This paper is about how cybercafés in small and medium Asian towns highlight
new aspects of modernity. Especially in the context of Asian modernity, the
introduction of ICT-shaped social spaces in the form of cybercafés leads to
multiple conflicting rhetoric of empowerment and progress on the one hand,
and risk and moral degeneration on the other. Through an ethnographic study
carried out in twelve small or medium towns in six Asian countries, the research
explores how new media technologies influence the contexts of reimagining
Asia’s encounter with modernity. The paper is based on a study drawing from
secondary materials and primary information gathered through extensive field
work in six developing countries in Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the
Philippines in South East Asia, and India and Bangladesh in South Asia. In this
paper we set out to argue that the continuities, ruptures and innovations that
constitute the Asian modernity, as well as their social impacts, are mirrored in
the discourses surrounding the various technologies that embody this modernity,
negotiating a new phase in its mediation and legitimization in Asia. In particular,
new media technologies and social media are involved in multiple discourses
of risk, opportunity and adaptation. In the case of the cybercafés in Asia, we
argue that the situated nature of technological access gives rise to new
dimensions of adaptation at individual and collective levels. Discourses
emanating from representatives of civil society, State and various other
stakeholders converge on cybercafés, and their attention on this particular space
emerges as an indication of its complexity as a zone of mediated access to the
worlds—both desired and undesired—that computers make possible. The
complexity of defining an essential set of Asian values and a regionally unique
trajectory of modernity notwithstanding,