Journal of Digital Media & Policy - Current Issue

This Special Issue aims to problematize past and current socio-technical imaginaries and datafication practices of the rapidly digitizing nation states in South and South East Asia, and gathers critical analyses of where the digital, government and power intersect. The papers in this issue emerge from a workshop on Governing Technologies: Exploring Datafied Practices, Imaginaries, and Digital State Assemblages in Asia convened in October 2022 by Monash University and University of Nottingham Malaysia, where the guest editors worked. The papers engaged with a number of questions that animate our current understandings of how technologies govern and are governed: Who are the (human and non-human) actors propelling these initiatives and new arrangements? What do their discourses around these imaginaries reveal about their ambitions, interests and conflicts? What role do communities and the people play in shaping, adapting and resisting digital plans and practices, and who decides? Providing an introduction to this Special Issue, this editorial presents a conversation amongst the three guest editors of the issue, where they reflect on some aspects of governing technologies as they play out in South and South East Asia, setting the stage for further engagement from the authors in this issue.

#MeToo has been studied as an international social movement that offered a model for women’s rights activism. Using a mixed method approach, this article examines #MeTooIndia between 2018 and 2021, through the analysis of 354,496 tweets combined with a media framing analysis of news coverage and qualitative interviews. It discusses the chronology of the movement and assesses the more precise mechanisms by which the participatory and transformative potentials of #MeToo were realized – or not – in the particular case of India. It shows that instead of strengthening victim’s and feminists’ voices, the violence and abuse many women experience on the platform can lead to self-censorship and even driving them off X completely; leaving mainly the floor to ‘meninists’ who think they are victimized by feminism and who use #MeTooIndia to defend their struggle. This specific case study questions the (non)inclusivity of women in the Twittersphere in India and beyond.

Tactical deployments of a variety of digital community media for fostering social change and participation in the Malaysian context have been extensively explored and continue to be explored. These include peripheral discursive influences during and beyond election periods, community-building and disaster relief amidst nationwide epidemiological and flooding disasters, and creative political socialization amongst the (eastern and peninsular) Malaysian youth forbidden from political participation by the legal state apparatus. By bringing into this scholarship a geographical perspective, this report notes down preliminary insights from the pilot phase of a study on how and why the study of community (social, digital) media in a historically habitually diverse Malaysia (and South East Asia) could and should be geographically and developmentally (de)limited.