Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2013

Vol. 43, No. 4, 579590, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2013.785698

Introduction: Assessing the Social and

Political Impact of the Internet and New
Social Media in Asia
JASON ABBOTT
Center for Asian Democracy, University of Louisville, Kentucky 40208, USA

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a special issue on the social and political impact of new
information communications technologies (ICTs) in Asia, with specific attention paid to new social
media. This paper provides some contextualisation of the broader questions that the principal
literature on the subject raises, namely questions about the effectiveness of ICTs as tools for
mobilisation and information exchange; mechanisms of censorship and control; and the nature of
public discourse on the Internet. In doing so, the paper introduces and locates the articles that
comprise this special issue within these debates.
KEY WORDS: Internet, new social media, mobilisation, public sphere

In the space of a few shorts months in 2011, popular protests and discontent swept leaders
from power in three of the Arab Worlds most enduring authoritarian regimes. The role
played by new social media in the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, respectively,
as well as in a spate of other countries in the region where regime change did not occur,
thrust platforms such as Facebook and Twitter into the full glare of the worlds media. It
also led an increasing number of social scientists to examine their comparative social and
political impacts (Howard and Hussain 2011; Howard, Agarwal, and Hussain 2011). Were
the revolutions really tweeted as suggested by Else (2012) and Hounshell (2011)? Or is
Morozov (2011) right in suggesting that the role played by new social media was
exaggerated amidst the hype and punditry that followed the Arab Spring? Furthermore,
would the success of these political revolutions inspire demonstration effects in other parts
of the world where authoritarianism and semi-authoritarian political systems persisted? It
was an attempt to answer these questions that motivated the authors of the papers
presented in this special feature.
In the initial aftermath of events in Tunisia and Egypt, political leaders in a number of
Asian countries were clearly concerned about potential demonstration effects. There were
expressions of concern that their own citizens would emulate the example and methods of
the Arab Spring protestors. For example, in February 2011, Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Tun Razak warned, [d]ont think what is happening in Tunisia and Egypt will also
happen in Malaysia We will not allow it to happen here (The Star Online, February 7,
Correspondence Address: Jason Abbott, Center for Asian Democracy, Stevenson Hall #204, University of
Louisville, Kentucky, 40208, USA. Email: Jason.abbott@louisville.edu

2013 Journal of Contemporary Asia

580 J. Abbott
2011). In Cambodia, strongman Hun Sen, Prime Minister since 1998, made an even
blunter threat. In response to comments on a Radio Free Asia report that a Tunisian-like
protest could occur in Cambodia, Hun Sen lashed out stating, I have to send a message to
people who want to inspire a riot [like] in Tunisia I will close the door and beat the
dog" (Voice of America, January 21, 2011).
In Vietnam, Dr Nguyen Dan Que, one of the countrys leading dissidents launched an
appeal in Ho Chi Minh City asking people to take to the streets to save the country. This
was taken up by a number of other groups online including the group, Bloc 8406, which
issued an online statement urging the Vietnamese to follow the example of North Africa
and demand greater democracy and human rights (Asia News.it, March 1, 2011). The
Vietnamese authorities were particularly anxious when an engineer called Pham Thanh
Son set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his family's property by local
authorities (Global Voices, February 20, 2011). Although the authorities claim his death
was accidental, the incident clearly echoed the self-immolation of Mohamed Buoazizi in
Tunisia, whose protest and death sparked the beginning of the unrest in Tunisia.
In China, authorities swiftly responded to an anonymous posting on Twitter that called for
protests in Chinese towns and cities on February 20, 2011 apparently emulating the Arab
Spring, and a number of online activists were swiftly arrested, a heavy security presence was
deployed on the date in question and there was a crackdown on foreign journalists. While few
anticipated or expected events in North Africa to have a significant effect in China, the
Chinese authorities clearly felt insecure enough to censor the word Jasmine from Internet
searches, since many commentators had dubbed the political upheaval in the Arab world the
Jasmine Revolution (see El-Khawas 2012; Schraeder 2012).
Clearly there are significant contextual differences between regimes in Asia and their
counterparts in North Africa. For example, in the cases of China and Vietnam, political
power no longer resides in the figure of a single authoritarian leader as it did in Egypt, Libya
and Tunisia, and the succession problem has largely been resolved by the retirement and
promotion of successive generations of party apparatchiks (Nathan 2003, 79). In addition,
government censorship has proven to be both more pervasive and adept in many parts of
Asia, and the security and intelligence forces more proactive in anticipating political unrest
and acting quickly and decisively before such unrest can spread.
A comprehensive comparative analysis of the political impact of the Internet and new
social media in Asia is beyond the scope of the articles in this feature issue alone.
Nevertheless the three countries examined in the articles that follow constitute a useful
sample of the regime types found in the region. Lewiss study of China provides an
exploration of how the Internet is leading to an expansion of a deliberative public sphere
that is increasing political opportunity in a single-party authoritarian system. At the other
end of the political regime continuum, Lim and Hamayotsu explore how social media is
being used in one of Asias most vibrant democracies, Indonesia. Indeed, Indonesia is an
important case study for analysing the impact of social media activism: it is the fourth
most populous country in the world; the largest Muslim country; and has made a
successful transition to democracy after three decades of authoritarian rule. Despite its
relative poverty, Indonesia has the third largest number of Twitter users in the world and
the fourth largest number of Facebook users most of whom access the Internet via
mobile phone of which there are an estimated 220 million. Despite the spectacular
growth of new social media in Indonesia, both Lim (2013) and Hamayotsu (2013) are
somewhat more pessimistic about the impact of new information communication

