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- Convenors:
-
Chen-Pang Yeang
(University of Toronto)
Wen-Ching Sung
Zhixiang Cheng (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel investigates Asian digital technologies and cultures. We reassess the familiar account in which the US innovates while Asia manufactures. We also facilitate discussions on the effects of long-term cultural factors and recent grassroots undertakings on the Asian digital.
Long Abstract:
In a fast-transforming world where the transnational division of economic production changes, the geopolitical tectonics shift, and the new modes of techno-social assemblages emerge, Asia plays an expanding part in our digital life. Today, Taiwan and South Korea supply the majority of high-end microchips. China takes a lion’s share in electric vehicles, 5G cell phones, and e-commerce. Japan’s robotics and virtual entertainment make headline news. India is a major software outsourcer. Despite Asia’s rising influences on the global “high tech,” the significances of the Asian digital technologies and cultures have not been reflected proportionally in the West-centered mainstream historical and social studies of information, computing, communications, and electronics. This panel aims to explore ways to investigate, understand, and frame Asian digital technologies and cultures from the Asian perspectives. A familiar approach is to focus on a political-economic order since the Cold War in which Silicon Valley and the American military-industrial complex innovate while the strong developmental states—Japan, the four “Asian Tigers,” China, India, and Vietnam—manufacture. As revealed from the 1980s US-Japan clash over semiconductors and the ongoing “chip war” between the US and China, however, maintaining this hierarchy is increasingly challenging. Meanwhile, other important factors complicate the configurations of the Asian digital. In a longer horizon, Asian technologists’ endeavors to bring their own languages into modern information technology are cases in point. Moreover, recent grassroots undertakings in Asia generate wider and deeper effects. They include business initiatives such as the “turnkey solution” that enables the making of affordable mobile devices for the Global South markets and decentralized civic actions disseminated through cyberspace, including the anti-hijab movement in Iran and white-paper protest in China last year. In this panel, we hope to facilitate focused yet broad discussions on various aspects of the Asian digital.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Josephine Seah (University of Cambridge)
Short abstract:
This paper discusses ongoing challenges that Singapore's smart city projects face as the country digitalises its government services. The discussion contributes to scholarship on smart city dynamics in Asia, and emphasises the need to address emerging linguistic and generational disparities.
Long abstract:
Smart cities around the world have increasingly embraced the participatory turn and sought more opportunities for citizen co-creation. This paper focuses on one such initiative in Singapore’s smart city, the Smart Nation Builder (the Builder), and the challenges it faces in engaging with the country’s diverse, multilingual population. Designed as an interactive exhibition, the Builder has two functions: first, as a communications site where the public learns of new digital government services; and second, as a space to gather feedback on existing digital public services. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper shows how the Builder’s interactive stations, which only display and collect feedback in English text and/or verbal inputs, end up isolating the very groups in society—non-English speakers and the elderly—that would benefit the most from co-creation initiatives like these that seek to empower citizens in a rapidly digitalising country. Locating this discussion within the country’s linguistic policies and multilingual communities, this paper discusses the work of translation that emerges to address these linguistic and generational challenges. As workers translate comments, feedback and questions that citizens bring, they render these comments legible to the state through the Builder’s interactive stations. Nonetheless, this work, I suggest, remains undervalued amidst the country’s rapid digitalisation. This discussion thus adds to the literature on smart cities in Asia that aim to ‘provincialise’ practices of smart urbanism (Woods et al. 2023; Chang et al. 2021) while seeking to depict the ‘discursive and material realities of actually existing smart city developments’ (Glasmeier & Christopherson 2015, p.9).
Sharon Ku (National Yangming Chiaotung University) TIAN WEN (The University of Sydney)
Short abstract:
The paper explores the pathway and practices of China's digital innovation in Africa. It illustrates the sociotechnical, cultural, and algorithmic infrastructures in converting local users’ internet consumption into profitable economic values and examines innovation from the South-South perspective.
