Digital citizenship in Asia: A critical introduction

In the past two decades, societies in Asia have witnessed an upsurge in digital citizenry with novel and creative uses of digital technologies and networked communications in various aspects of life. Broadly defined, digital citizenship emphasizes the active use of information communication technologies by civilians to engage in society, commerce, politics, and culture. In more situated conditions, it represents the multifaceted contestation and (re)negotiation of ideals and values between individuals, groups, and the State in response to the emergent political and social concerns related to governance, identity, activism, and culture.

“Digital citizenship in Asia”—the theme of this Special Issue—is an emergent sub-field in communication, cultural studies, and Asian studies. In the few studies that have specifically used this term, its broad spectrum of activities is introduced, such as: the role of education in shaping norms of behavior with regard to technology use (cf. Ribble et al., 2004; Xu et al., 2019); increased citizen participation through digital media (Yusuf et al., 2016), and; the active political awareness and organizational activities of youth online (Adorjan and Yau, 2015). This spectrum mirrors extant embryonic scholarship about the region that elucidate how various actors—such as netizens, activists, parents, journalists, social media users and content creators, teachers and students, and young people—have deployed technology in their capacities as citizens, and they partake in a range of citizenry engagement including citizen feedback, civic activities, making claims to rights, digital conduct, e-participation, horizontal leadership, identity-formation, information acquisition and dissemination, international causes, parody and humor, petitions, surveillance, political dissidence, protest and raising awareness. These draw on diverse media forms, from advertisement, alternative news, campaign media, mass and social media, to e-finance services. Rather than just focus on the negotiation between the individual and the State, this scholarship also emphasizes ways institutions (e.g. censors, corporations, education, government, police, media, work, etc.) mobilize technology and shape the possibilities for citizen action. Eschewing the freedom or control approaches in favor of the practices approach that neither romanticizes utopic digital participation or fetishes the education of ‘proper’ digital behavior, five thematic clusters repudiate the reduction of digital citizenship to principles of democracy and complicate its production in and through the local conjuncture of social forces. This is especially relevant for Asia where citizenship claims can be enacted without rights and where contexts become key sites to identify and develop new practices that challenge Western liberal notions of citizenship.

The first cluster argues against technological determinism and focuses on whether information and communication technologies have a democratizing effect. Digital citizenship is understood through practices such as: an increase in undifferentiated civic engagement (Lin et al., 2010); unconventional (petitions, protest) compared to conventional (speaking to officials, voting) political action (Lee, 2017), and; critical attitudes towards the government, sectarianism or celebrity-drive politics (Latham, 2007; Lei, 2011; Perbawani et al., 2018; Pertierra, 2012; Rauchfleisch and Schäfer, 2015; Tang et al., 2012; Weiss, 2012). The second cluster examines digital citizenship education focusing on e-participation at government and school levels (Cho and Hwang, 2010; Gayatri et al., 2015; Nurmandi et al., 2015; Yusuf et al., 2016). It foregrounds the technical capacity of e-services and rarely examines the imbrications of power-relations. Digital citizenship is defined as general participation in governmental (and other institutional) decision-making processes through interactive digital platforms, including the appropriate use of digital technologies (Gayatri et al., 2015; Lim et al., 2011; Xu et al., 2019). The third cluster adopts a pessimistic view of technology as either open to specific manipulation by media-savvy groups in power (Abraham and Rajadhyaksha, 2015; Lee, 2015; McCargo, 2017; Therwath, 2012) or an outlet for normative and conservative sentiment (Epstein and Jung, 2011; Lim, 2013; Yusuf et al., 2016). Digital citizenship is shaped by these contestations of power that have polarized citizen participation. The fourth cluster promotes an optimistic view of technology that accords voice to historically excluded minorities. It oscillates between citizen movements and concerns for unrecognized or marginalized issues (Adorjan and Yau, 2015; Liu, 2013; Mirani et al., 2014; Siddiqi, 2018; Yun and Chang, 2011), and the incorporation of these claims under normative citizenship (Tapsell, 2018; Warren, 2014).

The fifth cluster is the most significant to our Special Issue. It focuses on digital citizenship as a contextual social practice strongly dependent on its political and cultural landscapes (Yue et al., 2019). This cluster is less concerned with evaluating the function or effectiveness of particular forms of digital citizenship, and more invested in examining how digital citizenship is constituted as a practice of local contexts and histories. Digital citizenship is framed as an intentional and hybrid practice between Western democratic ideals and local actors/experiences (Zhang, 2013), or as a contingent practice that emerges through micro-political struggles (Seto, 2017). In Indonesia, it exists as a sociotechnical imaginary and a practice of digital dwelling in the fight against authoritarianism (Barker, 2015). In Korea, netizenship emerges by distinguishing itself from the more traditional and institutionalized social movement organizations over disagreements on how to best protest against government corruption (Lee, 2012). A common motif is the focus on young people where uneven technological development, fear-based politics and repressive colonial laws have impacted youth participation far more than in the West In Singapore, digital youth citizenship is characterized as subpolitics whereby small-scale actions submerged in everyday life without a direct teleological connection to larger political processes may nonetheless have profound, if gradual, political effects (Sreekumar and Vadrevu, 2013). In China, the Internet and social media have opened up multiple public spheres for netizens to voice and add diverse perspectives to the state-controlled public sphere (Lei, 2011). Digital citizenship research in this cluster explores the rise, significance and politics of mediated youth citizenship in Asia. It stresses the importance of research to be sensitive to how historical imperialisms and political contexts inform modern conceptualizations and experiences of citizenship, which remain deeply divided across the region.

