Despite a double-digit decline in advertising in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001, which forced many media companies in Southeast Asia either to reorganize or close down operations completely, recent research indicates that the Asia Pacific media and entertainment market will remain the fastest-growing region during the next five years, increasing to $432 billion in 2009, led by powerful growth in China, which is on track to overtake Japan as the region’s biggest market by 2008 (PWC, 2005).
Information was, once, the jealously protected ward of the local elites, as the local mass communication media, in particular the nascent broadcast industry, was closely controlled by the newly-independent governments and accorded a central role in nation building. Today, the international media giants, seeking profitability through scale, have taken their place alongside local producers. They have extended their reach across Asia, eroding mono- lithic state ownership in an apparent profusion of choice and ownership, but representing the concentration of ownership and control.
There is a paradox here: many Southeast Asian governments fear the links drawn by the modernization theorists between capitalist market develop- ment, the free flow of information, and the development of liberal institu- tions (Diamond and Plattner 1993). Yet their worries in this area are largely unfounded. The elites in Southeast Asia regularly rail against the interna- tional media but, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, they can respond effectively (Atkins 2002; Rodan 1998), retaining a high degree of control over, or manipulating the flow of information flooding across their borders.
Global industry trends such as commodification and commercialization have helped to ensure that the content provided by these transnational media giants has little impact upon the region’s authoritarian regimes.
Thus, rather than inspiring democratic ideals in an informed and educated public, the media tends to be locked in its own battle of competing com- mercial interests. Only very occasionally does it reflect the political aspira- tions of its audience and their call for political change, rarely sowing the seeds of political conflict (McCargo 1999). These media giants are not here to fight for democracy, they have ‘other priorities such as entertaining the people and making money’ (Merrill 2000, p. 215).
Yet, this does not mean that the mass media, together with the techno- logical infrastructure down the wires of which it flows, do not have a huge
impact on politics in Southeast Asia. Here, as with much of the rest of the world, the communication media, as well as the perception industries so closely connected with it, are altering the fabric of politics and political communication, changing the ways in which political leaders relate to those over whom they rule. Consequently, the region’s elites are becoming more aware of manipulating and projecting their public image (Thompson 2001).
As we shall show, even in Singapore, a model of media control, the government must get its messages across in a modern and complex media environment, and one which grows ever more challenging given digital technology. Hand-in-hand with the growth of information-hungry media companies in Southeast Asia, therefore, has come the development of the publicity apparatus. Despite the recent economic downturn, the top five public relations companies in Asia earned a total of almost $US90 million in 2001 (PRWeek2002, p. 11), and the industry, as a whole, continues to flourish (Sudhaman 2004).
It is, however, the depth and pace of the changes in communications, pre- saged in part by the explosion in the number and reach of international media products, that has had many governments in the region having to remodel themselves in order to adjust to the new environment. The more they opened their economies in an attempt to share in the financial benefits of being part of the global information economy, the more they exposed themselves to the process of modernity threatening the social and political foundations of their societies. They clearly perceived the increased flow of informational and entertainment materials across increasingly flimsy national borders via the global communications system as threatening, politically and culturally. This flow was also critically connected to issues of sovereignty and the impact of transnational companies (Williams 1995, p. 47). And, even though the transnational content providers might be careful to ensure political pitfalls do not affect their profits, these remain products that come with an inbuilt bias.
This is particularly obvious in mass media products. As public spaces in Asian cities like Singapore see a proliferation of skateboarding youth in their baseball caps and baggies, it is clear that the message from the global media giants is McWorld and definitely not Jihad (Barber 1995). However, in the converging currents of media reception it is not a matter of McWorld or Jihad: a member of Jemaah Islamiah is just as likely to pick up a McDonalds, while the fringes of the burqhua often hide a Nike ‘swoosh’.
These contradictory challenges face Asia’s political elites as they seek to protect their interests, maintain their grip on power, and sustain economic growth.
Media production and reception is a process of constant negotiation. Its role in cultural transformation is both complicated and unpredictable.
Audiences have become ‘nomadic gatherers’ (McLuhan 1964, p. 310) of information, taking what they want and discarding the rest. There is a high- tech mobilization of radical constituencies, whose voices often speak in opposition to globalization, fed by ‘its major discontents, nationalism, regionalism, localism and revivalism’ (Majod 1999, p. 81). The voices chal- lenge the authority of the centre, as culture becomes a factor in both national security and international relations (Majod 1999, pp. 61–2).
With the modern global information economy, technological develop- ment and the current integration of the world’s economies, it is clear that the media has moved to become increasingly central in daily life, and a focus in the complex relations between nation states and the global economy. Satellite broadcasting and the flow of political news and opinion, often in opposition to the ideas and opinions of national political auth - orities, has led to controversy over the sources and control of this information.
But, the general trends in the mass media industry are doing little to offer mainstream outlets for opposition and discontent. Increased commercial- ization and the tendency to view the audiences as consumers not citizens, has seen deterioration in public broadcasting and a growth in entertain- ment programming. As the case studies in the following chapters will show, despite the challenges to traditional forms of power and authority, the unbalanced flow of information and the unequal distribution of the prod- ucts provides the local political elites with an upper hand in their effort to reinforce their control strategies.
