New Media in Southeast Asia: Concepts and Research Implications

Abstract

media technologies [have] altered infrastructures and rhythms of everyday (Horst, 2012, p. 62) - this is true not only for technology-driven metropolitan areas in Eeast Asia or USA, but also, and particularly, for those Southeast Asian countries that hold some of largest numbers of social media users in world. Yet, contrary to popular expectations of an interconnected global network society (Castells, 1996), a number of ethnographic studies have exposed rather unorthodox ways in which digital technologies have become part of daily dynamics of social, cultural, and political life that depend largely on particular regional settings, infrastructures, offline relationships, and other aspects of locality (Hine, 2000, p. 27; Horst, 2013, pp. 149-151; Horst & Miller, 2006; Madianou & Miller, 2012; Miller, 2011; Miller & Slater, 2000; Postill, 2011; ,h Servaes, 2014; Slater, 2013). Focusing on New Media in Southeast Asia, this issue contributes to this project of provincializing (Coleman, 2010, p. 489) digital media, particularly social media, by following ways in which people go about organizing their social, cultural, and political lives in largely institutionalized and conflict-laden environments.Directing their focus toward political participation of urban middle classes ses in authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes, authors of this special issue explore ways in which different actors set parameters for participation in digital space, and seize digital media for their socio-political and cultural agendas. This approach allows them to avoid media-centric generalizations and various forms of technological determinism associated with early work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and others (Baym, 2015, pp. 27-44). Without disregarding importance of external forces, such as political centralization, bureaucratization, and urbanization, as well as their regional particularities, contributions place a strong emphasis on agency of Internet users. Hence, digital media feed into, reflect, and shape symbolic struggles over perception of social world (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 20) by allowing for new types of exchange and socialities to emerge across gap between virtual and ® actual (Boellstorff, 2012, p.While contributions to this issue deploy terms digital and social media by addressing concrete, non-analog technologies and applications, such as Internet or Facebook, term new media is rarely discussed in detail. Inquiring what makes new media new, llana Gershon (2010, p. 10) goes well beyond factual innovations introduced by what we know today as Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2007; see also Ellison & boyd, 2013). Rather than technologies she argues, it is people's perceptions of and experiences with social media (e.g., Facebook or Instagram) that define them as new. Internet users, as Hine (2000) poses in her book Virtual Ethnography, are involved in construction of digital technology both practices by which they understand it and through content they produce (p. 38). Once embedded in everyday practices, new media and their accompanying infrastructures may appear mundane and transparent to users. Yet, emerging forms of social interaction through and with digital media do not go without a fair amount of anxieties related to these media (Baym, 2015, p. 22; Gershon, 2010, pp. 80-81), as they potentially challenge previously established technologies and patterns of exchange (Campbell, 2010, p. 9).Madianou and Miller (2011) encountered similar suspicion among Filipino domestic workers in London who today could be defined as the real vanguard troops in marching towards digital future (Miller & Horst, 2012, p. 10). Formulating their concept of polymedia, authors explore ways in which diverse media contribute to emotional repertoire of Filipino mothers in their communication with their children back in Philippines. …