1. There is an even more bizarre side to this enterprise. Reports out of China indicated that prisoners were playing video games to produce income for the state, and in North Korea, hackers wormed their way into popular games, stealing reward points and selling them to foreigners for cash. Choe Sang-Hun, “Seoul Warns of Latest Northern Threat: An Army of Online Gaming Hackers,” New York Times, August 4, 2011. See also Chad Sapieha, “North Korea May Be Funding Nuclear Weapons with Video Game Gold,” Toronto Globe and Mail Blog, August 8, 2011.

2. For a helpful introduction to the social impact of digital media, see Marin Woesler and Junhua Zhan, China’s Digital Dream: The Impact of the Internet on Chinese Society (Bochum, Germany: University Press Bochum, 2002). See also Carin Holroyd and Ken Coates, Japan and the Internet Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

3. For a very thought-provoking discussion of the long-term implications of new media, see Lydia Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

4. One of the best books on the emerging technologies is Gerald Goggin, Global Mobile Media (New York: Routledge, 2011). See also Madanmohan Rao and Lunit Mendoza, eds., Asia Unplugged: The Wireless and Mobile Media Boom in the Asia-Pacific (New York: Sage, 2005).

5. See, for example, the books by Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), and Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008). See also the much more harsh analysis of the impact of the digital age in Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) (New York: Tarcher, 2008). More generally, see S. Craig Watkins, The Young and the Digital: What Migration to Social-Network Sites, Games and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

6. Lui Shiying and Martha Avery, Alibaba: The Inside Story of Jack Ma and the Creation of the World’s Largest Online Marketplace (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).

7. For an insightful study of the role of multinational corporations in the expansion of digital media activity, see Amelia Arsenault and Manuel