Introduction: Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in Asia 581
technologies (ICTs) in Indonesia. Interestingly, Lewis, in his assessment of their impact in
China, is rather more optimistic. In her study, for example, Lim makes the excellent point
that social media do not automatically result in greater mobilisation and participation.
Rather, new public sphere social media leads to multiple and diverse networked
spheres that may be civil and progressive in their politics but also promote uncivil and
reactionary politics. Building on this latter point, Hamayotsu claims that the enormous
growth of new social media in Indonesia has seen liberal religious segments of civil
society increasingly on the defensive while conservative Islamic voices have proliferated.
The Flowering of ICTs
The impact of new ICTs in Asia is not a story that simply began with the more recent
surge in social media usage. In 1998, for example, a small number of activists and
students used early online bulletin boards to co-ordinate protests that ultimately brought
an end to the 30-year rule of General Suharto in Indonesia. Similarly, one of the first
examples of the use of political blogging in Asia occurred in Malaysia during the
Reformasi protests of 1998 in the aftermath of the detention of its de facto leader
Anwar Ibrahim (see Abbott 2001). Finally, protestors in the Philippines three years later
took advantage of short-messaging services (SMS or texts) to mobilise the EDSA II
demonstrations in 2001 that precipitated the resignation of Joseph Estrada.
One thing that is new is the proliferation of these disparate tools and their integration
into the latest generation of mobile phones (dubbed smartphones). This technological
integration has lowered the financial cost of accessing the Internet, since desktop and
laptop computers with fixed line connections are no longer a prerequisite, leading to an
explosion of instant communication that has made social media omnipresent.
In their contributions on Malaysia, Weiss (2013) and Tapsell (2013) explore the impact
of the Internet and new social media in one of Asias most resilient and enduring semidemocratic regimes, Malaysia. As commentators such as Abbott (2004, 2012), Brown
(2005) and Weiss (2006) have noted, Malaysia has a vibrant and developed online media
that has had notable impacts on politics and society and, therefore, has served as a test
case for studies of the democratising effects and impact of new ICTs in hybrid regimes.
Despite strict controls on mainstream newspaper and television media, the Malaysian
government chose to refrain from overt Internet censorship in order to attract large-scale
foreign investment into its much-vaunted megaproject, the Multimedia Super Corridor
(MSC). With such assurances written into the MSCs Bill of Guarantees, independent and
oppositional media almost immediately took advantage of this parallel public sphere,
developing a thriving landscape of bloggers, activist-edited agglomeration sites and
independent journalism. Long before the birth and development of todays social media
tools, Malaysian civil and human rights advocates were using online bulletin boards and
email lists to exchange information and opinions. Nevertheless, the arrest and detention of
former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in 1998 served as a significant catalyst for
online activism, giving rise to one of the countrys most famous bloggers, Raja Petra
Kamaruddin, and contributing to the creation of the countrys first commercial online
news service Malaysiakini (see Tapsell, 2013). In addition, consistent with Howards
(2011, 180) argument that in autocratic regimes opposition political parties and civil
society are among the first to go online, all of Malaysias major political parties soon
developed websites that enabled them to circumvent the restrictions on the print media.

