Asia in Their Shadow: Satellites and Asia

Researching audiences in Surabaya: an initial engagement with Brian Shoesmith to study the Indonesian television audience (1993-1995)

“…Rather, how those programmes are received depends on the receiving country's cultural policy, the characteristics of the local television industry, and the audience's autonomy. Brian's study of Indonesian satellite television in 1993 confirms Lee's argument: setting aside the English language barrier and cultural differences, Indonesian viewers felt a detachment from Australian culture, and this was reinforced by the New Order's suspicions of Australian government propaganda being disseminated through the television news content (Shoesmith 1994a). To Indonesia, Australia is the next-door country.…”

“…This enthusiasm was demonstrated in the mushrooming of parabola satellite discs outside of urban middle-class households. The popularity of satellite television watching was followed by the launch of the first private/ commercial television station, RCTI, in Jakarta in 1989 (Shoesmith 1994a;Sen and Hill 2000;Kitley in TBS 1999;Kitley 2000). Indonesian audiences could access various information and entertainment programmes, especially foreign television programmes, including AusTV.…”

“…Indonesian audiences could access various information and entertainment programmes, especially foreign television programmes, including AusTV. In 1993 Australian Television International, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's external television service, became one of the broadcasters to use the Indonesian government's Palapa satellite (Atkins 1995;Shoesmith 1994a). It was following this start of AusTV, a 'new' international broadcasting service, in addition to the predominant US and European programmes available in Indonesia, that Brian Shoesmith and Hart Cohen undertook their fieldwork in 1993 and 1995.…”

Constructing Asian values: National identities and ‘responsible citizens

“…Understanding this puts into context the anxieties of Asian countries to construct Asia as 'morally authentic', and as Yao (1994) points out, one of the chief discursive strategies that is being used to do this is an essentialism that positions Asian values and cultures as unique, irreplaceable and pure. It is this essentialism which is seeking •the spaces thought time by some Western theorists to have been replaced by (see Shoesmith 1994). As many now observe (see Robertson 1992), increased globalisation implies (and usually involves) increased regionalism 3 and that, as a form of nationalist reaction.…”

@rchipelago online: The internet and political activism in Indonesia

“…In this study, attention is given to the importance of space (Lefebvre, 1991), in terms of both actual networks of flows of information over the Internet and the physical linkages between cyberspace, Internet cafés, other printed news media and, ultimately, collective actions and social movements in real territorial and spatial contexts. One of the examples of the importance of the spatial dimensions is the almost complete control over public space by Suharto (Kitley, 1994;Shoesmith, 1994;Lim, 2002a) which gave the appearance of Internet technology, and the spaces of the popular warnet (Internet cafés) an unprecedented historical role in socially mobilising students to participate in the end of his regime.…”