Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

COLLAGES OF BETTERMENT 227It would seem to me now that there is a need for a varietyof forms of speech including the seemingly abstract andthose not immediately amenable for application to theproblems of the day. In many real ways, academics,concerned citizens and artists were trying to create avariety of publics, each with its own register, vocabularyand frames of reference.I returned to Malaysia and went to work in a newspaper,then involved myself in human rights activism andacademic work. Again, the challenges were fundamentallythe same; though the space available for open politicswas much wider, it was not immediately clear if therewas any depth to the public discourse surrounding orinforming this politics. One could reasonably ask ofboth the authoritarian administration and its detractorswhether they contributed to a deepening of publicculture. (They in turn might ask how “depth” is definedand, indeed, quantified.)I would like to make one brief reference to the questionof the media in Malaysia to underscore my concerns.The Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s reverberatedthroughout Malaysia’s then fast-paced economy aswell as in politics. Images of the anti-regime streetdemonstrations—known by its borrowed slogan ofreform, “Reformasi”—carried in the traditional mediawere then accompanied by the development of theso-called alternative media. Journalists and observersalike looked to the Internet as a new, perhaps evenrevolutionary, tool. These early assessments were toprove too exaggerated. In many respects, the new mediawas new only in respect to the forms of disseminationof “information” defined broadly. What remained thesame, however, was the quality of that information. Ifthere was potential for new relationships to be formedbetween the producers of information and its recipients,for new structures of knowledge production to becreated, something other than the Net had to comeinto play.One commentator astutely identified the problemwhen he complained about the character of Malaysianpolitical discourse. He said that opportunities to educatethe public (the “electorate,” more specifically) at publicrallies were being squandered because politiciansreplicated what we in Malaysia call “coffee shop talk.”This coffee shop talk—its fascination with rumor,‘insider’ knowledge, conspiracy theories and the like—was being disseminated in new ways and at new speedsbut it was “coffee shop talk” all the same. My friendsand I thought that the best way to address this problemwas to develop different strategies and ‘values’ in ourwebsite, titled “Saksi” which in the Malay languagemeans “witness.” We were not without our failings butthe general register of our site was in marked contrastto the partisan and polemical character of much thatpassed for “alternative” media then.I think one of the challenges that arose in those times ofheady political confrontation was to persuade ourselves,and others, that there is value in complexity, that onecan fashion a politics out of complex political andethical positions. This belief in the value of an analysisthat is adequate to the object in question—whether it isa politician, a political party or a socially disadvantagedgroup—is not a widely nor deeply held one in mycountry, I am afraid.Our website grew into a larger project with thedevelopment of a media NGO called the Center forIndependent Journalism. Together with an Indonesianmedia group, Radio68H, we developed a joint projectto circumvent the very tight regulations governingbroadcasting. Without getting into a rather nastynarrative about the many conflicts that erupted among“progressives” that I had the misfortune of being caughtin, suffice it to say that the project floundered on afundamental difference in the perception of the role ofthe media in times of crisis. One leading academic wentso far as to claim that even honest public criticism ofthe political was not to be encouraged, as this providedresources for the ruling party against the nascentdemocratic movement. His position was popular andin some respects intuitive. Its hazardous consequenceswould arise only later and could conceivably be dealtwith in the future. This is a debate that is never ending,perhaps.I edged back into academic work after the collapse ofthe Center’s radio project on a long-term group researchproject on the Malaysian electoral system. It proved thatacademics could respond to important issues but in amanner consistent with the specificities of their labor.(Our book—I contributed a chapter on civil societyinvolvement—has made a lasting contribution to thedebate on electoral reform in Malaysia.)For argument’s sake, let me make a sweepinggeneralization. Politics and the media share a similarpace and tone which contrasts markedly with art andacademia. Think of it as a spectrum with a variety ofpractices in each of these fields lying on various pointsof this line (or multiple lines—speed, tone, depth) andwith neither end of the spectrum defined in normativeterms, meaning I do not ascribe values to being fast, forexample. Does Malaysia have a full range of practicesthat gives expression to these terms? This is a questionAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows