The Significance of Media
By Amanda Liaw
At the conclusion of this exploration of digital activism in Asia, it is necessary to define both "digital activism" and "Asia". The latter is perhaps largely thought of as a physical space, as inhabited by people who are born and/or live in Asia - Asia is a continent, Asia can be found in Asian sites around the world as diasporas contribute to the formation of local communities, and Asian identity by extrapolation is shaped by it being one region of the world in which close contact has enabled cross-cultural exchange. This definition becomes murkier when the idea of Asia is digitized, just as national boundaries have blurred in the era of globalization. What does it truly mean to fight for an Asian identity? If we base our definition of "digital activism" on that of Htaike Htaike Aung's, the programme manager at MIDO, a non-profit organization in Myanmar that uses ICT to fight for development, the term simply means to use digital tools for activism. As examinations of activist efforts in Hong Kong, Japan, India, and Myanmar have shown, activism is often a site of resistance wherein people are claiming their collective identities. Media, then, is extremely important in portraying and realizing these identities, without which there would hardly be a benchmark to compare progress against.
In presenting a facet of this idea, the documentary Burma VJ that was stitched together using the footage shot by video journalists in Myanmar during the 2007 Saffron Revolution plays with the notion of construction and, hence, highlights the relationship between audience and activist. It was illegal and dangerous for these video journalists to have captured the footage they did, let alone export this footage to both incite the world to attention and put international pressure on the government. The process of its making relied almost entirely on international relationships that aimed to place Myanmar in the same space as democracies, which created an interesting power dynamic that doesn't appear as emphasized in other activist efforts, though such a dynamic does underlie most, if not all, contemporary civic strife. By appealing to a group of people with a specific mindset empathetic to their cause, the documentary acted as an ideological form of intervention that one can also see in Japan's top-down humanitarian aid, and in the various national versus international agendas that formed the backbone of Scholarism and CGNet Swara. Careful consideration of media content clearly becomes crucial in piecing together not just a movement, but also the representation of Asia as a whole. Interestingly, Burma VJ raised the important question of interpretation - it contributed greatly to the mythologizing of Myanmar's monks, which gave the Saffron Revolution its name, image, and gravitas. And yet, interpretation is an act of awareness that relies on contextual understanding, which means that as much as the revolution became a way for the world to understand Myanmar, so could the world only understand the revolution based on what they assumed to be Myanmar.
Beyond this issue, a common thread that has emerged across all the activist efforts that have been examined thus far is the terrifying idea of being forgotten. The shortening of people's attention spans is now a common complaint, but a large ramification of this is, perhaps, the increasing need to sensationalize local movements such that yesterday's news remains today's and tomorrow's news. Should the over-saturation of content be looked at on a linear scale, or is there a more all-encompassing way of giving various communities the attention and importance that each say it deserves? If "forgetting" is becoming a byproduct of the digital, can activism exist then without being a movement? Insofar as this brief exploration has reached, it might be practical to say that media can play the role of any capitalist endeavor - to incite change, one must appeal to the powers that actually decide what this change should look like.