Hybrid media in Asia:
The case for a cultural renaissance without advertising.

Lee Artz
Purdue University Calumet

Transnational media and contoured markets: Redefining Asian television and advertising. (2006) Amos Owen Thomas. New Dehli: Sage. ISBN 0-7619-3484-7 (paper).  $29.95

Chapter Two, “Mediating Globalization,” in Amos Owen Thomas’ new book is a gem and should be required reading for anyone concerned with globalization and consumer culture. Amos Thomas has cogently and clearly introduced the primary theoretical and practical contours of the convergence of transnational media and marketing and advertising. Combined with Appendix C, there may be no more balanced summary of the theoretical perspectives which criss-cross studies of international media, advertising, and marketing. The accompanying case studies and structured overview of media and advertising agency ownership in three regions India (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), Malay (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei), and China (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) will provide data useful to any theoretical perspective and allow Thomas the material necessary to make a case for redefining Asian television and advertising as a contested hybridity subject to economic, political, and social tensions within each nation.

The case study of the “metamorphosis” of Star TV from a “pan-Asian broadcaster to one that was more regional” illustrates Thomas’ empirical approach to understanding media hybridization (p. 44). He recounts the chronological phases of Star TV: Pan-Asian, begun by a Hong Kong family-owned “transnational” satellite broadcasting one signal across Asia; Regional, following purchase by Murdoch, a truly transnational media operator, with a “multi-domestic or even subregional” strategy of broadcasting with multiple footprints and regionally diverse programming (p. 49); Quasi-domestic, a thoroughly hybridized transnational phase, as Murdoch turned diverse domestic programming to reach the multiple cultures and languages of Asia., such as joint-ventures with ZeeTV in India to broadcast in Tamil, Hindi, and Arabic.

Subsequent chapters outline media and advertising ownership, state regulation, and audiences—lending valuable information on practices and tendencies within each region and demonstrating that transnationals successfully enter complex cultural arenas largely through joint ventures with established domestic partners, who are invariably economically and politically enmeshed with the nation-state.  Although the information is bountiful, frequent distancing from the political realities of the nation and culture should encourage readers and researchers to become better acquainted with the social histories of the regions. For example, Thomas presents—with no historically-instilled skepticism or irony—that the Indonesian “government progressively put in place a domestic commercial industry . . . [its] liberal policy towards transnational satellite broadcasts was related to its interest in attracting foreign investments to the country by demonstrating the openness of the society and its policies” (p. 83).  Granted the text is not intended as a political history of Asian nation-states—although Thomas offers cursory reference to nationalist struggles against the Dutch and implies some Cold War difficulties—he omits any acknowledgment of the 30-year Suharto dictatorship, U.S. financing and support to same, and global media complicity for the sake of market share. In its larger context, Indonesian nationalism was not primarily defense against Western media, but an ideological cover for repression against workers and ethnic minorities who had no interest in an Indonesian national identity. This deficiency in political contextualization is not repeated in the sections on China.

The data do not stand alone, unconsidered in this text. Thomas uses the conditions and relations of media and advertising as evidence in his larger narrative: transnational satellite broadcasters have successfully adapted to contrasting domestic markets. From the point-of-view of the domestic audiences, StarTV and other transnational broadcasters “have come to be perceived paradoxically as just another option for domestic advertising albeit to different degrees by each market. The ultimate impact of transnational television and advertising in Asia must surely be the ongoing blurring of the boundaries between [their] national, regional and global strategies” (p. 181).

In his concluding chapter, Thomas departs from his ecumenical approach to offer an assessment—which appears all the credible given his balanced appraisal in the previous eight chapters.  Thomas finds media hegemony, understood as “alliances and conglomerates,” to be most accurate, because in Asia “transnational television has not only eroded government control over the broadcast media but drawn domestic commercial and even public broadcasters into the competitive arena of the global media industry” (p. 182). In other words, transnationals have not bullied their way in, they have not overwhelmed with Western commercial programming, but instead successfully “engaged [Asian media], not only economically as joint venture and strategic alliance partners, but also culturally as buyers, providers and users of ‘glocalized’ programming” (p. 182).  Thomas makes the case for a more concretized understanding of “hybridity,” not as primarily a defense of domestic culture, but as a characteristic of “the process of converting them into markets for global products” (p. 183).  Hybridity is not the progressive appropriation of Western programming for national cultural use, because although in Asia “the liberalization of media content via the availability of transnational media has not resulted in an avalanche of strictly global commercials in the domestic media. More often than not, international advertising agencies have appropriated local cultural symbols in their successful promotion of global, regional or multi-domestic products via their television commercials on domestically accessible media” (p. 184). Triumphalists or culturalists who hope to insist on hybridity as cultural resistance may have brief responses to the wealth of evidence that a theoretically-appreciative Thomas has gleaned from case studies across Asia. In the end, Thomas values and even desires hybridity—those with “innovation, cultural renaissance and creative excellence” that represent the best of all media (p. 198). Thomas analysis of transnational media, marketing, and advertising in their Asian contours may be considered an example: a scholarly, innovative and creative hybrid.

 Return to Book Review List | Return to Top of Book Review