582 J. Abbott
Furthermore, clumsy efforts by the government to restrict opposition party newspapers
further only contributed to the increased sophistication and innovation of their online
versions. For example, in March 2000, when the government revised the printing permit
of the Islamic party PAS in order to reduce the frequency of its newspaper Harakah from
biweekly to bimonthly, the PAS responded by moving additional resources into an online
version of the paper, Harakah Daily. Within a year this version had incorporated online
television and continued to add functionality at a rapid pace. In 2013, Harakah Daily
includes a Malay and an English language site, multimedia resources, letters pages,
columns, RSS and Twitter feeds and a link to its Facebook Page, which has over
298,000 likes. By comparison, the leading Malay-language newspaper Utusan
Malaysia has only 28,000.
This rapid development of online media in Malaysia saw it become an early adopter of
blogging, with the result that today Malaysia has one of the highest proportions of
bloggers per head in the world. According to a 2010 survey of blog demographics by
Sysomos, it ranked fourteenth in terms of its share of the total number of blogs worldwide, higher than any other country in Southeast Asia and third in Asia behind only Japan
and India (Sysomos, June 10, 2010). Liow and Pasuni (2010), Ufen (2008) and Suffian
(2010) have argued that bloggers played an important role in the 2008 Malaysian general
election in which the governing coalition lost its two-thirds majority for the first time
since 1969. In particular, bloggers were seen as playing a role in mobilising first-time
voters in urban and semi-urban areas. Indeed, in those elections a number of prominent
bloggers were themselves elected to office, including Jeff Ooi, Tony Pua, Tian Chua,
Nik Azmi Nik Ahmed and Elizabeth Wong (Inter Press Service News, March 12, 2008).
The Effectiveness of ICTs
Each of the articles in this collection address, to differing degrees, the question of how
effective social media activism can be when such activism is allegedly grounded in weak
ties rather than in stronger bonds of personal or occupational relations. Indeed, it is
because of such weak ties that Gladwell (New Yorker, October 4, 2010) and other sceptics
have largely dismissed the efficacy of online activism (Morozov 2011). Simply clicking a
like button is, according to Gladwell, nothing more than slacktivism. Anyone can
like a movement but such armchair activism cannot be a substitute for direct forms of
political action and, he continues, it is inconceivable, for example, that the civil rights
movement in the USA in the 1960s would have been as successful as it was if it had relied
only on the good will and moral symbolic support that characterise direct action. The
contributions here are neither as dismissive as the most sceptical commentators nor are
they as optimistic as the most ardent proponents of the new technologies, software and
media platforms.
Lim (2013), for example, explores the reasons why it is that some social media
campaigns and activism succeed while others fail. Using Indonesia as a case study, she
contrasts two campaigns that were successful with two that largely failed. Lim uses these
cases to show how the specific context within which social activism occurs is crucial to
understanding when, where and why it will be a success or failure. For Lim we cannot
simply dismiss all social media activism as slacktivism because, at times, it does cross
over into the real world, mobilising real people to take real action, as the Arab Spring
vividly demonstrated. Contrary to the notion that weak ties are ineffective, Lim argues

