This seems to fly in the face of those who suggest independent journal- ism is silenced by vested interests. When access to these public spaces is so easily achieved, and an obvious explosion of material is available at the touch of a keyboard button, it would seem the falling cost of computer ownership is the only barrier to producers and audience.
However, while the importance of this trend should not be underplayed, the weight of impact still remains with those with the resources – including the control of major brands. Driving large volumes of traffic to a website is a complex marketing challenge demanding huge resources. Likewise, with time and money, it remains possible to create sizeable audiences whether at football matches, World Cups, Olympics, Hollywood, or through the ‘editor brands’ which were able to attract audiences to view major news events from elections to terrorist attacks like 9/11 and the June 2005 bombings of London Transport (Hunt 2001). Even newspapers still remain very profitable despite their dwindling appeal. According to Goldman Sachs, America’s 12 biggest newspaper publishers in 2004 enjoyed a profit margin of 24 per cent – double the average of Fortune 500 companies (The Economist22 April 2006, p. 9).
Bloggers and Internet pundits do seem, however, to exert a dispropor- tionately large influence on society, as the Internet reached, ‘a tipping point in its evolutionary path . . . [with] a shift in the balance of power between consumer and provider’ (Smith 2006). While ‘active’ web users make up only a small proportion of the online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends. More than half of Internet users are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, and a further 23 per cent only respond when prompted, the remainder who do engage with the net – through message boards, websites and blogs – are being heralded with helping change national conversations.11
By 2006, there were more than 35 million blogs on the Internet (Clark 2006). The number was doubling every six months with a new weblog created every second of every day (Sifry 2006). And while most bloggers only write for small audiences and many quickly lose interest, they focus attention on issues and draw coverage from established media, becoming what Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids(2006), describes as
‘influentials’. Like many of these vocal activists, they are attracting the notice of the authorities from politicians and government to large corpo- rates, many of whom view bloggers as an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective:
No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM’s Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual
and dozens of other victims – even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat. (Lyons 2005, p. 128)
Where ICT development is concerned, the West, occasionally, lingers behind some of its Asian counterparts. Asia was a global leader in broad- band roll-out, and it had one of the earliest examples of citizen journal- ism. South Korean OhmyNews was founded in 2000 as a corrective to the otherwise state-influenced press in Seoul. It made a huge splash in 2002, when its unique brand of participatory journalism by amateur writers played a critical role in the South Korea presidential race. By 2006, the company had 90 full-time staffers – 65 of them journalists – and some 44 000 citizen contributors. Together, they produced around 150 articles a day. Revenues in 2006 were expected to be about $US6 million, 60 per cent of which would come from online ads and the rest from the sale of the company’s news product to Internet portals, and from miscellaneous ser- vices (Moon 2006).
Indeed, South Korea also led the way in rolling out broadband services to users. In 2001, the number of broadband subscribers in the country grew by 58.7 per cent from 4.1 million subscribers in 2000, to 6.5 million in 2001.
As OhmyNews indicated, Koreans were fast adopters of the ‘broadband lifestyle’ spending an average of 13 hours on the Internet each week. Japan was also successful in its broadband rollout, with Taiwan seen as the next big market for broadband services, as household penetration reached approximately 20 per cent by 2001 (Internet News.com 2002).
Singapore has also developed this capacity. In 2002, it was 12th out of the 53 top-wired nations according to the International Data Corp (IDC) Information Society Index (ISI), with 2 in 5 Singaporeans logged onto the Internet via broadband. The Singapore government expected that number to increase to 50 per cent of households to have broadband by 2006 (Chellam 2003, p. 1).
With Internet access rapidly moving from dial-up to broadband access, Asia also claimed the world’s largest regional Internet market. With an esti- mated 375 million Internet users (a user penetration of 11 per cent ) by the end of 2004, Asia was maintaining its lead over Europe (292 million) and North America (227 million). Internet application in Asia continued to be led by the developed economies of the region – Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. This group has been joined by China. With a penetration of 8.5 per cent, China had a massive 111 million Internet users by the end of 2005.
Driven by the continued expansion of broadband and IP services and a growing mobile sector, the Asian telecommunications market was estimated to be worth around US$300 billion in 2006. In the area of broadband
Internet access, South Korea continued to be a world and regional leader with 70 per cent of households having a broadband connection by 2006. The two major technologies supporting broadband in Asia were Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and cable modem. By March 2006, there were 153 million DSL subscribers and 76 million cable modem subscribers across the region. China had become the biggest mobile market in the world, with 400 million mobile subscribers by April 2006, and the sector continued to Table 2.1 Asia – number of Internet service providers per country(2000)
Population No. of ISP providers
China 1.27 billion 3
Hong Kong 7.2 million 17
Indonesia 229 million 24
Japan 127 million 73
Malaysia 22 million 7
Philippines 83 million 33
Singapore 4.3 million 9
South Korea 48 million 11
Taiwan 22.4 million 8
Thailand 62 million 15
UK 60 million 245
US 279 million 7800
Source: Kawamoto (2002).
