Media, Culture and Society

in Malaysia

This book presents a comprehensive, full-length analysis of the uses of media

and communication technologies by different social actors in Malaysia. Unlike
other studies of the media in Malaysia which concentrate on ‘political economy’
or ‘freedom of the media’ approaches, this book focuses on the ways in which
different media forms have constituted cultural practices and power relations
amongst particular audiences and publics. It also examines the ways in which
technologies of varying scales and range have been appropriated for various
subaltern purposes and counter-hegemonic agendas. Drawing upon recent case
studies on the deployment of different media – including mainstream and
independent films, television programming, black metal music, community rituals,
political advertising, the Internet, and artistic visual installations – it provides
valuable insights into the complex, vibrant ways in which these different media
forms have negotiated with the dominant cultural representations of Malaysian
society. The book makes an important contribution to the emergent disciplines of
media studies and cultural studies in Malaysia.

Yeoh Seng Guan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences,
Monash University, Sunway Campus, Malaysia. He has recently published book
chapters in The Other Global City and Dissent and Cultural Resistance in Asia’s
Cities (both published by Routledge). He is lead editor of Penang and its Region:
The Story of an Asian Entrepot (published by NUS Press).
Routledge Malaysian Studies Series
Published in association with Malaysian Social Science
Association (MSSA)
Mohammed Hazim Shah, University of Malaya
Shamsul A.B., University Kebangsaan Malaysia
Terence Gomez, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development,
Geneva

The Routledge Malaysian Studies Series publishes high quality scholarship that provides
important new contributions to knowledge on Malaysia. It also signals research that spans
comparative studies, involving the Malaysian experience with that of other nations.
This series, initiated by the Malaysian Social Science Association (MSSA) to promote
study of contemporary and historical issues in Malaysia, and designed to respond to the
growing need to publish important research, also serves as a forum for debate on key issues
in Malaysian society. As an academic series, it will be used to generate new theoretical
debates in the social sciences and on processes of change in this society.
The Routledge Malaysian Studies Series will cover a broad range of subjects including
history, politics, economics, sociology, international relations, geography, business,
education, religion, literature, culture and ethnicity. The series will encourage work
adopting an interdisciplinary approach.

1 The State of Malaysia 6 Privatization in Malaysia

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Edited by Edmund Terence Gomez
2 Feminism and the Women’s
Movement in Malaysia
An unsung (r)evolution
Cecilia Ng, Maznah Mohamad and
Tan Beng Hui
3 Governments and Markets in
East Asia
The politics of economic crises
Jungug Choi
4 Health Care in Malaysia
The dynamics of provision, financing
and access
Edited by Chee Heng Leng and
Simon Barraclough
5 Politics in Malaysia
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Edited by Edmund Terence Gomez
Regulation, rent-seeking and
policy failure
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7 The State, Development and
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Edmund Terence Gomez
8 Race and Multiculturalism in
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Edited by Daniel P.S. Goh,
Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden,
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9 Media, Culture and Society in
Malaysia
Edited by Yeoh Seng Guan
10 Islam and Politics in Southeast
Asia
Edited by Johan Saravanamuttu
Media, Culture and Society
in Malaysia

Edited by
Yeoh Seng Guan
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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© 2010 Yeoh Seng Guan

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utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Media, culture and society in Malaysia / [edited by] Yeoh Seng Guan.
p. cm. – (Routledge Malaysian studies series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mass media–Social aspects–Malaysia. 2. Mass media–Political
aspects–Malaysia. 3. Communication in politics–Malaysia. 4. Mass
media and culture–Malaysia. I. Yeoh, Seng Guan
P92.M3M362 2010
302.2309595–dc22 2009027642

ISBN 0-203-86165-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-55246-2 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-203-86165-3 (ebk)

ISBN 10: 0-203-86165-5 (ebk)

ISBN 10: 0-415-55246-X (hbk)
Contents

List of illustrations vii

List of contributors ix
Acknowledgements xii

Introduction: Representation, cultural mediation

and power in Malaysia 1
YE OH SE NG GUAN

1 Consumers, citizens and copycat television in Malaysia 21

W ANG L AY KIM

2 Packaging the PM: The art and ideology of political

advertising 46
M UST AFA K. ANUAR

3 The Dayak Festival as a media ritual of nation building 64

JOHN POST IL L

4 Civil society use of media and ICT: A case study of

the SOS Selangor campaign 85
SONIA R ANDHAW A AND GA Y A TH R Y V EN K I TES W A R A N

5 Running cyburbia: Internet and local governance

in Subang Jaya 96
JOHN POST IL L

6 Shame and the Fourth Wall: Some thoughts on an

anthropology of the cinema 117
GOR DON GR AY
vi Contents
7 Through our own eyes: Independent documentary
filmmaking in Malaysia 137
KHOO GAIK C HE NG

8 Reclaiming history: The politics of memory and trauma

in the films of Amir Muhammad 160
B E NJAM IN M cKAY

9 Facing the music: Music subcultures and “morality”

in Malaysia 179
AZ M YL M d YUSOF

10 Malaysiatropia: The art of Simryn Gill, Liew Kung Yu and

Wong Hoy Cheong 197
R AY L ANGE NB AC H

Index 227
List of illustrations

Plates
3.1 A local television cameraman films the Dayak dancers, who are
lined up to welcome the dignitaries. 66
3.2 An elderly Orang Ulu man (second from the left) holding an
‘Excellence award to model parents producing the most number
of graduates’. In the centre, a smiling Chief Minister of Sarawak. 67
3.3 Choreographed dance charting the progress of the Dayak people
from the Stone Age to the Computer Age. Halfway through the
dance, Dayak schoolchildren listen intently to a teacher while a
woman restrains a warrior who opposes modern education. 68
3.4 Near the end of the performance, two Dayak dancers wheel in a
computer monitor to represent the dawn of the Computer Age. 68
3.5 The monitor projects official propaganda onto a giant screen,
including the 2001 Dayak Festival slogan ‘Towards a
Transformation of Vision 2020 Family’. 69
3.6 The overall winner of the 2001 Kumang Gawai beauty contest
(an Iban), flanked by her Bidayuh and Orang Ulu co-winners,
pose for the cameras. 70
3.7 The local press photographing the new beauty queens. 70
3.8 An advertising banner in a Saribas longhouse gallery (ruai)
welcoming visitors to the local Dayak Festival. 72
3.9 The front cover of a Dayak Festival karaoke DVD. 73
5.1 27 July 1999. The USJ.com.my core committee paying a
courtesy visit to YDP Datuk Ahmad Fuad, the then president of
the Subang Jaya Municipal Council (MPSJ). On the far left is
Raymond Tan, who is also the founder of Nwatch. Third from
left is Fuad. In the centre is Jeff Ooi, the founding father of
USJ.com.my and today a renowned ‘blogger’. 103
10.1 Cover of The Other Malaysia by Farish A. Noor. 198
10.2 Downing Street and its Vicinity (2002), 62 cm × 82 cm,
lithography. 200
viii List of illustrations
10.3 Wadah # 7, Wadah Untuk Pemimpin Exhibition, National Art
Gallery, Malaysia (2004). 213
10.4 Detail of Wadah # 7. Wadah Untuk Pemimpin Exhibition,
National Art Gallery, Malaysia (2004). 214