Introduction: Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in Asia 583
that weak ties can and do link more people to many more and different social groups than
do those associated with strong ties. This not only allows for the much easier diffusion of
information, since individuals are part of overlapping multiple networks, but it also
exposes those individuals to other people and influences in more distant networks than
was possible prior to the development of the Internet.
In his contribution, Lewis (2013) also challenges the slacktivism charge by revealing
that Chinese citizens have shown that ICTs can be mobilised for a wide array of goals.
While many of these have been online, with perhaps the most famous being the phenomenon of human-flesh search engines that have been used to highlight petty corruption
and largesse by party officials, there have also been a growing number of mass events,
especially protest walks and strikes. Indeed, figures reveal a sharp increase in such mass
events over the past five years. For Lewis (2013) it is clear that such protests are
proliferating because of the wider access to information about their success elsewhere
and reduced barriers to organisation through ICTs.
Nevertheless it is simply not enough to proclaim a proverbial brave new world in
which new public spaces, crowd-sourcing, flash mobs and citizen journalism are
radically transforming participation. While Lim (2003, 274) acknowledges that the
Internet is a convivial medium that provides greater opportunities for co-operation,
collaboration and participation than ever before, she also contends, as do all the
authors in this special issue, that there is nothing intrinsic to the software and tools
that achieves this. Thus, collectively, the contributions in this special issue can be
regarded as a clarion call to political scientists to identify the conditions and variables
under which participation in social media leads to the success or failure of online
activism. For Lim (2013) the impact of the Internet and social media result from an
organic interaction of technology and social, political and cultural structures as well
as relationships. In other words, despite the global ubiquity of social network services,
such as Facebook and Twitter, how and how well they are utilised by individuals and
social movements will be a result of the existing embedded socio-economic, ethnic
and gendered structures of respective societies.
Despite vibrant online activism that has made Malaysians much more informed about
key issues, and contributed to large-scale demonstrations and the gains in 2008, the
political tsunami, as Malaysias Sunday Star dubbed the results (cited in The
Economist, March 10, 2008), did not have the transformative impact that some reformers
had hoped for. Aside from a few largely cosmetic changes, Malaysia has retained most if
not all of the institutions, mechanisms and legislation that characterise its hybrid semidemocratic regime. It is this lack of any radical transformation, despite the vibrancy of
online activism, which lies at the core of Tapsells contribution to this feature. In particular
he explores the impact of the new media in Malaysia upon the norms and values within
journalism as a whole. In doing so, he details how despite giving an impetus and fillip to
demands for wider media reform, both in 1998 and in 2008, the mainstream media has
largely proven resistant to change. Moreover, on a more pessimistic note, Tapsell (2013)
shows how a combination of renewed government efforts to constrain online journalists,
coupled with limited commercial success, have seen many pro-reform Internet voices go
silent. While retaliation against and repression of journalists are features of the governments response to the rise of critical voices on the Internet, self-censorship, peer pressures
and commercial viability are also important factors in accounting for why the media
remains largely muzzled.

584 J. Abbott
Weiss (2013) adds to this analysis with her article, also on Malaysia, which attempts to
dispel some of the punditry and more optimistic assessments of the impact of the Internet
and new social media even while acknowledging that these technologies are qualitatively
different from earlier technologies, both in form and impact. For Weiss both these new
communication tools can be used in settings which may redistribute power and open
debate, giving them the potential to be transformative. Like Lim, Weiss is concerned with
whether and how the Internet and social media get people to cross from the online world
into the offline world and argues that to do so requires the development of collective
identity and agency. It is precisely the possibility of such mobilisable collective identities
that makes the new media important for Weiss, noting the role such media played in the
Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih 2.0) in 2011. Principally using Facebook
and Twitter, Bersih was able to organise a demonstration of between 10,000 and 20,000
people despite a large police presence and roadblocks on major intersections, a feat it not
only repeated, but surpassed on April 28, 2012 when an estimated 80,000 turned out for
the third iteration of the protest, dubbed Bersih 3.0 (Aljazeera, April 28, 2012).
Nevertheless Weiss is cautious, noting that in Malaysia, as in many countries, surveys
of Internet users reveal that the overwhelming majority of people do not use the Internet
for explicitly political purposes. Indeed, even in a country where blogging and bloggers
have played such a highly visible role, only 16% of Malaysias top 50 bloggers write on
politics, with most blog readers preferring personal journals rather than political blogs.
Tapsells contribution similarly notes the transformative potential of the new technologies and media platforms in Malaysia. In particular, he argues that these technologies and
platforms did provide a way for an independent media to overcome the pervasiveness of
pro-government media ownership (Tapsell, 2013). Moreover, the development of new
social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, precipitated calls for greater liberalisation and
managed to push new directions for journalism. Nevertheless the striking feature of the
Malaysian case is that such potential has largely not been realised. The Barisan Nasional
government did not embrace liberalisation and the media regime remains largely
unchanged. Consequently, Tapsells article demonstrates that there is no immediate
causality between new media and democratisation. In doing so, he therefore provides an
important analysis of the contextual factors that mitigated the democratising effects in the
case of Malaysia.
In a similar vein to Tapsells piece, Lewiss contribution on China explores the impact
of new ICTs on the media. No analysis of the socio-political impact of the Internet in Asia
would be complete without an analysis of how new ICT is affecting the Peoples Republic
of China. As Lewis notes, since China is an authoritarian one-party state and also has the
most Internet users in the world it represents a critical case for the assessment of any
democratising potential in these new media. In order to explore this impact Lewis not only
draws on a number of specific examples and anecdotal evidence but also provides content
analysis of online news editorials in China. To test the hypothesis that online media is
more open, Lewis compared editorials posted on one of the countrys leading online news
portals QQ.com with editorials that appeared in newspapers from five different
provinces. His data revealed that while the two national Beijing-based newspapers
gave more coverage to sensitive topics than QQ, they were far more likely to shield
their critique behind rhetorical language and symbols consistent with the regime than were
journalists at QQ. As Lewis notes, this demonstrates that at the very least the editorialists
at QQ felt less political pressure when arguing for policy change.

