Volume 8, No 2.

 
The order button will take you to the Access MQ shop.

Introduction

by Chua Siew Keng

Introduction (8:2) Reframing the ‘global’, the ‘digital’ and the ‘local’ — communication theories and Asian perspectives Chua Siew Keng In the last decade of the last century/millennium there has been an explosion of the ‘global’ and the ‘digital’ communications within the geopolity of the Asian region. From a universalised discourse, ‘globalisation’ has become increasingly contested in relation to both economic and communications development. Linked to the ‘digital’, the term ‘global’, from the perspectives of communication scholars in the Asia and the Australasian region, is in need of being reframed, if not redefined. This reframed globalisation may articulate a politics of communication that critiques and reshapes the old theme of cultural imperialism but it does not render the latter entirely obsolete. The ‘international development’ era of communications has morphed into the ‘global’ era with continuities and change. Whereas the international era had projected communications from the top down within the modernisation project of progress and development, in the reframed global era there needs to be ‘careful consideration of the democratic potential of the new communications media ... along with limits placed by global markets’. There can be ‘globalisation from below’ (see Sosale’s article), contextualising the global within the history of the local. ‘Asia’ as a region, too, has been subjected to contestable boundaries. As a designation for a geopolitical terrain, it has expanded during the past two decades to include the countries of Australasia, comprising Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific nations, from the perspectives of the scholars within the region. Indeed one Indonesian scholar-journalist has made out a strong case for considering Australia as the ‘white tribe of Asia’ (Hardjono 1993). New Zealand scholars have increasingly aligned their perspectives more with Asia than with the ‘West’. This turn against the West in communication theories within the region has been active in contesting globalisation as applied to Asian and non-western media studies. From another angle, the technologising capability of the ‘new’ digital communications has also contributed to the rhetoric of globalisation to link it with ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’. Scholars in the Asian region have also begun to demystify the new digital communications technologies and have called into question what may be regarded as new. In Japan, the most economically developed nation in Asia and the most technologically advanced country in relation to communications development, the rhetoric of the digital can be critiqued. Jungbong Choi discusses the limits of such a rhetoric about new communications, such as digital television, in the Japanese situation. His article ‘Embedding digital television in an IT economy: The case of Japan’ explores the tension between public service broadcasting and the commercial consumption of the digital potential of the medium. He locates the economic discourse of the new communications within its social and cultural contexts. Choi attempts to ‘situate Japan’s launch of digital TV within the larger campaign to reshape economic structures and sociocultural domains in correspondence with the fast-changing configurations of information capitalism’. Goode and Little explore the tension between the political economy of digital television and cultural issues through the investigation of the term ‘local’ as it applies to content production. They argue that the issue of local content ‘may be more under threat’ as a result of digital television. They question the accepted contours of local culture as ‘national’ culture in relation to global imports, and suggest that in effect what may emerge is a ‘localisation’ which is hybrid in nature, comprising an amalgam of imported features and everyday local realities. Goode and Little’s theorising of the local as both contestable and not synonymous with national looks forward to Ishida’s article ‘Glocalising an environmental conflict: Thai press and Pak Mun Dam’, a study of print (or ‘old’) media as opposed to the new digital communication technologies. Hoar and Hope argue that ‘the democratic potential of new communications media’ (to use Sosale’s words) such as the Internet has actually created a ‘digital divide’ among the haves and have-nots in New Zealand where ‘the excluded poor do not simply lack access to PCs and the Internet; they are also surveilled and stigmatised by the very technologies that are supposed to empower them’. Though the Internet, the Web and digital broadcasting may be considered as ‘new’, in many ways, while the technology has transformed the format of delivery and reception, content imported into the region from elsewhere may not be so new. At the same time, in concert with the emergence of new issues, particularly pertaining to local environmental interests, scholars have become more aware of how the old media may reframe themselves with new content such that the politics of journalism and information flow becomes transformed to shed light on what serves local (Asian) interests. Ishida’s article is a case in point. Ishida explores the tension between the global and the local in the Pak Mun Dam conflict in Thailand, relating the intertwining forces of global, national and local environmental interests in conservation to the narrative of reporting of the conflict in two Thai newspapers. Such a politics of ‘glocalisation’ (a term used earlier by Robertson (1992), and which Ishida reprises here) critiques the ‘modernisation’ theme of progress and development and demonstrates within an Asian communal situation the thesis put forward by Sosale. At any rate, what may be considered new may be relative. The convergence of broadcasting, print and telecommunications is still an emerging phenomenon in some Asian countries. Bhuiyan, in his article ‘The political economy of mass communication in Bangladesh’, relates his country’s communications development to locate it within the historical and political context of Bangladesh. The issue of developmental politics in relation to globalisation from the communication perspective constitutes an important concern. In the postcolonial and so-called Third World countries the question of sustainable development and environmental damage has thrust the issue into the global media framework from which local media is not exempted. In another article on a local situation, Rattikalchalakorn (who deals with more than media) gives a complex analysis of the ‘social-info transformation’ surrounding the Asian economic crisis in Thailand. The role of the mass media and information flow is seen as one of the important factors/sectors in the transformation of communications and information in the period prior to and after the Asian economic crisis experienced in that country. Like all the other features in this issue, Rattikalchalakorn’s analysis provides a rich sociocultural context for locating communication and information processes. The studies included in this special issue represent a small sample of communication theories which have engaged scholars within the region. These studies constitute some of the emerging and continuing analyses which critique universalising communication theories and conceptual frameworks that have their roots in western scholarship. The analyses and critiques embed discussions of communication and media within the specific historical and sociocultural contexts within the region. The studies engage with the politics of theorising communication development from their own local and regional perspectives. They contest accepted discourses and terminologies and employ a hybrid of methodologies which range from political economy to critical theory discourse analysis and cultural studies. These analyses are contextualised in relation to the challenge of the interaction between global and local forces (glocalisation). In doing so they are continually reframing communication theories by a turn towards the lived local realities of the Asian region. Bibliography Hardjono, R. (1993) White Tribe of Asia: An Indonesian View of Australia, South Melbourne: Hyland Publishers. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage. Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalisation and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press. Downing, J., Mohammadi, A. & Sreberny-Mohammadi, A. (2001) Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Sage.

Communication and development in the international and global ‘eras’

by Sujatha Sosale

Embedding digital television in an IT economy: The case of Japan

by Jungbong Choi

Digitalising the Land of the Long White Cloud

by Luke Goode and James Littlewood

The Internet, the public sphere and the ‘digital divide’ in New Zealand

by Peter Hoar and Wayne Hope

Glocalising an environmental conflict: Thai press and Pak Mun Dam

by Suda Ishida

Social-info transformation in Thailand: Before and after the economic crisis

by Sripan Rattikalchalakorn

The political economy of mass communication in Bangladesh

by A.J.M. Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan

Anura Goonasekera: An appreciation

by Shelton Gunaratne, Naren Chitty

  
The order button will take you to the Access MQ shop.