The Internet in Asia through Singapore

Abstract

The Internet or, as these authors argue, Internets (plural) in Asia are composed of cables and exchanges, protocols and firewalls, regulations and other legal devices, making them subject to investment and governance strategies, as well as treaties and court cases. But they are also composed of figures, layers, stories, and rumors. These latter descriptors provide a heuristic framework of social features that, together with metaphors from folklore, provide analytic tools for understanding the diversity, conflicts, competitions, and disengagements of the patchwork of Internet development across Asia. The authors further argue that Singapore provides an exceptionally valuable comparative site from which to explore these features. The first part of this article lays out some of the comparative features, and the second part turns to the four themes or heuristics of figures, layers, stories, and rumors, developed through an STS research cluster at the Asia Research Institute and Tembusu College, both at the National University of Singapore.

• Internet
• Singapore
• folklore

Acknowledgments

We thank the reviewers for their generous and insightful comments on this article.

Notes

¹ Graham et al. 2018 make a similar point in their introduction when discussing the hopes, conceptions, and fears driving digital design.

² Freedom House (2017b) reports that in Singapore social media and information and communication technology applications and political and social content are not blocked. For example, a dispute over the legacy of the first prime minister of Singapore, somewhat remarkably, played out in real time over Facebook (Jayakumar 2018).

³ Singapore is ranked as the fourth most globally competitive financial center (Woo 2016) and continues to be a key port, ranked second busiest globally (World Shipping Council n.d.).

⁴ Other technologies could have been considered here: browsers through which the user is imagined as a traveler/nomad, Internet Relay Chat through which the user is imagined as a converser/a voice, and Napster through which the user is imagined as a “free” consumer.

⁵ The legacy of Silicon Valley is now challenged by such technology centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen and, less effectively by centers in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mumbai, where inroads have been made not only into the Internet economy in India but also globally, as in the reach of Tata Consultancies.

⁶ In these four ways of seeing the Internet, layers, stories, figures, and rumors, we acknowledge our debt to Don Ihde’s postphenomenological account of four basic forms of mediation (for a summary, see Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015). We also acknowledge our grant application collaborators, especially Crystal Abidin, Aieshah Arif, Celine Coderey, Axel Gelfert, Nancy Mauro-Flude, and Sarah-Tabea Sammel, for helping shape these themes through the submitted Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2 grant proposal “Internet Life and Lore: Histories, Mythologies and Materialities.” Our thanks to the other grant collaborators and to Gregory Clancey in particular for their coauthorship on this proposal.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Connor Graham

Connor Graham is senior lecturer at Tembusu College and research fellow at the Science, Technology, and Society Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, both at the National University of Singapore. His teaching and research center on living and dying in the age of the Internet, with a particular focus on new information and communication technologies. His recent work has been examining the evolution and features of the Internet in Asia through the city-state of Singapore.

Eric Kerr

Eric Kerr is a philosopher and research fellow at the Asia Research Institute and lecturer at Tembusu College, National University of Singapore. His writing centers on the philosophy of technology and social epistemology. He is associate editor and book review Editor at Social Epistemology and cofounder of the Society for the Philosophy of Information.

Natalie Pang

Natalie Pang is senior research fellow at the IPS Social Lab at the Institute of Policy Studies. She received her PhD in information technology from Monash University, Australia. Prior to joining IPS she was assistant professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University. She is an active contributor and reviewer for New Media and Society, Computers in Human Behavior, Online Information Review, Telematics and Informatics, Journal of Association of Information Science and Technology, Chinese Journal of Communication, and Media, Culture and Society.

Michael M. J. Fischer

Michael M. J. Fischer trained in geography and philosophy at Johns Hopkins, social anthropology and philosophy at the London School of Economics, and anthropology at the University of Chicago. Before joining the MIT faculty he was director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Rice. He has done fieldwork in the Caribbean, Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia; he currently works on the anthropology of biosciences, media circuits, and emergent forms of life.