Introduction: Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in Asia 585
These observations for China contrast surprisingly with Malaysia where despite being
a much less repressive regime there is also much less evidence of the kind of critical
editorials and arguments for policy change in the mainstream media. Tapsell notes, for
example, that following a brief flowering of dissent after the Reformasi movement in
1998, critical journalists were sacked, leaned-on heavily by the editors of major newspapers or moved to late night editorial shifts. As a result, the mainstream news media in
Malaysia remains a largely apolitical force dominated by so-called developmental
journalism, in which the media does not form a fourth estate but instead is a partner in
the development process. Having demonstrated this surprisingly greater proclivity towards
openness in China, Lewis proceeds to survey a number of other studies of online content
and activism in the country. The conclusions he draws from these are that, despite
censorship, it is clear that the new media has broadened access to information in the
country, not least because China has a surprisingly high degree of active participants
online. For example, statistics from the Chinese Internet Network Information Center
(CNNIC) for 2011 show that 65% of users blog, while over half use social networks.
Censorship
Several of the contributions in this feature demonstrate that online spaces are also subject
to increased attempts by governments to regulate and control information flow. While few
governments are prepared to adopt the extreme measure of cutting their country off from
the Internet, due to the economic and political consequences that this would bring,
governments of all regime types are finding new ways to persuade, patrol and police
cyberspace. Indeed, Asian governments appear to be becoming more capable at the
management of that content. Yet the tools with which regimes silenced critical voices in
the past are increasingly ineffective in an era of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. For
example, Malaysias Printing Press and Publications Act, which, until 2012, required all
publications to apply for an annual licence to print, enabled the Home Minister to deny
such permits to critical publications or to place limitations on the frequency of publication. Online publications do not fall under the remit of this law, and even had the law been
extended to cover online publications, sites could have simply been relocated offshore
on a foreign server and thus outside the sovereign jurisdiction of the Act.
While all governments have the option to switch off the Border Gateway Protocol
routes used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to connect to the World Wide Web, as
Egypt did briefly in January 2011 (Howard, Agarwal, and Hussain 2011), such measures
can have significant and deleterious economic and socio-political consequences. For
example, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD), the cost to the Egyptian economy of disconnecting the country from global
networks for five days was approximately US$90 billion in lost services. Consequently as
Shirky (2010, 37) contends, it is much harder today for autocrats to shut down or censor
tools that are in broad use without risking politicising the larger group of otherwise
apolitical actors.
The same is true for other techniques for blocking online content. Besides blocking
ISPs, censors can try to block keywords, block URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, or
web addresses) or pollute/poison Domain Name systems. Much of the attention on
Internet control in China has been paid to the so-called Great Firewall of China,
which rather than a single firewall actually consists of all of the above strategies, coupled