Long abstract:
The common sense understanding of digital innovation often focuses on faster chips, high-end cell phones and big techs FAAMG business strategies. China, as a latecomer in internet technology, has always been seen as a chaser or imitator. However, could such perceptions reflect developed countries’ biases towards innovation and invisible infrastructural hegemony? Could there be alternatives that challenge the dominated Western model? This paper explores the pathways and practices of China's internet technology innovation, using Transsion and Transsnet, China's largest mobile phone and social platform companies in Africa as case studies. It examines the historical, social, political and cultural factors that shape Chinese companies’ business strategies of perceiving and defining “the African market”, along with their hardware, software product design and marketing practices to sustain local users.
We argue that China’s internet innovation in Africa illustrates the advantages and opportunities yet shortcomings of “innovation with Chinese characters”. The biggest obstacle comes not from achieving technical superiority, but from the soft power deficit in understanding, characterizing and commercializing African cultures, when competing with Western products such as Facebook or Instagram whose advantages lie in their existing global popularity, celebrity branding, as well as the language use and cultural affinity rooted in the colonial history. Our empirical study indicates the critical role of the hidden cultural, diplomatic and ideological infrastructures in converting users’ digital consumption, content creation and data flows into profitable economic values. It also illustrates a different digital innovation approach from the South-South perspective.
Chen-Pang Yeang (University of Toronto) Wen-Ching Sung Zhixiang Cheng (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Short abstract:
Launched in 1991, Chinese FidoNet (CFido) provided a virtual space, perceived as a "pure land," for hobbyists to explore technology-for-fun and aggregated would-be prominent Chinese digital entrepreneurs to experiment with business models and pursue open-source software with Chinese characters.
Long abstract:
The Bulletin Board System (BBS) significantly changes the production and transmission of knowledge in China’s information technology (IT). Launched in 1991, Chinese FidoNet (CFido) provided a virtual space for hobbyists to explore technology-for-fun and aggregated many would-be prominent Chinese digital entrepreneurs to experiment with business models and pursue open-source software with Chinese characters. CFido’s short history (1991-1998) also encapsulates the fast-changing dynamics between knowledge and its social context. CFido participants first perceived BBS as a utopian “pure land” for grassroots intellectuals to develop software and digital technologies, free from interests and interventions. Yet the beginning of government control of cyberspace, the boom of IT industry and e-commerce, and the transition from dialup BBS to the Internet led the CFidoers to diverging positions about amateurs and ultimately brought CFido to its end.
Ling-Ming Huang (National Taiwan University)
Short abstract:
This research reviews how technocrats and TAC transferred IC technology into Taiwan in the 1970s. With counterfactual analysis, we finds that TAC tried to embed the IC technology into Taiwan’s industrial context instead of regarding it as a scientific project, creating solid base for the future.
Long abstract:
Taiwanese government initiated technology transfer for IC technology in the 1970s, and this project, the RCA Project, set the foundation of Taiwan’s IC industries and led to the birth of many important IC companies, including UMC and TSMC. However. according to the archives left by Dr. Pan Wen-Yuan, who was the leader of Technological Advisory Committee (TAC), the way how Taiwan transferred IC technology could be other possibilities instead of building IC manufacturing power for consumer electronics. Could other approaches also lead to Taiwan’s critical position in the global IC industries? This research reviews the history of the RCA Project with counterfactual analysis to discuss what would happen to Taiwan’s IC industries if TAC and Taiwanese technocrats chose “the roads not taken.” This research focuses on three counterfactual analysis. First, if Taiwanese government did not launch the technology transfer, Taiwan’s local IC industries were too small to build IC manufacturing power, so they would rely on imported IC key components for decades, delaying or even killing the birth of professional foundry in Taiwan. Second, if Taiwanese government chose to transfer bipolar semiconductor technology for its Telecom Lab rather than C-MOS for consumer electronics industries, the transferred technology would be irrelevant to Taiwan’s existing industries losing dynamics for further development. Third, if Taiwanese government transferred IC technology for scientific researches only rather than building the demonstration factory and deriving UMC, ITRI could not launch VLSI Project which gave birth of TSMC and professional foundry.