Table 2.2 Asia – computer penetration and Internet use (2003)
Computers per 1000 people Internet use per 10 000 people
China 16 176
Hong Kong 347 3359
Indonesia 10 68
Japan 315 3044
Malaysia 105 1505
Philippines 20 266
Singapore 483 2987
South Korea 190 4025
Taiwan n.a. 2813
Thailand 24 266
US 315 3466
Source: World Bank, ADB (quoted in Adams 2003).
expand at a rate of almost 20 per cent per annum. Japan also continued its reputation for innovation to maintain its global and regional telecommuni- cations leadership, with its citizens embracing the application of wireless Internet access. By 2006, Japan had more than 79 million mobile subscribers using either NTT DoCoMo’s i-Mode or one of the other proprietary prod- ucts by early 2006 (Paul Budde Communication Ltd 2006).
User-generated content marks a sea change in the way ICT is being used.
People are increasingly moving once more to control the technology for their own use, moving away from being passive consumers and realizing the disruptive capacity of the technology. It represents just one of the latest trends in the growth of the globalized media industry that has political ramifications. As we have seen, as the media companies have grown and technology has allowed them to extend their reach around the world, from issues of media imperialism and national security through to increasing conglomeration, commodification and celebrification, and as Southeast Asia’s economies follow Singapore’s moves ‘on line’, the challenges to tra- ditional elites are increasing as will be examined in the next chapter.
NOTES
1. See Julie Tomlin (2001) and TVSpy.com(2001).
2. The rise of reconstruction works – docudramas that restage historical events – which are increasingly popular are making it hard to determine the boundaries between fact and fiction. Television has always claimed to ‘enjoy a special, privileged status because of its ability to show us things minute by minute. Do we doubt what we see is “real”? . . . With age, television has become more skilful in steering the unwary away from such questions’
(Fraser 2005).
3. Quoted in William Jr. Pesek (2003).
4. See Frederick J. Fletcher (1991).
5. For a summary of research see Thompson (2001).
6. Rupert Murdoch, reported comments on the fact that the Hitler diaries published in his UK ‘quality’ newspaper The Sunday Timeswere forgeries; cit. Robert Harris (1986).
7. Quoted in Joshua Chaffin (2005).
8. See Business Times (2003) and The Economist(13 September 2003, p. 53).
9. See for example Williams and Rich (2000).
10. From Dixon (1999, pp. 47–8).
11. Jupiter Research quoted in Bobbie Johnson (2006).
The conglomeration of media ownership into the hands of transnational corporations which lack distinctive national identities and neither neither
‘reflect nor respect nationhood as an organizing or a regulative principle’
(Barber 1995, p. 13), offers a major challenge for national governments.
This encroachment is an issue which has been consistently raised by the states of Southeast Asia, particularly vulnerable to external pressure given that their economies are so dependent on foreign trade and investment.
This chapter, then, examines the issues that the globalization of the media, and the ongoing technological developments that have made that globalization possible, raise for the political elites of Southeast Asia. It con- siders the question of whether Southeast Asia is subject to the encroach- ment of the global media, what effect that has had on the local media industry and how any developments have impacted the perception of the challenges to regime survival.
Despite the erosion of national sovereignty by the growth of global markets, the media is not simply an avenue down which march the imper- ial legions of cultural change (Blumler and Gurevitch 1996, pp. 132–3).
While the media has a role in cultural transformation, the process is both complicated and unpredictable (Thompson 1995, p. 190). Being able to watch the ‘silicone-enhanced imperial master race’ cavort, bikini-clad, on America’s Bay Watchbeaches probably does stimulate the capacity of its audience around the world to imagine alternative ways of life, but they absorb these messages in culturally particular ways.
A UNESCO-sponsored study of the media trade in 1974, which showed a one-way flow from the developed to the developing world had a marked impact on media studies in the 1970s, giving rise to the media imperialism approach. However, it is one that has been criticized for being simplistic.
We are not witnessing the straightforward Americanizing of the global TV industry. The ‘be global, think local’ was a very successful mantra for the transnational media giants. From MTV through CNN to Disney Channel, commercial sense dictated that products were attuned to local preferences.
By the turn of the century, Business Weekhad seven foreign language edi- tions as part of its efforts to localize the publication, with online versions customized for Europe and Asia by publisher McGraw Hill (van Duyn 2006, p. 25).
55
In addition, around Southeast Asia, American television exports rub shoulders with home-grown output, and the domination of the Asian media is made difficult, if not impossible, by a ‘complex combination of counter forces ranging from national gate-keeping policies and the dynam- ics of audience preference to competition from local media’ (Chadhu and Kaviori 2000, pp. 417–18). Also, local voices have developed a long reach.
Since the 1990s, the region has witnessed the emergence of non-western satellite news operations like Al Jazeera and Al Monar (the Hizbollah satel- lite channel), as well as a few niche Asian brands. India’s ZeeTV can now be seen by the large South Asian community in Britain, and Hong Kong TVB’s library of Cantonese-language programming is standard fare in China towns from Manchester to San Francisco. The Singapore Government’s promotional television product, Channel News Asia, can be seen by Europeans on their cable television. Americans themselves have enthusiastically embraced their local versions of European reality TV shows like Survivor, Big Brother, The Weakest Linkand Who Wants to Be a Millionaire(The Economist13 April 2002, p. 13).
What we can see develop in Southeast Asia is a localized media industry, with localized models for ownership and control, challenged by the global- ized media and other external forces, which have both helped shape the industry, the way it operates and the policies adopted by local political elites as they attempt to control access to the media space and affect public perceptions.