This Special Issue continues this focus on youth digital citizenship in Asia. Young people in Asia comprise more than 60% of the world's youth population (UNESCAP, 2013). As digital natives facing multiple transitions—from technological cultural transformation to life-course progressions, young adults are the core objects and subjects of digital citizenship. While ineluctably inculcated in and governed by dominant norms such as citizenship education, they also actively exercise variegated digital civic pathways towards new autonomies of adulthood. Especially acute in Asia with stark digital divides (UN, 2020) and resilient authoritarianism (George and Venkiteswaran, 2019), they have responded, both critically and innovatively, to the challenges and opportunities posed by social networking and communication platforms, and are emerging as front-stage actors in radical assertions of civic rights and alternative futures.

The #MilkTeaAlliance linking multiple Asian youth groups, including those in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Myanmar, is exemplary of this practice. The hashtag started as an Internet meme in 2020 when Hong Kong youth activists showed online support for Myanmar activists through promoting their common love of the Asian-styled milk tea and the common fight against Chinese nationalism. This was also a way to deflect censorship and inject fun metaphors to the protests. The hashtag soon grew as a transnational coalition among youth activists in these countries who were involved in their respective mass political demonstrations on the streets. Young people in Myanmar in particular, like all digital natives savvy about the networked power of social media images, protested with attention-grabbing placards written in English and costumes (Kyaw, 2021). Their three-finger salute became a symbol of this transnational coalition and movement, and rose to popularity in selfies and protest photos (Lee, 2021). While political concerns are localized and diverse, #MilkTeaAlliance traverses national interest and facilitates an inter-Asian solidarity through digital platforms. As the platforms gave space for young people to perform political engagement and practices playfully, they fostered the imagination of alternative publics (Sastramidjaja, 2016). While these uses of symbols and practices of digital solidarity are of course not novel nor unique to Asia, this nonetheless underscores the significance of redefining digital citizenship which can facilitate practices of actualizing citizenship (Bennett et al., 2011) in order to create alternative futures.

This Special Issue consolidates and extends this scholarship. It brings together original fieldwork from Singapore and Hong Kong beyond Western and Global South contexts. Both cities are coeval: they are predominantly economically advanced Chinese East Asian cities with high rates of technological adoption; they share similar postcolonial British legacies and increasing Sinicised nationalisms. What strategies and tactics of youth digital citizenship are emergent in these contexts? Rather than from the empiricism of ‘area studies’, their hybridized practices provide a useful lens to theoretically delineate the genealogy of forms and performances that constitute contemporary digital citizenship.

These papers begin from the trajectory of civic education and political participation to minority sexual citizenship and digital activism; they engage extant debates in digital literacy, media trust, platform affordances and vernacular media, and, showcase the official and unofficial, from the top-down impact of governing citizenship to the bottom-up effects of citizenry resistance. These papers are the result of a sustained series of seminars, workshops and conference panels on Digital Citizenship in Asia held in Singapore and the Philippines between 2017–2019. Through new empirical case studies using qualitative, critical, media and communication theories, stakeholder and focus group interviews, digital ethnography, quantitative surveys and computational social sciences, this Special Issue brings together scholars who are embedded and engaged in Asia-based research and are also institutionally-based across the diverse Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, USA, Hong Kong and Australia.

Weiyu Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Yeow-Tong Chia, and Jia Ying Neoh examine the evolution of civic education in Singapore schools in the light of technology advancements. Drawing on focus group study results, they reveal how young people are increasingly withdrawn from formal politics, a trend influenced by the pressure and confusion from diverse political views and a lack of effective formal education. Social media, they argue, have evolved into a preferred learning and participatory arena for civic education. Natalie Pang and Yue Ting Woo present a longitudinal study of voting patterns between young and older Singaporeans over two general elections across ten years, and explore differences in media use, political knowledge, media trust and political expression. Deploying the concept of ‘actualizing citizenship’ (Bennett et al., 2011) to highlight citizens’ social network engagement, they discovered that younger citizens’ political expression is influenced by their concurrent usage of mass media and social media, while older Singaporeans’ political expression is largely anticipated by their usage of social media. Examining youth digital sexual citizenship, Audrey Yue and Ryan Paul Augustine Lim propose that platform affordances allow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people in Singapore to maintain sexual identity and fluidity against homosexuality's illegality. The algorithms of social media, which could lead to more intense surveillance to many, has provided the LGBT youth with a sense of community and helped them negotiate peer surveillance in a society where sexual rights remain limited. The authors showcase the emergent acts of digital sexual citizenship claims under authoritarian regimes, emphasizing civic participation as emergent acts towards alternative sexual publics, while also capturing how online participation is enculturated in physical, socio-cognitive, and corporeal embodiments. John Nguyet Erni and Yin Zhang highlight the significance of digital platform Lìhn dāng Hong Kong (LIHKG) (連登) in facilitating Hong Kong's young people's protests against the anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill. They show how it plays the role of communicative center for information exchange, expressions of outrage and solidarity, and agitation. While platforms such as this facilitate deliberation, Erni and Zhang argue they do not necessarily correlate with intentional politics of citizen subjects. Their analysis reveals a ‘language in the wild’ that represents not only Hong Kong digital citizens’ collective hopes but also its messy digital activism. This ambivalence evinces the myriad practices that encompass the diverse spectrums of digital citizenship, from formal online deliberation to the wild politics of activism. Overall, these papers demonstrate youth as a site for rethinking the frames and reconstituting the bounds of digital citizenship; media as a polymediated site for enacting online and offline performances of citizenship that sometimes exceed the legal claims to rights and representation; and their practices, together, extend digital citizenship theory beyond the orthodoxy of Western liberalism and democracy.