Figures
5.1 Conceptual framework for SJ2005 smart township/community.
Notice the ‘good governance’ component. 101
5.2 Some of the key agents in the e-governance field of USJ-Subang
Jaya, as of mid-2005. The horizontal axis represents the degree
of proximity to government. The vertical axis stands for the
geographical range of action, from the neighbourhood level to
the national level. Anti-clockwise, from the top left-hand
corner: MIMOS/DAGS, Lee Hwa Beng, MPSJ/JKP, Nwatch,
Subang Jaya Youth Football League, USJ.com.my, and Family
Place. In the centre: SJ2005 and The Star Online. 109

Tables
1.1 Locally produced content on free-to-air Malaysian television
(March 2002) 26
1.2 Weekly broadcast output in comparison to locally produced
content of free-to-air Malaysian television for the month of
March 2002 27
1.3 Format adapted programmes according to genres in Week 1 of
March 2002 29
1.4 Format adapted programmes compared to total domestic output
for the month of March 2002 30
1.5 Format adapted programmes and their origins (March 2002) 31
1.6 National origins of format adapted programmes (March 2002) 32
2.1 Advertising expenditure in Malaysia (in ringgit million) 48
Contributors

Azmyl Md Yusof (@ Azmyl Yunor) holds an MA in Communication from

RMIT University, Australia. He is a singer-songwriter and touring Malaysian
musician who has performed in Australia, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea
among others; a lecturer at the Department of Performance & Media at
Sunway University College, Malaysia; co-artistic director and co-founder of
Troubadours Enterprise, organisers of the annual singer songwriter showcase
KL Sing Song, now in its fifth year; and a co-founder of the Experimental
Musicians and Artists Co-operative Malaysia (EMACM), currently based
at the Studio in Cheras, Kuala Lumpur (SiCKL), an artist-run space for
improvisation, experimentation, and collaborative learning. His journal article
‘Election and Ethnicity: Local Language Dailies and the Prevalence of Ethnic-
based Discourses during the 2008 Malaysian General Election’ appeared in
the Journal of the South East Asia Research Centre for Communication and
Humanities (SEARCH), Vol. 1 (2009). He has also contributed articles to
Malaysian online portals Kakiseni and The Nut Graph.
Gordon Gray holds a PhD from Napier University. He currently teaches visual
anthropology at Temple University, USA. His publications include Cinema: A
Visual Anthropology (forthcoming with Berg Publishers), and ‘Urbanism: The
Symbol of Malay(sian) Modernity’, in Bozidar Jezenik (eds) Urban Symbolism
and Rituals (1999). He has also produced/directed a number of films. They
include Forty Years in the Making: Jonathan Friedlaender’s Solomon Island
Artifacts (2007), and Minimal Risk: BSE and the Politics of Food (2006).
V. Gayathry is Executive Director of the Centre for Independent Journalism,
a non-profit organization promoting and advancing freedom of expression,
media freedom and freedom of information. She holds an MA in International
Relations from Australian National University and has presented several papers
on press freedom in Malaysia. Her publications include ‘Media Values, Media
Ownership and Democratic Governance in Malaysia’ (with Yeoh Seng Guan)
in Communicating the Future: Proceedings on National Conference on the
Future of Media in a Knowledge Society (2004).
x Contributors
Khoo Gaik Cheng has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University
of British Columbia and currently lectures in Gender, Sexuality and Culture
in Australian National University. Her publications include Reclaiming Adat:
Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature (2006), ‘Smoking, Eating and
Desire: A Study of Alienation of the Films of James Lee’ in Benjamin
McKay and Addol Ingawanij (eds) Cinema in Southeast Asia Today: Emerging
Independent Film Cultures (2008) and several articles in journals such as
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Cinema and Singapore Journal of Tropical
Geography. Khoo inaugurated and is a member of the organizing committee of
the Annual Southeast Cinemas Conference.
Benjamin McKay lectures on Film Studies at Monash University, Sunway
campus in Malaysia. He is completing a PhD dissertation on early Malay
language cinema and his research areas are focused on Southeast Asian cinema
with a particular interest in the development of independent cinema movements
in the region in the past decade. His most recent journal article is ‘Global
City: Malay Motion Pictures, Mambang Moden and the Contested terrains
of Singapore History’, Jurnal Skrin Malaysia (2006). Together with May
Adadol Ingawanij, he is also co-editing the volume, Independent Cinemas in
Contemporary Southeast Asia (forthcoming). McKay is developing units of
study that focus on Malaysian cinema and the Independent Cinemas of Southeast
Asia. He is also a regular contributor to the film and performing arts journals,
Criticine (Manila) and Kakiseni (Kuala Lumpur).
Mustafa K. Anuar is Associate Professor at the School of Communications,
Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. His recent publications include ‘Prescribed
Truth, Licensed Freedom: The Press in post-Mahathir Malaysia’, in Nalini
Rajan (ed.) 21st Century Journalism in India (2007), ‘Politics and the Media
in Malaysia’, in Kasarinlan: Philippines Journal of Third World Studies
(2005), ‘Muzzled: The Media in Mahathir’s Malaysia’, in Bridget Welsh
(ed.) Reflections: The Mahathir Years (2004), and ‘The Role of Malaysia’s
Mainstream Press in the 1999 General Elections’, in Francis Loh Kok Wah
and Johan Saravanamuttu (eds) New Politics in Malaysia (2003). His latest
publication is Journalism in Good Faith: Issues and Practices in Religion
Reporting, co-written with Eric G. Loo (2010), Subang: Marshall Cavendish
Editions. He holds a PhD from City University, London.
John Postiil gained a PhD in Anthropology from University College London
(UCL). A specialist in the anthropology of media, currently he is Senior Lecturer
in Media at Sheffield Hallam University and a Digital Anthropology Fellow at
UCL. He is the author of Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became
Malaysian (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), Localizing the Internet as well as the co-
edited volume (with Birgit Bräuchler) Theorising Media and Practice, both in
press with Berghahn. His research and teaching interests include media practice
theory, digital media activism, and social media and geopolitics. He is also
the co-founder of the Media Anthropology Network, European Association of
Social Anthropologists.
 Contributors xi
Ray Langenbach is an artist, writer, and curator. His video works, installations
and performances have been presented in Singapore, Norway, Philippines,
Malaysia, India, South Korea, United States of America and Germany among
others. He has published in Art Asia Pacific, Artlink, Asian Art News,
Afterimage, Performance Research, and Performance Paradigms. His PhD
dissertation (Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney),
Performing the Singapore State, 1988–1995, is published online. His writ-
ings have also appeared in various collections including House of Glass:
Modernity and the State (2001) and Ask Not: The Necessary Stage in
Singapore Theatre (2003). Langenbach is Associate Professor, Department of
Performance and Media at Sunway University College, and serves as Professor
of Artistic Research, Theory and Art History, Department of Post-Graduate
Studies, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and Professor, Department of Research
Development, Finnish Theatre Academy.
Sonia Randhawa holds an MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the
University of Oxford. She is a founder and current director of the Centre for
Independent Journalism, the Deputy President of the World Association for
Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) and a columnist with Malaysian
English-language daily, The Sun. Among her other publications are a handbook
to community radio (in Malay); The Rio Declaration: Principle 10, What
it means to you (2008) and Instant Expert: A Guide to Malaysian Media
Legislation (2007).
Wang Lay Kim is Senior Lecturer at the School of Communications, Universiti
Sains Malaysia, Penang. She holds an MA in Communication Studies from
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom. Her recent publications include
‘Ownership, Control and the Malaysian Media’ (with Zaharom Nain) in
P. Thomas and Zaharom Nain (eds) Who Owns the Media? (2004), ‘Malaysian
Women in the Information Society: Opportunities and Challenges’ in Philip Lee
(ed.) Many Voices, One Vision: The Right to Communicate in Practice (2004).
Together with Ubonrat Siriyusak and Leela Rao, Wang has also edited Gender
Reflections in Asian Television (2000).
Yeoh Seng Guan is Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts and Social Sciences,
Monash University, Sunway Campus, Malaysia. He holds a PhD from the
University of Edinburgh. His recent book chapter publications include ‘Limiting
Cosmopolitanism: ‘Streetlife Little India’, Kuala Lumpur’, in Shail Mayaram
(ed.) The Other Global City (2009) and ‘The Streets of Kuala Lumpur:
Cityscape, ‘race’ and civil disobedience’, in Melissa Butcher and Selvaraj
Velayutham (eds) Dissent and Cultural Resistance in Asia’s Cities (2009). He
is also lead editor for Penang and its Region: The story of an Asian entrepot
(2009). Among others, his journal articles have appeared in Contributions to
Indian Sociology (n.s.), Material Religion: Journal of Objects, Art and Belief,
Sojourn, and Crossroads. He has produced as well a few ethnographic film
documentaries.
Acknowledgements

