Asia, Media Use in

Children and young people are fascinating to work with because their tastes are so diverse and their needs so specific. This diversity means that we need to internationalize our understanding of young people and learn how to study them in ways that are relevant to their experiences and situations. Children in Asia are the focus of this entry, with an emphasis on how they fit into a wider story of media in Asia and its influences and conditions of existence. Children in Asia comprise varied populations, and their media use is therefore not easily characterized. This entry offers categories of description and delineation that may be helpful in approaching the study and understanding of a crucial sector of the global media audience for television, film, publishing, radio, and the Internet. It argues in particular that it is useful to examine the impact of economic development, evolving national identity, and other cultural forces on the experience of Asian children who are consumers of media.

Asia encompasses highly developed social entities, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, as well as areas of extremely uneven development, such as China, India, Indonesia, and North and South Korea. Although Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Asia, and the Asia Pacific regions share trans-sectoral similarities as a result of history and geography, each also has distinctive characteristics. This complicates any attempt at continent-wide assertion or analysis. However, it does offer a first point of call for sketching out possible parameters of study and thought. Development is a key feature of governance in much of modern Asia. This derives from a need to catch up to and compete with the modernity and attendant wealth achieved during the late 19th and 20th centuries in the United States and western Europe. In the post-colonial period, considered here to be from the 1940s through to the 1960s (with a few later exceptions), the shift from a dependent and often premodern economy to an upscale and ambitious program is best seen in the Singaporean model. Colonial economies have often been left underdeveloped by their colonial masters, a situation that has inhibited the formation of modern media and communications systems. Thus, after independence, nations such as Singapore have needed to catch up and develop modern systems, structures, and economic identities rather quickly.

The focus on development has tended to be at the expense of more relaxed approaches to modern life, and media expression has been a casualty of this need to make change effective and efficiently. This “developmentalism” has led to a functional approach to media and, as national media have emerged in the wake of empire, their role was (and is) seen to support the accelerated growth of national sovereignty, wealth, and stability. It can be argued that, given children's centrality to the future of any nation—and especially to those nations that are really new in the sense that they are reinventing themselves as independent economic and political entities on the global stage—development is a relevant perspective from which to examine Asian children's use of media.

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