm of IT as a universal service or of a global information society. The last trend on the list refers to the varieties of subcultures, some of which are extensions of offline politics, while others are autonomous. In most Asian contexts, the online culture is closely related to offline politics and governance.
These aforementioned dimensions of the Asian difference make it easier now to understand the alterity within the Information Society in Asia. The first section of the book is dedicated to a discussion of the social politics of IT within given social, governance and infrastructural contexts. According to Nasya Bahfen (“National Contexts and the Negotiation of Islamic Internet Identity by Southeast Asian Undergraduate Students”), Muslim students in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore use the internet as an online support for offline political engagements, as a discussion venue for religious knowledge online and its utilization offline, and for broadening offline interactions and relationships. When online, the Muslim youth practice an ambiguous balancing of, on the one hand, news collected and reported by non-Muslim sources, and on the other, specific and desired information from both Muslim and non-Muslim sources. This results in contextual consumption of information that ultimately shapes the evolving online practice of Islam.
In his discussion of alterity, Fernando Paragas (“Migrants, Mobiles and Money: Alterity and the Confluence of Three Transnational Flows”) shows migrant workers working within existing systems of provisions of mobile telephony (e.g. pre-paid schemes) to effect changes in their lives and communities. Paragas points out that any alterity from mobile telephony is not a product of the State, but of the industry and of the users. Accordingly, migrant workers primarily drive alterity in communication, approximation of presence despite spatial separation, and finances, as their patterns of use result in the launch of IT products and services.
For Kwoh-Jack Tan (“Blogging Singapore: Control and Excess between Offline and Online Worlds”), alterity in the internet-assisted democratization in Singapore is characterized by a dynamic process of control and resistance in the off- and online worlds. Tactics of control employ technology, legislation, and existing norms surrounding credibility and legitimacy, while tactics of resistance utilize amplification (multiplying of participating voices as awareness spreads), sanctuary (placing materials beyond the reach of State control), and humor.
On the same theme of democratization, Pui Yee Choong (“Grassroots Democratic Movements’ Dependency on New Media in Contemporary Malaysia”) points out that as the internet and new media aided democratization and human rights initiatives in Malaysia, ideals of protest in the online sphere vary significantly from their offline form. And despite being urban-centric, new media create a space for alterity toward a more secular and democratic offline country.
The volume's next section (“Governmental Steering and Policy Alterity”) opens with Kay Hearn's “Hacking, Nationalism, Democracy and Cyberwarfare in the People's Republic of China”, which examines the alterity in a virtual China. According to Hearns, the internet which operates in a setting characterized by a center/margin relationship enables the expression of nationalist sentiments by hackers (that include nationalist groups within China and groups outside of China). These sentiments range from hack attacks triggered by disputes in international relations and (un)officially sanctioned by the government, to government control of online political behavior in reaction to offline political behavior, to hacktivism by pro-democracy groups scattered around the world.
Alan Chong's chapter (“‘Global City Foreign Policy’: The Propaganda of Enlargement and Integration of an IT-Connected Asian City”) sheds light on the propaganda or promotional aspects of IT connectivity. In this account, government promotional efforts of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Taipei as global cities are anchored heavily in a global city foreign policy that redesigns offline political bureaucracies in favor of a global IT-connected city. Alterity is then brought into existence by such policies.
Struggles between the Korean government and civil society and finding a balance between the logic of efficiency and public interest are the themes examined by Byoung Won Min against the backdrop of IT-related policies and revisions of media laws (“Biting Back against Civil Society: IT, Media and Communication Regulations in South Korea”). The role of government is further examined in the final two chapters, this time focusing both on the government and the private sector. Joefe Santarita (“Growth and Government: The Rise of Information Technology Enabled Services Centers in India and the Philippines”) and Faizal Bin Yahya (“The Political Economy of Data Security in the BPO Industry in India”) demonstrate the critical role of the government policy environment in the rise of IT-based industries, including the IT-enabled services industry in India and the Philippines.
The existence (and persistence) of alterity, or diversities in the Asian use of IT, is the big question that this volume of edited works successfully poses. The work should be welcomed for its attempt to be nuanced and for emphasizing that it is context that matters. For these, it has to be forgiven for still not being nuanced enough sometimes; for example, when the urban experience appears to stand for that of the whole country, or when one group of actors appears to represent a whole category.