This publication has its origins in three panels convened by Zaharom Nain and
Yeoh Seng Guan at the Fourth Malaysian Studies International Conference (in
2004) held at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi. The panels were billed as
‘Media, Culture and Power in Malaysia’. Unfortunately, only a few of the original
papers presented then have found their way to this publication for various reasons.
They are joined by a group of contributors commissioned to write on their areas
of expertise related to the basic thrust of the book.
I am grateful to all the contributing authors for their efforts, forbearance and
good spirits in the long time that has been required to bring this manuscript to
publication. My gratitude also goes to Zaharom Nain for his early contributions
to the project and to Edmund Terence Gomez for his steadfast encouragement in
making the publication a reality.
I would like to thank Berghahn Books for their kind permission to reprint, as
Chapter 8 in this book, a chapter entitled ‘Calender Time’, originally published
in John Postill’s monograph, Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became
Malaysian (Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). Last but not least,
I thank Wong Hoy Cheong, and Liew Kung Yu for allowing visuals of their
remarkable and challenging artwork to grace this volume. Thanks also to
Samuel W.F. Onn; Martin Pohlmann; Tiew Brothers Company, Sibu; Silverfish
Books Sdn. Bhd for permission to reprint material in the book.
Introduction
Representation, cultural mediation and
power in Malaysia
Yeoh Seng Guan

The basic premise of this book is that the media of all ranges and provenances –
“big/small” and “old/new” – in Malaysia matter. As elsewhere in the academic
world, the media in polyglot, multi-ethnic and multi-religious Malaysia can
be profitably viewed as a convenient analytical site for making more visible
contemporary configurations of cultural production and of contestations of
meanings. Some of the key questions that frame the book include: What kinds
of imaginaries do the media (mainstream and alternative) project and promote?
How do they converge/diverge from one another? How are the range of media
(and communicational) technologies appropriated by different social actors for
their respective agendas and projects? What do they index about the contours of
cultural economy and social power in Malaysian society?
By keeping in full view the nexus between media, culture and society, and
the multifarious deployment of communicational technologies by a range of
individuals, groups and institutions, each of the essays in this volume maps
and probes the traffic of imaginaries that currently traverse the Malaysian
media-worlds. These lines of inquiry have been a staple fodder of the eclectic,
multi-disciplinary and expansive field of media studies, and its closely related
kin, cultural studies (e.g., Barker 2003; Erni and Chua 2005; Grossberg et al.
2006; Stevenson 2002). In the case of Malaysia, the analytical possibilities of a
regional appropriation translation of media and cultural studies are arguably still
in their infancy, and this publication is a modest contribution towards its local
translation and development.
To date, studies on the media-worlds in Malaysia over the past two decades
have been prominently anchored by two major frameworks. While having
different analytical logics, both are nevertheless centrally concerned about
media interactions with Malaysian publics. The “consensus” perspective broadly
comprises administrative, policy-oriented, and empirical studies that imbibe
functionalist (and positivist) theoretical proclivities. They essentially underscore
the centripetal – and, by implication, the potentially centrifugal – powers of the
media in providing the imaginative resources for “national unity” and “nation-
building” (e.g., Karthigesu 1988; Mohd. Safar Hashim 1996; cf. Anderson 2006).
The fiercely independent and adversarial aspects of the press associated with the
developed West are freedoms deemed to be inimical to the paramount agenda of
2 Yeoh Seng Guan
“national development”, The clarion cry of press freedom is starkly juxtaposed in
terms of a divide between the “socially responsible” role of local media vis-à-vis
the “irresponsible” and cultural imperialist agendas of the foreign media. In short,
the local media has to be “guided” especially on commentaries pertaining to public
order, morality, national security, and so forth (cf. McCargo 2003; Romano and
Bromley 2005).
On the flip side are a smaller collection of studies that direct their critical
gaze on the inequitable distribution of informational and symbolic resources, the
ideological (ab)uses of “big media” by the state apparatus, and the undermining
of democratic ideals and aspirations.1 In this regard, the interpellative, compliant
and illiberal postures of the mainstream media, especially in reportage of
perceived local sensitivities, is linked to a strait-jacketed milieu legitimated by a
combination of restrictive laws and concentrated cross-media proxy ownership by
key political parties of the ruling government (e.g., Loh and Mustafa 1996; Mustafa
2002; Zaharom 2002; Gomez 2004; Zaharom and Wang 2004). Additionally,
government-sponsored market liberalization and media de-regulation in recent
years have sparked off a mushrooming of a diversity of genres and formats in
the mainstream media. Notwithstanding the milieu of liberalization, the central
claim advanced by their critics is that the imaginative universe continues to be
ideologically mimetic and conformist if not escapist in tenor. Sporadic attempts
(real and perceived) at countering dominant social and political discourses have
been reciprocated with unflinching reprisals from the state, actions which are
usually favorably reported in the local media but heavily criticized in cyberspace.
They argue that market freedom has not translated into substantive democratic
freedoms fomenting a plurality of social imaginaries, and Jurgen Habermas’
theoretical ideal of a vibrant communicative public sphere is woefully weak in
evidence.
As elsewhere, the recent advent of Information and Communication Technology
(ICT) and Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) in Malaysia has arguably
both entrenched and confounded the claims of both positions (e.g., Gan et al.
2004; Cherian 2006; cf. Atkins 2002; Heng 2002; Bunnell 2004). When former
premier Mahathir Mohamad promulgated the arrival of the “internet” in Malaysia
in the early 1990s, he gave the assurance that it would be free from the
governmental controls found in “old media”. Subsequently, ordinary consumer-
citizens have been quick to appreciate the comparative freedoms offered by the
labyrinthine realms of cyberspace, and have deployed the technology of “new
media” for a variety of alternative, contrapuntal and oppositional purposes –
productive, consumptive, and political. Even as state authorities champion its
populist use as a technological marker for the acceleration of modernization of the
country, they have also maintained vigilant surveillance and occasionally meted
out punitive measures on individuals and groups anchored in the offline world
deemed to have been “socially irresponsible” in fomenting “anti-nationalistic”
and “subversive” sentiments.2 With good reason, the emerging field of “new
media” has therefore attracted the growing attention of researchers because it is
viewed as “creat[ing] new spaces for alternative voices that provide the focus both
 Introduction 3
for specific community interests as well as for the contrary and the subversive”
(Silverstone 1999: 103; cf. Atkins 2002; Aton 2001). While this development is
hugely significant and even epochal, this volume will also maintain that studying
the realms of “old media” and “small media” continues to yield valuable insights
in tangibly mapping and indexing the cultural shifts and social transformation
of different publics in Malaysian society. Simply put, there is value in looking
both ways.
Making the claim that media and communicational technologies act to shape and
mediate “culture” and “societal power” in significant ways requires us to discuss
briefly what might be encapsulated by these analytical categories. Firstly, while
each contributor employs their own specific academic disciplinary vocabularies
to explicate their case studies, all of them broadly share perspectives that eschew
idealist, elitist, monolithic and static versions of “culture”. By the same token, they
also undermine technological determinist views of communicational and media
technologies. In the Anglo-American tradition, these are landmark formulations
of British cultural studies as exemplified by the pioneering scholarship of Richard
Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, and which has now become a
major strain of critical media studies. Raymond Williams (1977), in particular,
speaks of the necessity of understanding culture as a creative practice not reserved
for the class of intellectuals and educated minority. As opposed to a normative
“high”/“low” distinction, Williams coined the phrase, “culture is ordinary”, to
denote its texturing in the practices of daily life. Recuperating Italian journalist-
academic Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony”, Williams also behooves
the researcher to give equal attention to the workings of “ideology”, on the role of
institutions and on the possibilities of dissidence in analyzing cultural practices.
His work brings to the analytical center the material production and reproduction
of “invented tradition”, and the role of institutions like education and the media in
popularizing its currency. His celebrated shorthand phrases, “cultural materialism”
and “structures of feelings”, typify this stance of appreciating both the durability
of cultural forms as well as the processes of selective tradition in the definition of
what constitutes “culture”.
Stuart Hall’s body of work has similar resonances. To cite one of his more
succinct formulations: “by culture here I mean the actual grounded terrain of
practices, representations, languages and customs of any specific society. I also
mean the contradictory forms of common sense which have taken root in and
helped to shape popular life” (Hall 1996: 439). Still with a cartographic metaphor,
“culture” can perhaps be provisionally pictured as an array of everyday practices
signifying a collage of imaginative maps of social meanings. This implies an
element of social cohesion because of its relational and shared properties. But,
more importantly, the cultural terrain is also open to contestations and shifts as
zones of overlapping maps of meanings may come unhinged despite its veneer of
stability, coherence and hierarchy. To invoke Raymond Williams once again, “no
dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human
energy and human intention” (Williams 1977: 125). The work of “ideology”
and “hegemony” appears compelling only when specific and contingent maps
4 Yeoh Seng Guan
of meaning and the technologies of their sign-systems – whether they pertain
to markers of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, the economy,
religion, and so forth – are persuasively clothed in mythical and commonsensical
garments. In the same manner, proponents of contending tropes, narratives and
discourses may resort to cultural resources that have the verisimilitude of being
universal, timeless and necessary truths as their arbitrary constructions disappear
from view.
The transnationalization of cultural production and the globalization of moder-
nity through Western-dominated media in more recent times have complicated
and transformed local cultural practices honed from decades, if not centuries, of
competition, co-existence, intermingling, and hybridization with distinct emergent
cultural forms. Despite the proliferation and export of Western “culture industries”
to almost every corner of the globe, there is evidence to suggest that different
accentuations and subjectivities of a globalist culture fomented in an array of
local and regional contexts continue to be vibrant (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Curran
and Park 2000; Erni and Chua 2005; Wilson 2007). Expressed differently, in the
meaning-making process, “power” is central and cannot be wished away. One can
argue that studies of the Malaysian media noted earlier are implicitly speaking
to the power of the mass media industry. In these formulations, however, power
is usually imputed to have coercive, repressive, possessive and non-renewable
properties, and resides only in privileged elite social groups and governing political
institutions. By contrast, the undifferentiated mass audience of consumer-citizens
is evaluated to be vulnerable, passive and easily manipulated, especially with the
aid of a docile and pliable media apparatus.
While brutish control and monopoly of the mainstream media continues to be
a lasting legacy of statecraft in Malaysia, and it would be unwise to disregard its
durability and wide-ranging influences, the well-known theoretical interventions
of European scholars like Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault have also alerted
us to the more subtle productive and enabling dimensions of societal power.
Foucault (1980), in particular, argues that power needs to be fully grasped as
a historically conditioned set of disciplinary techniques. Rather than theorized in
idealist and static terms, power must be analyzed through a historical materialist
perspective. Ubiquitous and pervasive in every aspect of social relationships,
the “technologies of bio-power” (and its necessary correlate, resistance) cannot
be circumscribed but circulate at every level and aspect of human society. As
varied individuals and groups labor to structure the possible imaginative fields
