8 - ASEAN and ICT: A Tale of Two Cities?

Summary

The story of ASEAN and ICT may well be a tale of two ASEANs — the “Young ASEAN” and the “Official ASEAN”.

Young ASEAN is comprised of “digital natives” — tech-savvy, digitally-nimble, and multi-tasking individuals who are fluent in digital devices and the Internet. Official ASEAN, on the other hand, is composed of “digital immigrants” who are learning to adapt to their new environment but still “retain, to some degree, their ‘accent,’ that is, their foot in the past”.

The Young ASEAN

The youth of Southeast Asia are at the forefront of the global social network revolution. In the first quarter of 2011, there were an estimated 131.3 million Facebook (FB) users in Asia. The top five countries in Asia in terms of FB users are Indonesia (35.2 million), India (23 million), the Philippines (22.4 million), Malaysia (10.1 million), and Taiwan (9.1 million). A recent study showed that the Philippines posted the highest FB penetration rate across the globe, making Filipinos “the world's heaviest users of social media”. In fact, Asia is FB's fastestgrowing region. In the last two years, FB has seen 1,000 per cent growth in Malaysia and 4,000 per cent growth in Thailand (4,000 per cent!). As Patrick Winn notes, “As of 2010, the largest Facebook population outside America is no longer the United Kingdom. It's Indonesia, an archipelago where 80 per cent still lack Internet access.”

Young ASEAN is also at the forefront of Twitter use. A 2009 report revealed that two ASEAN countries are in the top twenty global list of those with the largest share of Twitter users. They are Indonesia (ranked 6th) and the Philippines (ranked 15th). In terms of Twitter activity, Indonesia is 6th (accounting for 2.3 per cent of the world's tweets), Singapore is 12th (with 0.88 per cent), the Philippines is 13th (with 0.85 per cent), and Malaysia is 18th (with 0.47 per cent). Young ASEAN is multi-taskers too.