Media Asia

This edited volume brings together cutting-edge studies from emerging scholars of East/Southeast Asia who explore the role of mobile media in the contemporary transformation of the region’s social intimacies, from the romantic to the familial to the communal. By providing a regional and transnational overview of such studies, it affords new insights into how these mobile technologies have contributed to the rise of ‘glocal intimacies’. This pertains to the normalisation and intensification of how people’s relationships of closeness are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. In providing case studies of mobile media and glocal intimacies, the chapters in the volume attend to a broad range of countries that include China, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. This illustrates the differing ways in which mobile media might be embedded in the region’s divergent articulations of social intimacies, which reflect the ongoing tensions between Western and Asian imaginaries of modernity. The chapters also discuss a wide array of mobile media that people use, from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to messaging apps like KakaoTalk and WhatsApp, to dating apps like Tinder and Blued. This allows for a mapping out of the different levels of impact that mobile media might have on social intimacies in a region that contains some of the most technologically advanced as well as the most technologically behind societies in the world. In summary, this book allows readers to take a comparative approach to understanding the complexity of the glocal intimacies that are emerging from the ways people in Asia use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. This volume will benefit students, academics, and researchers who are keen in media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and Asian studies. “This exciting and much-needed book will greatly advance our efforts to decolonise media and communications research. The chapters offer empirically rich and nuanced accounts that challenge the dominant paradigms about mediated intimacy.” Mirca Madianou, Goldsmiths, University of London “This collection develops the original concept of ‘glocal intimacies’ to describe how mobile media have become a crucial site where new social intimacies are enacted, reinforced and transformed in Asia. It introduces fresh empirical research from emerging scholars to furnish deep theoretical insights into these imaginaries and practices.” Audrey Yue, National University of Singapore

While a decade ago much of the discussion of new media in Asia was couched in Occidental notions of Asia as a "default setting" for technology in the future, today we are seeing a much more complex picture of contesting new media practices and production. As "new media" becomes increasingly an everyday reality for young and old across Asia through smartphones and associated devices, boundaries between art, new media, and the everyday are transformed. This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region’s new media. Through an interdisciplinary revision of both "new media" and "Asia" the contributors provide new insights into the complex and contesting terrains of both notions. The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia will be the definitive publication for readers interested in comprehending all the various aspects of new media in Asia. It provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, conceptually cutting-edge guide to the important aspects of new media in the region — as the first point of consultation for researchers, advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields of new media and Asian studies.

As part of the advocacy of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) to promote regional studies in global academic discourse, this book contributes to a better understanding of social media within the context of Southeast Asian countries, with the addition of Sri Lanka. The contributors here are primarily Asian academics and practitioners, immersed in the fields of media and communication. Throughout the chapters, the reader will discover that social media has changed the paradigm of communication in the region: as an avenue for free expression; as a tool for news gathering and news distribution; as an aid in crime prevention; and even as a means to find a lifelong partner. For non-Asian readers, there is also an annex that provides a summary of social media statistics in the region to allow the countries mentioned in this book to be situated within the global context.

This book examines the influence of mobile media technology on the lives of young people in East and North Asia, South East Asia and Australia. It discusses the impact information communication technologies have today on social identity, well-being, participation and exclusion. It explores current media practices and their innovative, transformative and disruptive uses at the local, the regional, the national, and the global level. In particular, it analyses mobile media not as a discrete object, but rather as part of a dynamic communication and information environment in which human-object relations are constantly reconfigured. It covers key theoretical and conceptual themes in youth mobile media research focusing on social, cultural and political aspects, including coverage of key themes such as regulation and technology, practices, pedagogies, aesthetics, social change, and representations of mobile youth. The book includes new accounts of recent research into the uses of mobile media by young people, and how these are situated in a broader socio-political context. Case studies include mobile panics in Australia (the notorious Kings of Wirrabee sexual assault case) and Japan (the scandals of high school girls as teenage prostitutes) in which mobile media use has had significant impact. This book offers an up-to-date examination of the influence of information communication technologies on young people’s lives in the region.

Drawing on first hand research and written in a clear and accessible manner this is a highly original book providing a detailed account of the political influence exerted by both domestic and international media in the Asia Pacific region.

This book is an upper-level student source book for contemporary approaches to media studies in Asia, which will appeal across a wide range of social sciences and humanities subjects including media and communication studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and Asian studies, it provides an empirically rich and stimulating tour of key areas of study. The book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in one up-to-date and accessible volume, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.

The past decade has seen a major structural shift in broadcasting in Southeast Asia, with the development of digital satellite and cable broadcasting. This shift has impacted upon some of the most information-sensitive governments in the world: Singapore, Malaysia and, until recently, Indonesia. Atkins traces this development in five countries, showing that the challenge to authoritarian regimes, anticipated by modern theorists as a result of the globalization of news and information, is not materializing. Instead, a new commercial elite has arisen, Southeast Asia's own mini-moguls, who act as gatekeepers for state interests, as partners to global media companies.