Next week in San Diego, I’ll be on a “late breaking” news panel at the Association for Asian Studies’ annual conference. I’ve started to think about how to explain the many ways that connectivity — social media, VOIP, chat clients — have really colored how I think about news and story telling about the region. From telling stories using curation to the essential reading of bloggers on Global Voices, international news has been drawn in a lot closer to audiences in the United States. Journalists can no longer write or produce news with the expectation that the subjects of stories will not be able to see or comment on how they’ve been portrayed. Local feedback is instantaneous. But what does this mean for politics across Asia? How do things change when people in Asia can directly communicate with people anywhere else in the world, and vice versa?
These are the questions I’m looking forward to addressing. The panel has a great lineup and no doubt there will be some exceptional minds in the room, so I think it will be a lively conversation. If you have any thoughts or ideas that I might share with the group, I’m all ears. Email me or comment here.
If you’re in San Diego, you can join the event for free. Here are the details:
Digital Debates and Digital Divides: How the Web has Changed Politics in and Coverage of Asia
FRIDAY, March 22, 10:45 am – 12:45 pm, Manchester Grand Hyatt, Manchester Ballroom A
Discussants:
Jeff Wasserstrom, University of California Irvine (Moderator)
Nguyen Giang, Editor, East Asia Hub and Vietnamese Service, BBC World Service/London
Kaiser Kuo, Director of International Communications for Baidu, (China’s largest search engine).
Emma Larkin, Freelance Writer, Bangkok
Angilee Shah, Journalist and Blogger, Public Radio International
This panel is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation