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

credits are likely in the wealthier countries; North American youth, with more money than ability in many instances, are particularly enamored with the prospect of “beating the game” through whatever means are available. Off to the side, likely in some unimpressive factory-like building, hundreds of North Koreans are laboring without joy or engagement over video game consoles, piling up points that their managers can fob off to rich, game-playing foreigners in order to fund one of the most repressive regimes on the planet. Such is one of the many unseen elements of the digital age in East Asia.²

The digital revolution is best understood as the most oversold and underestimated technological transformation in world history.³ The same technological developments that brought the Internet and Facebook spawned the dot-com meltdown of the late twentieth century. It also launched the creative destruction of entire industries, including the music sector and book retailing, and the spatial transformations associated with mobile media.⁴ There is widespread celebration of the democratic potential of social media, as was demonstrated during the political upheaval in Egypt in 2011, and growing concerns about Internet breaches of privacy and a shocking increase in cybercrime. The British riots of August 2011 revealed the downsides of crowdsourcing and secure messaging, leading to calls from Prime Minister David Cameron to regulate the uncontrollable social media. From Silicon Valley to Japan’s sophisticated Internet-enabled health care systems, from China’s rapidly growing animation studios to the innovations spawned by Finland’s Nokia Corporation, the digital revolution continues to uproot existing market sectors, create entire service industries, and rattle the foundations of business, culture, education, and government. Little, however, is generally known about how the digital revolution is unfolding in East Asia, despite the significant role that the region plays in the global industry and the many ways in which digital technologies are recasting East Asian life.

For a generation, interest in the digital revolution has been largely American-centric, with some justification.⁵ Although the United States