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

systems. In less than a decade, digital commerce had emerged as a formidable economic force, defying the forecasts of those who saw it as a passing fad. Over the last decade, with the technological platforms in place and well supported, there has been an explosion in digital content and content-related enterprises, creating formidable opportunities for creative personnel and for companies able to move quickly and appropriately into the digital space. Western companies and applications such as Google; Facebook; MySpace; eBay; Amazon.com; YouTube; iTunes; dozens of media outlets; copyright defying systems that enable copying of movies, music, and television programs; and thousands of comparable websites, web services, e-commerce applications, and the like have transformed the global economy and created a foundation for twenty-first-century innovation and economic development.²³

Digital content emerged quickly as a key element in the Internet enterprise. Although the scale and success of digital business in East Asia is little known outside the region, regional businesses responded with impressive speed to the opportunities created by the Internet ecosystem. Many of the most popular sites were localized versions of global or American web services; others were much more nation-specific businesses. At the same time, particularly in Japan and South Korea, digital business expanded more rapidly and more successfully than in almost any country, demonstrating East Asia’s rapid response to the opportunities created by the new technologies. The infrastructure existed to transmit information—content—in whatever forms made commercial and/or political sense. China placed substantial controls on the Internet, trying with some success to keep foreign political and cultural intrusions at bay.²⁴ Japan and South Korea discovered that, contrary to the early concerns of national governments, nation-specific Internets did emerge, based on the uniqueness of language and (less pronounced) national cultures. As digital transmission speeds and quality increased, so did the demand for content, in terms of both storage and sharing of personal (web pages, photographs, video clips), government (educational content, official documents, forms), and commercial (music, television and movie programs, games) material.