Digitisation and Its Asian Discontents: The Internet, Politics and Hacking in China and Indonesia

Given its transnational character the Internet is often perceived as a technology that will challenge the frontiers of the nation-state. Asian governments, however, eagerly include the Internet in their policies, thereby inscribing this technology into the narrative of the nation-state. In this article I argue that such uses of the Internet to legitimise governments and their policies deserve as much attention as globalised movements that at times challenge such policies. More empirically grounded research - that moves beyond the utopian/dystopian, online/offline and virtual/real dichotomies - is important to grasp such contradictory uses of the Internet. Studies located outside the U.S. and Europe, the places that dominate Internet studies, will prove of crucial value in rethinking the roles of the Internet in society