of actions of others, the signifying power of language for knowledge production
and meaning-making is integral to their respective projects. Viewed thus, the
deployment of media and communicational technologies in the production,
dissemination and consumption of information of all varieties constitute acts
of governmental power developed in particular historical and cultural contexts.
Several of the studies provided by the contributors in this volume are thus amenable
to such Foucauldian re-readings. For instance, in Mustafa K. Anuar’s incisive
account of the powerful deployment of political advertising in the 2004 General
Elections, what is also implied is the precariousness of the status quo in its reliance
 Introduction 5
on long-established commercial rhetoric to over-determine voters’ imaginations.
Similarly, in Azmyl Md Yusof’s compelling discussion of the ideological force
of Malay vernacular media reportage of the supposedly disjunctive influence of
music subcultures (like “black metal music”) brings out clearly its panoptic and
disciplinary powers in the labor that is required to regulate the “morality” of the
urbanized Malay youths. John Postill’s chapter on the creative appropriation of
ICT and CMC by suburban middle-class residents’ for local governance illustrates
the transgressive capillary circuits of societal power reminiscent of Foucault’s
theoretical perspective. By the same token, in the world of independent film-
making discussed by Khoo Gaik Cheng, we are also given a nuanced look into
the kinds of dissident imaginaries constructed in uncensored disciplinary spaces,
but which are not also free from the intricacies and dilemmas of power relations.
Gordon Gray’s chapter is equally insightful for the ethnographic manner in which
he explicates taken-for-granted spatialized cultural maps permeating both the real
and cinematic worlds of Malay society, an analytical task made possible because
of his initial foreignness to its cultural economy.
In all these case studies, what is salient is that media and communicational
technologies are also technologies of the self as they perpetuate old “truths”
or help bring about emergent “truths” through an ensemble of textual and
visual discourses. Said differently, the deployment of these technologies foments
contesting “structures of feelings” and the re-calibration of power relations within
the imagined social body that is Malaysia.
While contributors in this book have explicitly directed their analysis at the
specific mass media technologies of print, film, broadcast television, ICT and so
forth in advancing their respective arguments, they also take cognizance that the
Malaysian media-world is not hermetically sealed, a point perhaps most cogently
underscored by anthropologists of the media (e.g., Ginsburg et al. 2002). In other
words, even if “the media bring the world to us and help to shape that world,
there is still a reality outside of the media” (Grossberg et al. 2006: 4). The
media are thus open as much to the contingencies and complexities of everyday
living as their producers and audiences. Indeed, for media texts to extend beyond
their ephemeral life spans and immediate contexts, their respective producers
must assume that their intended audiences possess the necessary shared stock
of “culture” or social maps of meanings to make sense of and perpetuate their
messages. In the absence of these inter-textual everyday knowledge and cultural
literacy skills gleaned through repetitive exposure and appropriation, to speak
of imaginative Malaysian social-worlds, however “fragmented” (Kahn and Loh
1992), would be an impossibility. It would be also salutary to remember that
although the word “media” is commonly deployed in shorthand to signify the
modern “mass media industries”, it has a wider and older array of meanings.
As the plural for “medium”, it connotes a vehicle for conveying imaginative
communicative spaces for the stream of experiences, interpretations and meanings
between human beings. This ecumenical appreciation of the word allows us
to entertain a plurality of media cultural forms in terms of scale, provenance,
reach, and modes of image-aural making technologies. Thus, one can then detect
6 Yeoh Seng Guan
“technologies of power” operating in “small media” and “old media” just as
cogently in “big media” and in “new media” if one accepts that the key thread
that connects their respective uses is the re-enforcement or, alternatively, the
re-shaping of hegemonic knowledge, cultural practices and societal power. In
this volume, several essays follow the trails of the deployment of these different
media range and forms. In particular, chapters examining the use of community
organizing events and the internet in campaigning against the construction of
a dam (Sonia Randhawa and V. Gayathry); the contrapuntal cultural critique
of Malaysian visual-installation-performing artists (Ray Langenbach); and the
meshing of Iban community harvest rituals with modern media rituals (John
Postill) exemplify this kind of flexible attention.
Of all the media and communicational technologies dealt with in this volume,
television is perhaps the most influential and powerful given its audience size,
the volume and transportability of texts, and its demands on our daily use of
domestic space and time. Raymond Williams’ insightful observation that the
growth of mass television is over-determined by the different agencies of state,
economy and mobile privatism continues to ring true. In this scenario, television
spectatorship becomes an important source of mediated cultural knowledge to
Malaysian audiences about themselves as an “imagined community” in relation
to state-defined national culture vis-à-vis a constellation of nation-states. The
exponential rise of cross-border or transnational television in recent times has
shaped up new kinds of cultural literacies with an enlarged diet of audio-visual
texts for consumption and appropriation. However, whether the liberal notion of
a free market necessarily ushers in a wider diversity for consumer choice is open
to serious question in Wang Lay Kim’s chapter.
The context of her research is the evident flourishing of media products as well
as the deepening of cross-media ownership in Malaysia. In this regard, giant media
conglomerate, Media Prima Berhad, is pre-eminent. Allegedly linked to United
Malay National Organization (UMNO), the dominant political party in the ruling
coalition, Media Prima currently owns all major private television stations, two
popular radio networks, a range of major English and Malay newspapers as well as
content creation, events management, and outdoor advertising companies. Media
Prima’s only major competitor is Astro (All Asia Television and Radio Company)
which is a pay television satellite operator known to be a beneficiary of state
patronage. Presently capturing about 30 percent of the market share, the station
offers a broad menu of programs (like lifestyle, sports, entertainment, children,
and news) targeted to the major linguistic groups residing in Malaysia (namely,
different Chinese dialects, Tamil, Hindi, and Malay) as well as the transnational
language of English. While Astro’s outlook can be characterized as cosmopolitan
and global, the crop of Media Prima’s programs is more tethered to the domestic
scene. Both, nevertheless, are subject to powerful legislative instruments that
threaten to punish “deviant” behavior as embodied in tele-visual programs in
the Malaysian mediascape.
Anchored on a case study of major free-to-air and private television channels,
and supplemented with audience research, Wang maps out the kinds of cultural
 Introduction 7
transactions that occur in the wake of the globalization of television entertainment
programs. Despite official pronouncements of the primacy of promoting local
cultural products, Wang argues that not only does the volume of locally produced
programs pale in comparison to format-adapted foreign programs in reality, but
current Malaysian television fare is also afflicted with a “copycat” syndrome
begotten because of a commercialized calculus. Although there was partial
evidence of critical and discerning viewers, Wang suggests that optimistic
arguments of a sovereign consumer-citizen are naive and misplaced in the
particular context of the television regime in Malaysia. Following James Curran’s
well-known model of a “publicly owned sector committed to public-service goals”
(Curran and Seaton 1997), Wang sees the remedy to the structural malady as only
possible through a more enlightened institutional paradigm shift in the cultural
industry. In the absence of these interventions, hopes for a wider range and
diversity of both informational and entertainment fare would remain utopian.
Political parties in the West, especially the United States of America and the
United Kingdom, have long valued cultivating the images of their respective
leaders through the media. Akin to the aura of media personalities of sports
and movie celebrities, their on-screen look, charisma, and accessibility figure
just as importantly as their political abilities and party policies. Together with
other commodified media texts, the cult of the spectacle in party politics has
become ordinary in a supposed post-ideological milieu where distinctions between
politicians and parties are often differences in style rather than substance. Whereas
Wang’s chapter illuminates the open-ness of the Malaysian public to foreign
entertainment imaginaries in the daily offerings on the television screens, Mustafa
Anuar provides a focused account of a translation of these same energies in
the particular moment of the eleventh General Elections held in 2004. Although
the legalist and commercial stranglehold of the mainstream media by the ruling
government during these liminal periods is well-known (e.g., Mustafa 2003)
what is significant about the 2004 event was that it signaled a shift towards a
more American-type presidential election campaign with a strong dosage of the
stock-in-trade of political advertising. More to the point, Mustafa contends that
the ideological persona of Abdullah Badawi, Mahathir Mohamad’s handpicked
successor, was deftly packaged to suggest a political leader who is not only
accessible to the ordinary citizen but especially to young voters given their
growing numbers and difference in political mind-sets. Arguably, this aspect of the
deployment of the media is not atypical and is a follow-through of earlier signifying
moves inaugurated during Mahathir Mohamad’s premiership at branding Malaysia
as a nation-state on the throes of achieving the coveted “developed” status of the
First World.
Among others, the project and narrative of “developmentalism” involves the
harnessing of state largesse in the provision of basic facilities (like hospitals
and schools) and the construction of modern infrastructure (like telecommuni-
cations and highways) ostensibly to benefit consumer-citizens situated within
its boundaries. Like economic medicine, “development plans” are periodically
and spatially administered to the national body in order to boost its capacity
8 Yeoh Seng Guan
to be able to stand alongside more developed nation-states in the world. In his
chapter on the Dayak harvest festival of Gawai celebrated in Sarawak (East
Malaysia), John Postill provides an ethnographic insight into a lesser known
aspect of nation-building – the reconfiguration of localized notions of space and
time in accordance with modular nation-state temporal sensibilities as a cultural
resource for development. Originally reckoned according to fluid spatial and
temporal circumstances, the modern day celebration of Gawai Dayak has been
synchronized according to clock-and-calendar time (CCT) and performed through
the aid of technologically mediated rituals. Drawing critically from work done in
the anthropology of ritual and media studies, Postill argues that the reworking of
non-native social scripts for events like the Gawai Festival is an example of an
“ethnic festival saturated with media rituals [in order] to provide remote access
to a modern country’s centres of power and knowledge”. Their willingness to
subordinate local practices to outside parameters in the quest for “development”
raises difficult questions about complicity with dominant power structures and
