Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Singapore, in which 77 % of the population has internet access, is one of Asia's
best-connected countries, with connectivity levels rivaling those in North America
and Western Europe, which is perhaps no surprise given the long commitment to
telecommunications made by Singapore's government (Corey
1991
). Singapore
has aggressively positioned itself as a regional, and increasingly, global center of
telecommunications and information services. In this vein, Singapore Telecom-
munications initiated a series of high speed fiber linkages with India in 2001,
Bangladesh in 2002, and Thailand and Indonesia in 2003. Today, 90 % of the
island enjoys high-speed broadband connections. Affluence and widespread
internet access have created a critical mass of web users, who routinely apply the
internet to banking and shopping. The Singaporean state retains tight control over
the island's internet content, with some of the region's strictest censorship.
In Thailand, with 18 million users (24.7 %) in 2011, the by-now familiar
pattern of a bifurcation between cosmopolitan, internet-savvy youth clustered in
the primate city and less connected people in rural areas is prominent. Thus, while
68 % of the population lives in rural areas, only 16 % of Thai netizens do so.
Facebook is particularly popular here, and has been used in protests against the
ruling monarchy.
Malaysia's digital divide largely reflects the pronounced differences between
the country's peninsular portion and the poorer provinces of Borneo. Socially, the
country's elderly and Indian population was the least likely to be connected. The
government's proactive policy, Vision 2020, which seeks to catapult the state into
a knowledge-based economy by that year, has had significant impacts in encour-
aging Malays to participate in cyberspace, including incentive programs such as
''One Home, One PC'' and a systematic roll-out plan to facilitate broadband
adoption (Nair et al.
2010
). The Malaysian government's Multimedia Super
Corridor (MSC) has integrated information technology at the core of its Vision
2020 Master Plan (Mohan et al.
2004
), and generated 17,000 jobs, of which 80 %
were knowledge-intensive. Part of this effort includes the Multimedia University in
Cyberjaya, owned by the privatized Telekom Malaysia which has established
collaborative linkages with 37 companies and 29 universities around the world.
Indonesia's internet straddles more than 17,000 islands, an environment more
economically conducive to satellites, with low marginal costs, than fiber optics.
With 55 million users (22 %) in 2011, the country forms one of the world's larger
pools of netizens. Indonesia was the world's first developing nation to use satellites
for domestic connectivity, launched several generations of its Palapa (''Unity'')
satellites to provide internet services to all 27 provinces; PalapaNet recently began
to sell services to neighboring ASEAN countries as well. The government has
spent tens of millions of dollars, including foreign aid, to promote broadband
connectivity in 72,000 rural villages (Jumaat
2010
). With low PC ownership, many
users rely on one of the country's 2,000 cybercafes, or warung internet (often
abbreviated to warnet) which are overwhelmingly clustered in cities all over Java
(Furuholt and Kristiansen
2005
). Warnet have become increasingly important foci
of social and political transformation (Lim
2003
).
