The Internet has not only changed the way we work, play, and keep in touch with each other. It has also become a battleground for those seeking to exploit its vastness, openness, or (at the very least) inevitable cracks to promote free expression, and those seeking to control the flow of information.
In this regard all over the world people are testing the limits of free expression in cyberspace as fervently and anxiously as governments have begun sensing the potency and danger of leaving the medium untouched and unfettered. The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) for one sees that because of this, 2006 will be defined by more landmark showdowns and stare-downs in cyberspace.
This coming April, the Bangkok-based SEAPA—an alliance of free press advocates from Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines—will be holding a conference precisely to discuss this inevitable showdown. Bringing in journalists, writers, bloggers, and online news providers from all over Southeast Asia as well as China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Asia, the conference’s intention is to tag cyberspace as a crucial frontier for free expression in Asia. As soon as possible, it is also important to lend support to those exploiting the medium to provide independent, uncensored information and commentary now that their numbers are growing but highly vulnerable. Equally important, there is a need to gather the region's new breed of online communicators, to start speaking about their common protection, as well as to start crucial discussions on their evolving roles, responsibilities, and even ethics, all in the context still of protection.
Since its founding in 1998, much of SEAPA’s work has revolved around the print and broadcast media. SEAPA—whose founding members include the Thai Journalists Association, Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), the Jakarta-based Institute for the Free Flow of Information (ISAI), and the Philippine-based Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) and Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ)—supports free expression advocates in these three countries as well as in Malaysia, Cambodia, and East Timor. In Chiang Mai, the alliance is helping journalists that have exiled themselves from Burma.
While it continues to reach out to the rest of the region, nowadays SEAPA finds its attention repeatedly being drawn to cyberspace.
New issues emerge with every new medium. In cyberspace, SEAPA sees a challenge to strengthen and protect the blogosphere and cyberspace in general, while reaching out to its denizens with a call to discuss the needs ethics, responsibility, a sense of community, and the demands and meaning of growing up.
Consider the following developments:
- In Thailand, the information ministry last year clamped down on at least two independent websites that were known to be critical of the government. These websites have been experimenting not only with more aggressive commentary, but also with bold technical innovations linking a fledgling community radio movement with cyberspace. When the Thai government fired across the bow of independent community radio stations in 2005, resulting in the closure of dozens of stations, one commentator brought her radio program—and government's scorn—to the Internet.
- In Vietnam, cyber dissident Pham Hong Son remains imprisoned for having posted pro-democracy essays online.
- In China, a cyber-dissident has been jailed for five years for posting essays and reports--including the lyrics of a punk song—on the net. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest market struggles against its own economic potential, as new economy businesses like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google compromise on people’s access to information in exchange for the opportunity to do business in the mainland.
- In Singapore and Malaysia, government officials have been going after individual bloggers and even webmasters with threats of criminal defamation and the Internal Security Act--bringing their crude but long-preferred weapons of choice to uncharted territory.
- In Singapore oppositionists have launched their own "podcasts"—downloadable radio programs—to skirt government regulations on broadcasting.
- In the Philippines, bloggers have gotten much credit for the dissemination of audio files that brought the presidency of Gloria Arroyo to its worst crisis.
- From South and Southeast Asia, exiled Burmese journalists have been exploiting Internet tools—from blogging to VoIP—to circumvent one of the harshest and most restrictive regimes in the world.
Much of the threats to free expression that SEAPA monitored in 2005 occurred in the realm of new media. The Internet and blogging, in particular, have not only taken off in Asia; for much of the region the technology now stands as the only viable medium for offering independent news, information, and commentary, as alternative to state-controlled news and information regimes. Consequent to its boom, however, cyberspace now stands as its own flashpoint, a venue in itself as crucial to monitor as any actual nation.
Mr. Roby Alampay is executive director of the Bangkok-based Southeast Asian Press Alliance.