problematizes a priori romanticized notions of subaltern resistance.
Film/Cinema Studies have contributed much to a deeper understanding of the
complex workings of movie industries around the world as well as deciphering
codes of meanings embedded in film texts of various national contexts (e.g.,
Dissanayake 1994; Khoo GC 2006; McKay and Adadol 2008). Adopting an
anthropological stance towards the study of cinema, Gordon Gray’s chapter
continues in this tradition to suggest how changing social, economic and
spatial contexts of urban ethnic Malays not only re-configure aspects of Malay
identities but are also necessarily inflected in the visual aesthetics and propriety
of Malay-language films. In particular, as a “non-native” academic, Gray
points to the analytical utility of viewing Malay cinema as a cipher of Malay
cultural practices especially when weighed alongside ethnographic evidence and
normative discourses on Malay housing, families and gender roles. Thus, filmic
texts are not just “reflections” of society but are an integral part of society. As Gray
puts it, “the Fourth Wall of cinematic space, comprising the imaginary audience
and/or the film crew, is in reality a public arena, one that in the Western canon
of film-making is treated as if it is a private space. In Malay-language films, the
Fourth Wall is treated as both a real and ‘reel’ public space”. What counts as
legitimate and culturally acceptable in Malay private/public spaces are played out
equally both in the diegetic and real worlds.
As elsewhere in the world, increasingly cheaper digital video technologies have
facilitated democratization of the Malaysian film-making industry and, in its wake,
the spawning of a growing and eclectic cohort of “independent film-makers”. Free
from the formal grip of national cultural policy imperatives, censorship guidelines,
and the logic of economic marketability, the range of genres, topics, and filmic
styles explored by these artists does not always cohere with mainstream cultural
and political agendas. Some have directed their filmic gaze on “hidden” aspects of
Malaysian society and dwell on politically “taboo” topics. How these new artistic
and ethical spaces are negotiated form the subject of discussion for Khoo Gaik
Cheng’s and Benjamin McKay’s chapters.
 Introduction 9
Following a cursory survey of the contemporary independent filmscape, Khoo
focuses her discussion on the entries submitted to the inaugural Freedom FilmFest
annually organized by communication NGO, Pusat KOMAS. First launched in
2004, the festival was conceived as a filmic forum to contextualize human rights
concerns in the country – epitomized in the challenge “Dare to Document” –
through invitations to the public to script and produce films that document daily
struggles for human dignity. Although the organizers have since experimented
with different formats beyond the documentary genre, Khoo’s essay provides an
insight into the artistic and ethical dilemmas that surface in the production of
such films outside the regime of state censorship. It also raises related questions
on the cultural and political form of DIY (do-it-yourself) media texts. Does it
necessarily follow that independently produced media texts are antagonistic to
dominant political institutions and cultural sensibilities? Khoo’s essay suggests
that notwithstanding the expressed progressive ideals of the Freedom FilmFest,
issues of power, (mis)representation, reflexivity, and ethical responsibility to film
subjects – themes usually associated with the hallmarks of responsible academic
research – are not erased or elided even as these independent film-makers wrestle
with the regime of state-imposed constraints.
In the Malaysian independent filmscape, the name of Amir Muhammad
prominently stands out. Conventionally credited as an astute trail-blazing pioneer
of independent digital film-making, Amir’s body of work is discussed in Benjamin
McKay’s chapter. Rather than simply realist “documentaries”, McKay suggests
that Amir’s avant-garde oeuvre can be better characterized as personalized
“essayed films”. Indeed, it is the expansive literary and fictive possibilities of the
former that permit Amir’s formidable narrative talents to come to the foreground as
he re-looks at canonical Malaysian “truths” via the highly portable and accessible
medium and language of film. Through his trademark use of irony and paradox,
and of habitually confounding the boundaries between the personal/public and
of memory/history, McKay argues that Amir Muhammad’s work “provides a
valuable record itself of the contestations and attempted reconciliations that shape
notions of contemporary Malaysian identity”. Indeed, in juxtaposition to statist
cultural practices, his cinematic strategies “reveal much about the awkward and
perilous nexus between memory, culture and power in contemporary Malaysia.
Memory becomes an alternative realm for ‘truth’ as it collides with officially
sanctioned grand narratives of history and rubs up against the state induced
proscribed amnesia when it comes to honest and objective accounts of real
moments of national and cultural trauma.”
The theme of collisions and contestations also figures strongly in the essay
by community media activists, Sonia Randhawa and Gayathry Venkiteswaran.
They offer an insider’s account of how a coalition of NGOs (non-governmental
organizations) called SOS Selangor carried a robust campaign against a dam
project in the early 2000s. While the campaign ultimately failed in halting the
construction of the dam by the state government, it chronicles the creative uses
of the media, particularly ICT, alongside extra media avenues in disseminating
alternative information that helped raise public awareness of the long-term
10 Yeoh Seng Guan
viability of the project, negative environmental impacts and social equity issues not
fully addressed in the mainstream media. The authors also claim that, perhaps as an
unintended consequence of this civil society campaign, subsequent water-related
projects appear to be better researched and packaged by the state government
authorities. However, in the final analysis, the episode underscored once again
the need to legislate in the offline world a Freedom of Information Act enabling
public access to documents and information vital in fostering debate on matters
of public concern and interest.
The networking powers of the ICT also informs John Postill’s chapter
on local e-governance in one of the most technologically savvy suburbs in
Malaysia, Subang Jaya. Discourses of “connectivity”, “e-governance”, and
“greater transparency” originated from futurist aspirations incubated during
premier Mahathir Mohamad’s administration to transform the country into a
knowledge-based economy. As a showcase for tri-sectoral partnerships, Subang
Jaya was selected in 1999 by a corporatized government agency to become a
“smart township” by the year 2005. While the fervour of that initial dream has
abated somewhat, Postill’s study provides a “grassroot” account of how local
residents of Subang Jaya, comprising largely “middle-class, middle-aged and
ethnic Chinese”, were quick to harness the communicative reach of the internet
for a range of networking and mobilizing activities, sometimes at cross-purposes
to the plans and rhetoric of local authorities. Ironically, the vibrancy of the e-
community site in Subang Jaya has made it a model example of e-democracy in
the global literature.
Both the chapters by John Postill and by Sonia Randhawa and Gayathri
Venkiteswaran underscore once again the well-known democratizing, liberalizing
and pluralist potential of ICT and CMC. Its appeal for its practitioners lies in the
medium’s well-vaunted ability in offering tangible possibilities for reworking
imbalances of informational flow in situations where access to mainstream
channels are restricted or controlled. Alternative news, images and interpretations
have become intimately synonymous with the internet, and by implication a deeper
reliance by its users on its powers of mediation of culture and society. However,
the authors of both chapters also suggest that these excursions in cyberspace must
necessarily translate into the offline worlds, requiring material changes, whether
legislative, organizational or attitudinal, before they can be of lasting benefit to
more Malaysian citizens.
Indeed, despite the many attractions of cyberspace, the exciting embodied and
sensorial experiences offered by live music remains paramount for segments of
Malaysian society (cf. Chun et al. 2004). Azmyl Md Yusof’s chapter on the
subculture of black metal music popular among urban Malay youths is a case in
point. Azmyl examines the cultural forms of this music sub-genre and its particular
appeal for these groups in juxtaposition to commercialized youth cultures. He
also deciphers media coverage of recent government crackdowns of black metal
music gatherings throughout the country and its entrepreneurial role in creating
and mediating a semblance of “moral panics”. These actions, Azmyl argues, must
be read as intimately intertwined with the policing of an ethnicized political culture
 Introduction 11
premised on the primacy and integrity of Malay-Muslim identity, a project which
is partially disrupted by the power of black metal music as a cultural resource for
making sense of unfamiliar material conditions and emergent subjectivities.
The final chapter by Ray Langenbach rounds up nicely the volume by bringing
to the foreground our cartographic rendition of “culture” but also undermining
it with a reflexive twist. He discusses the visual and intellectual strategies of
three prominent, avant-garde and highly skilled Malaysian artists – Wong Hoy
Cheong, Simryn Gill and Liew Kungyu – whose works have been exhibited both
in the local and international arts circuits. Reflective of their respective social
class backgrounds as well as collective historical insertions into the country’s
particular version of “autocratic developmentalism” in the past three decades, all
of them make nuanced commentaries on Malaysian society and cultural politics
via the medium of the visual. Langenbach reads Wong’s oeuvre as “late modernist
cosmopolitan” in his quest to de-stabilize the order of things through his signature
attention to representational styles and postcolonial identities. By comparison,
Simryn Gill consistently deploys a “post-humanist” stance in her depiction of
“the modernist dystopia of cultural space laced with entropy”. Her images are
remarkable for the absence of human subjects and the centering of landscapes and
artifacts. Yet, what unites both their distinctive styles is a refusal to “relinquish their
control to allow their work to free float”. This aspect, however, exemplifies Liew
Kungyu’s body of work through his precise and ironic deployment of political
kitsch in celebration of the heroic leader. Langenbach suggests that, of these three
artists, it is the last strategy combining the potent media forms of state iconography
and consumer capitalism that resonates closest to the “complexity of post-modern
cultures” because of its reflexive attention to the powers of representation and
interpellation itself.
Seen as a whole, each contribution then illuminates the complex and shifting
cultural and political landscapes that constitute contemporary polyglot, multi-
ethnic, and multi-religious Malaysia enmeshed in a trajectory that has globalist
implications. They also address varied repertoires deployed by different social
actors in navigating the nexus between the political, social and cultural realms
through their own respective research sites, and in the process explicate the logics
of media use by a range of individuals, groups and institutions. Additionally,
they uncover the varied “structures of feelings” that are embedded in the
disparate circuits of commercial pursuits, political and civil society mobilization,
community-building rituals, and the poetics of visual and aural technologies.
Finally, by offering a glimpse into how a range of “small/big media” and “old/new
media” are implicated in everyday living, they provide suggestive insights into
the linkages and flows between state-driven politics, economics, and everyday
subjectivities and practices.

