Digital Asia. Conference report
An academic conference in Sweden in December may not at first glance seem an appealing prospect: the days are short and the weather is, well, cold. The semester is coming to an end and exams and administrative tasks are taking priority. On the other hand, attendance at panels is more or less guaranteed, as the darkness and cold keeps participants indoors! Whether this was intentional or not, the 12th Annual Nordic Institute for Asian Studies (NIAS) Council Conference and PhD Course at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University in December 2019, was, regardless of the weather outside, both a lively and timely event.
Lively, because of the engaged presenters coming from far and wide, including Asia, Australasia, North America, as well of course Europe and the Nordic region. Timely, because of the theme—Digital Asia: Cultural, Socio-Economic, and Political Transformations. Aside from having the largest Internet population, Asia is at the forefront of digital developments in many fields, from governance, entertainment, and e-commerce. The vastness of the region also means that these developments take divergent directions, reflecting local cultures, histories, socioeconomic, and political realities. Given the theme, the papers presented cut across a wide range of disciplines and methods, diverse but unified in their aim of understanding the past, present, and future of the digital in Asia. For the programme see www.digitalasia2019.com
Keynotes: recovering the human in the digital
Four innovative and intellectually lively keynotes framed the conference, exemplifying the wealth of approaches that a focus on ‘Digital Asia’ enables. Conjuring up vignettes of Asian digital kinship and performative cartography (place-making through mobile media), Larissa Hjorth offered fascinating perspectives on how ‘dataveillance’ can be caring and benevolent, rather than exploitative as we typically imagine it to be. Diving into the related question of trust, Aim Sinpeng explored patterns of trust in social media across a range of Southeast Asian countries during election times, concluding that social media is informative in an environment of low trust, but becomes transformative when trust is high. Strikingly, the profoundly human traits and needs that infuse digital life emerged again as a main theme in Pauline Cheong’s keynote, which explored human-machine interactions and the role of human communication in robotic systems. Human emotions were also an important part of Florian Schneider’s exploration of what happens when Chinese nationalism goes digital, which suggested that nationalism today is a combination of human psychology and technological design (algorithms), and an emergent property of online networks.
Digital politics
A roundtable on Internet politics, populism, and digital authoritarianism brought together expertise on Southeast Asia, China and Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. The various insights offered from these diverse contexts fuelled a productive—and sometimes even passionate—debate among those taking part. Participants had different perspectives on key questions, such as whether social media platforms inherently give anti-democratic politicians an advantage, pointing variously to a digital bias and the liberal values that some argue are also spread by social media applications. Nor was there a consensus on the usefulness of the term populism for understanding the role of the digital in Asian politics, whilst concern was raised over the ease with which popular sentiment is dismissed through it.
Similarly highlighting regional differences, a panel on digital politics and governance gave insights into disparate patterns of digital politics across Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea. The role of Facebook for bureaucratic governance in rural Cambodia was explored, highlighting the technological difficulties encountered by local officials. Conversely, the potential of the digital for oppositional politics was laid out with regards to neighbouring Thailand and Japan, putting a spotlight on the Future Forward Party and Rikken Minshuto respectively. We were also introduced to the animated sphere of political podcasts in South Korea. Refreshingly, a long history of post-truth politics in South Korea was traced, putting the current hype about ‘post-truth’—Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year—in perspective.
A striking but perhaps sadly unsurprising insight offered by a separate panel was how the Japanese internet is dogged by misogyny and racism similar to that witnessed here in Europe. We learnt how both UK-based Facebook-Brexiters and Japanese nativists use similar tactics, and how female politicians on Japanese Twitter face the same kind of vitriol as seen in Europe. But we also learnt of Japanese social justice activists, whose online counter-protests against the far-right use gamification to increase participation and scope. Methodological innovations were in evidence here as elsewhere—getting access to vast amounts of social media data is one thing, but researchers still have to make sense of it. It was gratifying to see how advanced this research is, combining the best of Asian Studies in terms of context, nuance, and language, with the latest software to shed new light on older topics of research.
Digital imaginaries and urban futures
The conference provided a space for early career scholars to present cutting-edge research on the ways in which digital transformations are fundamentally reorganising life for Asia’s urban residents. Papers were presented on emerging platform societies, smart cities, and the digital sharing economy—exploring the ways in which big data is facilitating new forms of algorithmic control both by companies and governments, as well as attempts to subvert and game these digital systems by those subjected to them. Other presentations focused on digital subjectivities, looking at how apps and rating systems have been internalised by different populations, shaping social interactions in unpredictable ways. ICTs and digital finance technologies, including the emerging phenomenon of cashless societies, were also examined in depth, revealing uneven digital geographies and new spaces for both exploitation and resistance. Combined, these papers and the ensuing discussions provided an unflinching—and often uneasy—glimpse into our shared digital futures.
Preparing for the next generation of digital scholarship
The conference concluded with a two-day course for PhD students working on topics related to digital society and/or with digital methodologies. This included presentations on digital ethnography, digital data visualisation tools, and techniques for gathering and organising rich data from social media. There were animated discussions in sessions on emerging ethical issues in digital research and the role of digitisation in transforming academic publishing. Participants also broke into small groups for peer review sessions, providing an opportunity for detailed discussions about ongoing research projects and facilitating collaborative thinking for future research directions. All in all, the conference provided fertile ground for researchers across disciplines, fields, and areas of expertise to come together and compare notes on the digital developments that are transforming society and life in Asian contexts.
Nicholas Loubere, Astrid Norén Nilsson, and Paul O’Shea, Associate Senior Lecturers at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University