586 J. Abbott
with the use of human agents monitoring specific sites of which the 50 Cent Party (see
below) are the most famous. Despite the attention the Great Firewall has received, it is far
from the impenetrable obstacle it is often portrayed as. Blocked domain names can be
circumvented by typing the IP address directly, or by using mirror sites. For example the
mirror site elgooG was used to access Google after Chinese authorities blocked access
to the site (New Scientist, September 6, 2002). URL filters are circumvented by adding
escaped characters in the address by using Virtual Private Networks, software that creates
a tunnel through the Firewall, or secure encrypted sites. The most famous circumvention software is Tor whose creators have been engaged in a continuous Cold War with
Chinese censors since its launch. Every attempt by the Peoples Republic to prevent
access to Tor is met with modifications to the original program to evade the censors
(Technology Review, April 4, 2012). Meanwhile in May 2010, Google launched an
encrypted version of its site while the browser Firefox now enables users to turn on
private browsing.
The only real alternatives to the above strategies are to block keywords within URLs, to
simply block the ISPs, or to make ISPs responsible for policing, as has happened in
Thailand (Mutita and Athit 2009). The problems with these approaches are that blocking
keywords just is not very effective, while blocking ISPs shuts down not only sensitive
content but also the banal. Making ISPs responsible for all posted commentary promotes
self-censorship and considerable opposition. Zuckerman (2008) refers to this current
dilemma for authoritarian regimes as The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. Since
the tools that allow users to generate and share videos of cute cats are the same tool that
are used by activists against such regimes, blocking banal content is self-defeating. It not
only alienates apolitical users but it potentially teaches people how to become dissidents
they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in
learning to blog anonymously. Every time [you cut] off peoples access to cute cats
you spend political capital (Zuckerman 2008).
The net result of this is that governments must become far more adept, responsive,
subtle and versatile in their approach to information control. Lewis, for example, argues
that further evidence that the Internet is expanding political opportunity in China comes
from the fact that the regime is notably attempting to do precisely this. The re-emergence
of the Maoist left that culminated in the ouster of Bo Xilai, he argues, shows that the
scope for intra-party debate and deliberation has grown significantly. Indeed Lewis (2013)
argues that both during the 2008 financial crisis, and following the Arab Spring, power
struggles within the party in the run up to the 18th Party Congress became increasingly
visible online. Dubbed deliberative authoritarianism, Lewis demonstrates how the
opinions and arguments put forward by different factions online represent an opening of
public space for discussion and deliberation, creating and propagating opinion communities. Recognising this, both President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabo have engaged
in online chats, while the party itself now employs an estimated 300,000 people to
influence public opinion by posting comments and replies to comments on domestic
and, since 2009, foreign websites and news media. Dubbed the 50 Cent Party because of
the amount commentators were allegedly paid per post (Huffington Post, October 4,
2010), the strategy of deploying commentators to try to neutralise undesirable public
opinion on the one hand and disseminate pro-Party propaganda on the other does illustrate
a shift from information control to information management; from simple repression and
propaganda to an increased use of spin.

Introduction: Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in Asia 587
Uncivil Discourse
Both the rise of state-backed voices on the Internet, as well as increased campaigns to
regulate content, demonstrate that the spread of ICTs is not necessarily synonymous with
a techno-Utopian reworking of the teleological dynamics of modernisation theory. The
Internet does provide new spaces for protest and has proven to be a boon for the
organisation of protests and the dissemination of information. Equally, however, those
same places are subject to ideological and political contestation. Indeed, in her article,
Weiss argues that precisely because such online space is increasingly dominated by
fragmentation and polarisation it would be wrong to identify it as an uncontested
Habermasian public sphere; a sentiment shared in Lewiss assessment of the impact of
ICTs on the public sphere in China. Lewis concedes that while the evidence points to
greater connectivity, participation and mobilisation, this expanded public sphere presents
openings and opportunities for democratic as well as non-democratic forces.
In her article, Hamayotsus principal concern is to explore the growth of uncivil
discourse on the Internet in Indonesia and, in particular, how conservative and radical
Islamic movements are both benefiting and thriving at the expense of their liberal
counterparts. This, she argues, is a result of both the rapid spread of online social
media platforms in the country and of the harnessing of that technology to existing
sources of institutional strength. Moreover, a new generation of political leadership has
proven itself capable of combining adept IT skills with access to the state apparatus and its
resources. In sharp contrast, Hamayotsu maintains, liberal Muslims have less access to
powerful politicians or traditional Islamic institutions, such as the pesantren. The net
effect of this is that rather than facilitating expanded civil engagement, new social movements and enhanced participation, it has instead provided oxygen for uncivil elements that
propagate intolerance. Such concerns about how the Internet can equally propagate
extremist, intolerant, racist, terrorist and ultra-nationalist discourse has been noted in
many studies of online activism and, indeed, some critics lament that greater participation in political discussion does not automatically result in discussion that promotes
democratic ideals (Papacharissi 2002, 16). On the contrary, it frequently breaks down
into ugliness. In his contribution, for example, Lewis acknowledges that one of the
consequences of the growth of Internet use in China has been the growth of nationalistic,
jingoistic and extremist discourse, especially on issues concerning territorial sovereignty,
such as the status of Tibet, Xinjiang and recently island disputes with Japan over the
Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Thus, while Lewis stresses that ICTs are contributing to a more
diverse and pluralistic public sphere that is expanding political opportunity, it remains
uncertain how this opportunity will be used.
In the same vein Weiss suggests that there is little evidence that the Internet or new
social media have made significant inroads into the deep communal divisions that
characterise Malaysian society and its politics. Add to that the rise of uncivil voices on
the Internet and the danger is that online groups will simply become increasingly homogeneous communities talking to and with the like-minded and with a tendency for
extremism. Lewis also acknowledges the consequences of narrowcasting and the growth
of extremist discourse. Nevertheless, for Malaysia, Weiss is not entirely pessimistic,
concluding that Internet use has led to greater politicisation and that this alone is likely
to make Malaysia a more democratic society.