This might, as some commentators suggest, have ‘serious consequences for nation-states with fragile and unstable policies’ (Chadhu and Kaviori 2000, pp. 428–9). However, while it has been generally assumed by Asian elites (and liberal democrat theorists), that a globalizing media meant both Westernization and democratization, this has proved not to be the case. As we shall see in the following Southeast Asian case studies, Western media organizations tend not only to adapt to both popular culture but also meet the needs of local political elites in order to protect its distribution.
What is clear, however, is that in Southeast Asia, as with the rest of the world, the media is an intricate part of everybody’s day, and challenges to traditional forms of power and authority have emerged as the audience becomes less constrained by the precedents of tradition, yet the media can also be used to extend and consolidate traditional values, nourishing a sense of identity and sense of belonging (Thompson 1995, p. 194). This is the ambivalent aspect of the media as a technology. Southeast Asia is a good example of where the media has been used as a unifying political force, to create and reinforce common visions. In Indonesia, for example,
as we will see in Chapter 6, the media, and television in particular, helped to create a nation where diversity of geography, religion and culture would have seemed to have conspired against such an imagined community.
Likewise, inequalities in terms of access to the global networks of com- munications have not prevented the emergence of local strategies of oppo- sition, from local cultural production to piracy, providing a ‘complex syncopation of voices’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi 1996, p. 180):
Ideological discontinuities and social disruptions are especially evident in today’s fast-paced, contradictory, conflictive world. Although social institutions and information technology clearly serve their managers and backers in certain ways, they can also combine to shake dominant political visions and cultural tra- ditions to the core. (Lull 1995, p. 114)
In this context, the traditional sovereignty of the Southeast Asian nation state is being threatened by global communications, as national borders are dissolved by the broadcast of foreign news, entertainment, educational and advertising programmes. The effect is, however, ambiguous. These new technologies support both a concentration and a dispersion of power. It is ironic that, in the face of the persuasive influence of the Coca-Cola culture (Majod 1999), and MacWorld (Barber 1995), smaller groups in these com- munities have found their voice as new media ‘allow those on the periphery to develop and consolidate power, and ultimately to challenge the author- ity of the centre’ (Soules 2007).
These alternative views are often expressed through NGOs and interac- tive technologies, some through the established mass media where access is won through improved communications techniques, many more in the use of technologies like mobile telephone text messaging to organize protests.
In this way, they are challenging the centres of power. These voices often speak in opposition to globalization, fed by ‘its major discontents, nation- alism, regionalism, localism and revivalism’ (Majod 1999, p. 81). Thus culture has become a new factor in both national security and international relations (ibid., pp. 61–62).
Media production and reception is clearly complex. ‘It is a process of constant negotiation between personal, professional, audience, organiza- tion, and resources’ (MacGregor 1997, p. 53). The media is a contested space, subject to various pressures, from the influence of corporate owner- ship and advertising censorship, through the input of staffand consumer, to the socio-political environment in which the production and reception goes on (Curran 1996, pp. 145–6). In this battle for control, the division of power and resources is unequal, weighed towards ownership of the means of production. But other groups can negotiate access to media spaces, and are becoming increasingly good at it.
The power to create and distribute meaning still resides with centers of material and political power, both within the state and amongst the higher reaches of cor- porate and financial authority. But this power is exercised dynamically. It is fought over, challenged, and abused, both within and without. (Deacon and Golding 1994, p. 203)
Despite this, the avalanche of information and entertainment materials bursting through increasingly flimsy national borders over the global com- munications system is understandably perceived by many on the receiving end as threatening, politically and culturally. Television has become a spectre that now haunts the world (McChesney 1999, p. 39). Controlled by a small number of powerful, mostly US-based transnational media corpo- rations, it is seen to be at the centre of ‘new modes of image production and cultural hegemony, the political struggles of various groups and the restructuring of capitalist society’ (Kellner 1990, p. 129).
As we shall see from the following chapters dealing with the major economies of Southeast Asia, there is a heightened awareness that the import and export of cultural products and influence is critically connected to issues of sovereignty and the activities of transnational companies (Williams 1995, p. 47). However, these issues that the globalization of the media has created do not intimate a monolinear connection between democracy and the media. It does raise a set of issues that, as the local elites deal with them, have implications for both media development and democ- racy, and ushers in its own questions about the role of the media and its impact on politics in Southeast Asia which will now be exampled in the following case studies.
NOTES
1. For more detailed information on the economic impact of the crisis and the IMF’s bail out efforts see The IMF’s Response to the Asian Crisis, September 1999 http://www.imf.
org/external/np/exr/facts/asia.pdf.
2. Malaysian PM Mahathir quoted on the social responsibility of the press, in Mehra (1989, p. 116).
3. See Granitas and Pottinger (2002), Oliver (2001) and Francis (2002), among others.
4. www.fusionc.com.
5. Asia Market Intelligence (2001).
6. Indonesia 1999: Official Handbook, Directorate of Foreign Information Services, Department of Information, Republic of Indonesia.
7. See ‘Asian Values’ and Democracy in Asia, Proceedings of a Conference Held on 28 March 1997 at Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan, http://www.unu.edu/unupress/asian-values.html.