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Editorial: mobile communication and Asian modernities

The global emergence of mobile phone and wireless services has renewed the call for new media researchers to understand better the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and society. This is an intellectual challenge comparable to the one posed by the rise of the internet a decade ago. In this themed section of New Media & Society, we propose to take on the challenge and explore the opportunities therein by examining the social, cultural and institutional dynamics of wireless ICTs and the formation of multiple modernities in the context of contemporary Asia. We choose to focus on this part of the world because Asia has long been portrayed as an exotic Other outside western modernity. However, since the post-war industrialization of Japan and the ‘tiger’ economies and the recent economic and technological boom in China, India and several Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, the region has become a major global ICT powerhouse, especially with regard to aspects of mobile communication. In the wake of the Asian Financial crisis of the late 1990s, we have observed a surprising leap in the diffusion of mobile phones throughout Asia, now home to more users than Europe or North America (International Telecommunications Union, 2005). Parallel to rapid technological diffusion is the impressive production capacity of Asia as the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile handsets and accessories.While European and American brands remain prominent in Asian markets, indigenous capacity has been connected to transnational capital and global networks of production and distribution,