{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02924861321230459, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012607160867372668, 'mean_word_length': 5.161490683229814, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Review: Media in Society: Zaheer Baber, ed., CyberAsia: The Internet and Society in Asia. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2005, 241 pp., ISBN 9004146253, US$84.00

As its title suggests, this volume explores various aspects surrounding the introduction and utilization of the Internet, with a regional focus on Asia, supplemented by a few studies that look at other parts of the world (mainly North America and France) as well as more theoretically and conceptually oriented papers. Most of the essays are informative, some innovative and fascinating in terms of the issues they raise or the conclusions they draw. All in all, the book is a valuable addition to the burgeoning social scientific literature on the Internet. Some of the contributions also suggest themselves as readings for science and technology courses taught in Asia and beyond. Shigeru Nakayama’s paper (‘From PC toMobile Internet: Overcoming the Digital Divide in Japan’) highlights some of the difficulties facing ideogram-based EastAsia in the usage of the alphabet-based keyboard needed for typing characters into a word processor. These difficulties are key to explaining the comparatively late introduction of the Internet in Japan. They also account for the fact that the Japanese, while relatively weak in areas of the digital revolution that require a keyboard, have been strong in developing those areas that don’t, such as audiovisual media, cartoons, console games and others. Moreover, they underlie a strong preference amongmany EastAsians in general, and young Japanese in particular, to usemobile phones rather than personal computers for accessing the Internet, as the phonetics of the Japanese language are better suited to the decimal keypads of the former. Toby E. Huff’s paper (‘Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor and its First Crisis of Confidence’) reviews the history of policies aimed at facilitating the introduction of the Internet in Malaysia. During the early 1990s, it dawned upon the