Postscript
In mid-February 2008, as the finishing touches on this manuscript were being put
together, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi announced the dissolution of
12 Yeoh Seng Guan
Parliament in order to pave the way for the 12th Malaysian General Elections to be
conducted. The Elections Commission stipulated thirteen days for campaigning
before polling on 8th March. This annulment followed months of speculation that
it would most likely be held just before deposed former deputy premier, Anwar
Ibrahim, would be legally eligible to contest after mid-April.
Four years earlier, under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s newly minted leadership,
Barisan Nasional had garnered an overwhelming 90 percent of parliamentary seats
(198 out of 220). Various commentators and political analysts had anticipated a
slight reduction in seats for the Barisan Nasional because of the negative fallout
of high profile exposes of the preceding months and the renewed potent influence
of Anwar Ibrahim returning to lead the Opposition attack after being incarcerated
for six years. But the election results on the early morning hours of 9th March
confounded even the most optimistic predictions, and are now touted as historic
and epochal in transforming the manner in which political contestation along
racialized lines in Malaysia is constituted. In the sensationalist phraseology of the
headlines of the largest English language daily, a “political tsunami” had swept
Malaysia.3 Although still having the mandate to rule because it had secured more
than half of the parliamentary seats in a first-past-the-post electoral system, not
since the iconic 1969 General Elections has the ruling coalition fared so badly.
In that year, the Alliance (forerunner to Barisan Nasional) could only muster
64 percent of all parliamentary seats, lost Penang state to the Opposition, and
did not have majority control in Perak and Selangor. By comparison, in March
2008, Barisan Nasional lost their strangehold of two-thirds majority held for
nearly four decades and which had been assumed by many to be routine. More
starkly, excluding the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak which provided
overwhelming support to Barisan Nasional (54 out of 56 seats), the figures in
Peninsular Malaysia showed a drastic dilution of its supposed multi-ethnic appeal –
only 85 out of 165 parliamentary seats (51.5 percent) went to Barisan Nasional.
Equally groundbreaking, several veteran and illustrious leaders of the ethnic-
based political parties of Barisan Nasional (notably from the Malaysian Indian
Congress and Gerakan) lost their seats to Opposition neophytes and unknown
newcomers.4 Perhaps most significant of all, voters in five out of thirteen states
(Penang, Perak, Selangor, Kelantan and Kedah) and the Federal Territory of Kuala
Lumpur gave the mandate to rule to the Opposition coalition, birthing an uncharted
political landscape for Malaysian citizens to countenance and navigate in the
years ahead.
Rather than discuss the ramifications of the poll results, I confine myself to
highlighting some of the many creative and subversive ways in which different
kinds of media were deployed during the election campaign period in keeping
with the overall theme of this volume. They offer a clear instance of how
the media matter in fomenting alternative imaginaries and contesting cultural
maps of meanings to Malaysian society at large, and in the process engender
shifts in dominant power relations. To explain the strong performance of the
Barisan Nasional in the 2004 General Elections, analysts have conventionally
put forward the notion of a “feel good” factor towards a new premier whose
 Introduction 13
supposedly more accommodating personality contrasted sharply from his prede-
cessor, Mahathir Mohamad. Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s famous election slogan
of “work with me, not for me” was arduously promoted during and after the
campaign period by the mainstream media (e.g., see Mustafa K. Anuar, Chapter 2
this volume). In the 2008 General Elections, however, his iconic appeal was
noticeably muted. Presumably, the ruling coalition media strategists reasoned
that this marketing approach would appear incredulous in the face of a succession
of high profile incidents which opposition parties had pin-pointed to the PM’s
ineffective leadership and apparent inability to deliver his optimistic election
promises of four years earlier. The litany of discontent and allegations was as
broad as it was deep. It ranged from a seriously compromised judiciary, corruption
in high places, and sexual indiscretions involving senior political leaders to the
intrusive effects of triumphant Malay-Muslim ethno-nationalism, and human
rights violations of the freedom of assembly at peaceful demonstrations and protest
rallies. Cutting through these fractious concerns was widespread and deepening
dissatisfaction over spiraling costs of living which the ruling government seemed
unable to redress effectively. Not finding the details of these allegations aired,
much less debated, in the mainstream media, many turned to the “new” media to
whet their appetite.
During the campaigning period of the 2008 General Elections, communicational
warfare was intense. Indeed, both sides showed a keen and sophisticated
appreciation of the utility of deploying the full range of media in dictating the
terms of political debate and influencing public perception. However, as already
intimated by several contributors in this volume, the access to equitable media
coverage of their respective campaigns was lopsided. Candidates of the ruling
coalition enjoyed extensive positive reporting in addition to glowing political
advertisements in the mainstream print and broadcasting media. Opposition
party candidates, by contrast, had to rely largely on mobilizing the goodwill
of volunteers in distributing printed materials by hand to the electorate, which
combined generic party slogans and manifestoes printed on quality paper to more
modest photocopied leaflets bearing anecdotes and robust messages (including
caricatures) contextualizing local concerns and grievances. Out on the public
streets, spatial warfare was waged through a creative interplay between texts,
images, color and aesthetics. Because of limited resources, Opposition party
volunteers opted to concentrate their efforts at displaying their party posters,
banners, buntings, and streamers at strategic and vantage points along busy public
roads rather than compete with Barisan Nasional in blanketing an entire locality
with these materials.
To substantiate their presence, the daily schedules of opposition candidates also
included “walkabouts” to an array of public spaces – markets, shopping complexes,
food courts, places of worship, etc. – and to dwelling places – urban kampungs
(villages) high-rise flats, etc. – for brief face-to-face encounters. Evenings were
devoted to attending social functions and giving fiery and entertaining public
ceramahs (“public lectures”) held in open spaces (children’s playgrounds, car
parks, recreational fields, etc.) spatially scattered throughout their constituencies.
14 Yeoh Seng Guan
To draw in and engage the crowds, a common strategy deployed was to project
onto makeshift screens eye-witness video recordings of the iconic public rallies
of Bersih5 and Hindraf 6 held a few months earlier and of more recent ceramahs
given by Anwar Ibrahim. Some speakers turned to the aid of Powerpoint software
to enlighten their audience on the litany of woes of the country under the incumbent
leadership with a mixture of texts and images.
Opposition candidates in urban constituencies supplemented their hectic daily
schedules with the use of websites and/or blogs to declare their respective mission
statements, provide updates of daily schedules, upload photos and video recordings
of their activities (e.g., ceramahs, walkabouts) and post critical commentaries on
their opponents’ utterances. A few well-known Opposition incumbents simply
continued on with their entries on their “political blogs” started years earlier.7
Free communicational and social networking internet sites like Flickr, You-tube
and Facebook that could not be easily tampered by hackers were particularly
useful additional avenues for the posting of videos and messages not reached
via ceramahs and walkabouts. Popular with many viewers were materials that
combined artistic and musical elements with political satire to lampoon high
ranking leaders of the ruling coalition through songs, jokes, cartoons and mock
Hollywood posters.8 Whereever possible, abridged versions were disseminated
via the cellular hand phone, arguably the single most significant device of mobile
technological convergence deployed during the General Elections of 2008. They
tangibly linked and bound together individuals and groups in personalized and
collective ways through constant updates.
Political parties did not have the monopoly on electoral campaigning. Numerous
individuals and civil society groups also took the initiative to engage and educate
the Malaysian public on what was at stake in the 12th General Election. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that many members of the public downloaded, made copies,
and distributed at their own expense video interviews of candidates and politicians
posted on Malaysiakini to those without access to the internet. Together with
established social reform group, Aliran, the Centre of Independent Journalism
(Sonia Randhawa and V. Gayathry, this volume) monitored the mainstream media
for bias in reporting. Pusat Komas (Khoo Gaik Cheng, this volume) produced
docu-drama VCDs and educational booklets on the importance of voting and what
irregularities to look out for on polling day. A cohort of well-known performing
artists and cultural workers produced and publicized a communiqué endorsing a
well-known human rights lawyer standing for the Parliamentary seat of Subang
(cf. Langenbach, this volume). The Women’s Candidate Initiative (WCI) adopted
a more youthful and playful strategy, creating a fictional, non-partisan, larger-than-
life persona, Mak Bedah, to quiz both Barisan Nasional and Opposition candidates
on their policies toward gender issues.9
On polling day, the hand phone was again indispensable in facilitating timely
and contrapuntal informational flow. A few hours before the close of polling,
text messages alleging electoral fraud in several key constituencies contested by
the incumbent political leaders were disseminated en masse galvanizing many to
go to the polling centres to make their electoral voices count. Within an hour or
 Introduction 15
two of the close of polling at 5 pm, counting agents stationed at the scores of
polling centers were able to text message their local results to their respective
operations room for collation and onward dissemination up the chain of command.
As information streamed in from the individual constituencies across the country
and then relayed outwards like an expanding net, the onslaught and extent of the
“political tsunami” was already evident to its recipients hours before the results
were officially announced via live coverage on radio and television. Indeed, for
those with simultaneous access to both “old” and “new” media, the time lag
and informational discordance between what were mediated on state-controlled
television and the internet/handphone was instructive.
Practitioners of “new media” were quick to credit this vehicle as instrumental
in ushering in the new political landscape, especially with its high penetration rate
among the semi-urban and urban voters.10 More specifically, although a familiar
tactic for political activists in Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea, the cellular
phone was specifically attributed in mobilizing public opinion and bridging
the political informational flow between urban and rural electorate. A decade
earlier, during the Reformasi uprising, the portability of alternative news to the
rural Malay heartland was more circuitous. They were downloaded from the
internet, photocopied and mailed or brought back home for further replication and
dissemination. A few weeks after the polling results, Premier Abdullah Ahmad
Badawi acknowledged that the ruling coalition had underestimated the impact of
“new media” in ushering “new politics” at the 12th General Election. There were
calls within the media establishment to review editorial policies in the government-
run broadcasting and government-controlled print media in order not to lose more
credibility with the Malaysian public.
What the 12th Malaysian General Elections episode arguably manifests in a
condensed, combative and liminal form are some of the themes that are centrally
addressed in this volume, namely, the significance of the media of different forms
and range in the cultural production and of contestations of social power in
contemporary Malaysian society. By adopting a Janus-face approach in examining
their varied appropriation and use, we derive a fuller appreciation of how they
address and transform the diverse and contesting publics that constitute Malaysian
society today.

