Digital Media in East Asia: National Innovation and the Transform ...

readily accessible, and easily used set of digital technologies has allowed countries from Malaysia to Zambia to dream of using innovative policies and investments to leap multiple steps on the world’s economic tables. Mobile Internet, freed from the physical constraints of copper wire and fiber-optic cabling, has allowed digital services and content to reach into remote regions and throughout some of the world’s most oppressive regimes. The Internet and related technologies and digital content are both uniting the world into a global community connected at the speed of light and creating intense competition for ideas, personnel, and resources. The products themselves are masterful representations of global connectivity, with even the iconic Apple iPhone and iPad made up of a combination of American design and marketing, inexpensive Chinese assembly, Taiwanese and Japanese technological sophistication, and truly international contributions to the explosive growth of software applications.⁹

Digital Media in East Asia offers an introduction to the digital revolution in one part of the world. East Asia has had an unusual connection to the digital transformation. Japan tried to slow the introduction of the Internet into the country, only to become an enthusiastic supporter a few years later. China continues to suppress freedom of speech via the Internet, causing grief for companies such as Google that are trying to operate in the country, but it has started to push massive quantities of digital content through the Internet while still using the technologies to interrogate and intrude upon international rivals.¹⁰ Several major international hacking and digital spying operations were blamed on the Chinese in 2010–2011.¹¹ Taiwan joined the digital revolution as an inexpensive assembler of consumer technologies, became a world leader in the design and manufacture of innovative products, and is now seeking a future as a regional innovator in digital content.¹² Japan and South Korea helped transform the digital sector from a government and industrial priority into a fast-changing consumer economy, largely through the introduction of video gaming, the mobile Internet, laptop computers, and related technologies.