| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Digital Media in East Asia provides a thematic introduction to the issues and questions raised by the digital revolution. Chapter 1 offers definitions of digital media and explores scholarly work on national innovation systems. Chapter 2 examines national innovation strategies in East Asia, focusing on the efforts made to develop and sustain a digital media sector through state investments, leadership, and regulation. The national innovation policies have been the primary tools of government intervention and have played an influential—and not always successful—role in shaping East Asia’s digital ecosystem. These national strategies mobilized government, commercial, and academic interests, seeking to advance and sustain national participation in the digital economy. The third chapter examines East Asia’s initial and muted response to the digital revolution, a reaction conditioned by the Japanese government’s reluctance to allow the Internet to expand into the country and China’s well-known desire to control the distribution of information. Although the leading countries in East Asia were criticized for failing to respond to the potential of the digital age, the dot-com bust that followed the euphoria of the boom left little mark on the region, save for a healthy skepticism about Western overmarketing of the new technologies. In fairly short order, the digital infrastructure and related technologies demonstrated their utility and were shown to be an essential part of any modern economy. Chapter 3 focuses on the construction of East Asia’s digital media infrastructure—a remarkably expensive and fast-paced process—and the transformative development of the mobile Internet as a viable and sustainable backbone of the digital sector. East Asia’s first major success, again launched initially in Japan but with rapid participation by Taiwan and Korea, involved rapid engagement in digital manufacturing. Indeed, as this chapter demonstrates, East Asia quickly came to dominate the production and eventually the design of many of the consumer, industrial, and governmental products of the digital age. This manufacturing accomplishment—obscured by the fact that many East Asian products continue to have Western brands (the iPad is manufactured in China but is widely believed to be an American