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

dominated almost all key elements in digital equipment manufacture, albeit with shifts in design and manufacturing from Japan to Korea, Taiwan, and now China. Korea’s IT exports are now valued at over $156 billion (for 2011) and constitute more than one-third of its total exports.¹³ Taiwan controls the market for a huge variety of computer and telecommunication components. Its excellence, even dominance, in the production of component parts—aptly nicknamed Taiwan Inside—is not widely known, but it is a prime example of East Asia’s prominence in the field.

East Asia is one of the world’s fastest growing economic zones, a hotbed of national innovation strategies and programs, and a highly competitive high-technology environment. The development of a digital media ecosystem within the individual countries in East Asia and within the region itself is one of the most important transformations over the past quarter century. Digital media has had crucial social and cultural foundations and consequences as well, with the region providing a highly competitive and creative consumer foundation for global engagement in digital media. Digital Media in East Asia seeks to understand the nature and impact of the East Asian (Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) digital media sector. It considers both the development and impact of digital media infrastructure—the technology aspects of the digital revolution—and the increasingly important digital content angle (the supply of information, entertainment, and services through digital means).

Defining Digital Media

Digital media defies ready definition. One description of the field (by Digital Media Alliance Florida, or DMAF) defines digital media as “the creative convergence of digital arts, science, technology and business for human expression, communication, social interaction and education.”¹⁴ More specifically, digital media refers to the development, transmission, sale, and use of information and content by way of digital technologies.