Notes
1 In 2005, Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) ranked Malaysia 113th out of 167 countries
surveyed in its Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Washington-based Freedom House
has also its own ranking for press freedom. In 2006, Malaysia was placed 150 out
of a total of 195. See also “Freedom of Speech and Expression” in Malaysia Human
Rights Report 2006 published by human rights watchdog NGO, Suaram, for more
details.
2 When the Malaysian government launched the Multimedia Super Corridor in the
mid-1990s, assurance was given that the internet would be free from censorship.
However, punitive actions in the offline world on thriving online media have hollowed
out this stance. For instance, for its robust independent reporting, the online newspaper,
16 Yeoh Seng Guan
Malaysiakini, has been faced with several threats of reprisals over the years for touching
on “sensitive” issues like Malay privileges and race relations. In early 2003, its office had
been raided by the police, and several computers and servers confiscated after a report
was launched by the youth wing of UMNO, the dominant partner of the ruling coalition.
After two years of investigation, the police closed the case without any charges. In
the blogsphere, several well-known local-based bloggers have been questioned by the
police authorities for allowing “seditious” and “defamatory” contents to be posted. In
April 2007, bloggers decided to form a National Alliance of Bloggers (All-Blogs) to
protect their interests in response to government proposals to register all blogs in the
country for better control.
3 See Sunday Star, 9 March, 2008.
4 One of those elected into state politics was well-known blogger, Jeff Ooi, the founder
of the portal USJ.com.my discussed in this volume (Postill, this volume).
5 Refer to http://bersih.org for details.
6 Refer to http://hindraf.org for details.
7 Notably http://blog.limkitsiang.com and http://teresakok.com. See also http://
anwaribrahimblog.com.
8 For instance, refer to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxxGhvCH0jo.
9 See http://www.kakiseni.com/articles/reviews/MTI4Ng.html#top and http://www.
wci2.org/index.php/who-is-mak-bedah.
10 For instance, see “Virtual connection to election news”, Malaysiakini.com, 19 March,
2008, file:///G:/Dissent%20Book/Virtual%20connection%20to%20election%20news.
htm. Accessed on 20 March, 2008.

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