588 J. Abbott
Conclusion
Underpinning most of the work in this feature, either explicitly or implicitly, is a
theoretical conception of the public sphere that is derived from the work of Jrgen
Habermas. While it is most evident in Lewiss contribution, all of the authors are
interested in analysing and understanding the ways in which the Internet and other new
information communication technologies facilitate access to sources of information that
were hitherto more circumscribed, and in how they expand the potential and possibilities
for political participation. Indeed, while the authors in this special issue disagree about the
extent to which the Internet and new social media are democratising, they do all broadly
concur that the revolutions we are witnessing in ICTs are expanding political opportunity.
However, as Lewis observes, while Habermas concept of the public sphere is most oftremarked upon, and adapted, to the emergence of a new virtual public sphere, fewer
remark on his concern with the quality of participation, and whether independent information is informed, reasoned and critical (Habermas 1992). Again the conclusions from
the articles all remark that the opinions we read and hear on the Internet are far from
always being informed, reasoned or critical. Across the region and, indeed, across the
world, citizens are not only exchanging views on issues that pertain to the common good
but also views that conflict with the dominant norms and contexts of a particular society
and culture. To return to the Habermasian theme, this online public sphere, therefore,
represents both Habermas romanticised bourgeois sphere as well as the plebian or
counter public sphere (Habermas 1992), or perhaps rather than a single online public
sphere we should instead conceive of several special interest publics [that] co-exist and
flaunt their collective identities of dissent (Fraser 1992).
The articles that follow add to a growing body of case studies that argue that new
ICTs and tools: (a) provide increased access to information that before was both less
readily accessible, and more easily circumscribed; and (b) provide increased political
opportunity. While the authors presented here do not induce that this is sufficient to
support the argument that the Internet and new social media are democratising, it is my
opinion, as I have argued elsewhere, that because the Internet connects, empowers and
informs a greater number of people than ever before it does have clear democratising
potential (Abbott 2012). In particular, the tools and technologies of social media do
confer new opportunities for activists and social movements that open up the public
sphere. Clearly there are challenges to these opportunities, as these articles have
demonstrated; challenges from governments that are not just using traditional mechanisms for circumscribing dissent but are becoming increasingly technologically savvy
themselves; challenges from uncivil social forces within society promoting extremism, virulent nationalism, racism and xenophobia; and challenges created by the
growing commercialisation of the Internet and the inherent difficulty for many proreform websites to make their vehicles financially viable. Such challenges certainly
make the relationship between the Internet and democratisation more complex and
contextualised, but the continued evolution of new social media and the inexorable
spread of ever more sophisticated smartphones, suggest that the Internet will continue to
afford and expand political opportunity.

Introduction: Impact of the Internet and New Social Media in Asia 589
Acknowledgement
Four of the articles presented in this special feature section are drawn from the participants at a workshop entitled
The Jasmine Revolution and the Bamboo Firewall: The impact of the Internet and new social media on political
change in East Asia hosted by the Center for Asian Democracy at the University of Louisville, August 2425,
2011.

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