Introduction: The Media and Asian Transformations

Abstract

The proliferation of satellite and cable television and online networks, enabled by sophisticated digital technologies and the deregulation and liberalization of broadcasting and telecommunications in the 1990s, has created a new global media landscape, a complex terrain of multi-vocal, multimedia and multi-directional fl ows offering enormous challenges and opportunities (Thussu 2007). Such media fl ows have been accelerated by a shift from a state-centric and national view of the media to an imperative defi ned by commercially driven globalization, consumer interest and transnational markets. The earlier model adopted in much of Asia was of a dominant public broadcaster that was seen as integral to the development of nation states, modernizations and conceptions of national identity. Since the 1990s the new borderless media have penetrated the emerging markets of Asia, capturing the imaginations of people who were accustomed to the traditional domestic media under government control (Thomas 2005). There has been a growing chorus of voices in many Asian governments including Malaysia, Singapore, India and Indonesia responding to the anxieties brought by this process of media globalization, by projecting an Asian cultural identity, a common “Asianness” and “our space” being eroded by a permanent fl ow of the media, capital, people, technologies and ideas (Ang 2001). Today the growth in satellite platforms, transnational television channels and online communication communities in Asia is said to be the most rapid worldwide. Though the process of media globalization takes place not in a uniform but in a differential pace and scale from nation to nation, its interrelated trends have marked not only a quantitative change but also a subtle “qualitative shift” (Flew 2007: 55) in the dynamics of socio-political and cultural relations within and between nation states, societies and individuals.

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