Malaysia's electoral “tsunami” in March 2008 lofted the Internet to prominence alongside the newly potent opposition. It was the panoply of alternative Web sites, blogs, and online publications, observers suggested, that granted challengers the mobilizational edge they needed. Such claims beg a critical reevaluation of the communications landscape, online and otherwise, in Malaysia and its institutionally comparable neighbors. Two recent titles venture such efforts, albeit from distinct vantage points. Glen Lewis's Virtual Thailand: The Media and Cultural Politics in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore homes in on cultural politics at the confluence of globalization and media, while Cherian George's Contentious Journalism: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore explores online alternative journalism as a social movement with democratizing potential. While seemingly written for different audiences—Lewis's book is more a work in communications, George's in political sociology—both add nuance to a still new, complex field.

Lewis paints with a broader brush than George. He styles his ambit as “the role of communications and the media in democratization and cultural change in mainland Southeast Asia, meaning primarily Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore” (p. 1), though most of the work is on dimensions of media globalization (defined in terms of cross-border linkages) in Thailand. (Malaysia and Singapore are rarely considered to be part of mainland Southeast Asia—though Thailand's poorer neighbors to the north, with which Lewis also deals, clearly are.) A more tightly managed scope might have served Lewis better; his grasp of finer details and political subtleties is far greater for Thailand than for his other cases, and, as suggested by the notably ambivalent title and Singapore and Malaysia's retreat to the background as the book progresses, the latter cases are relatively tangential. Odd gaps in the literature cited on Malaysia and Singapore (e.g., works by the likes of Francis Loh and Garry Rodan) and the lack of the sort of critical reading of official pronouncements and mainstream interpretations that Lewis offers for Thailand make his secondary cases far less useful. Unfortunate, frequent errors in the names or specifics of Malaysian and, to a lesser extent, Singaporean, people and places—suggesting both unfamiliarity and distressingly poor copyediting—only add to this sense of imbalance. More important to his argument, the comparative dimensions of the study introduce unresolved incongruities. For instance, it is not clear why Thai media needed to create moral panics (a substantial focus of the study), whereas Singapore's did not, when the “quite real threats” that Singapore faced would seem largely to have been common to both states—and his discussion of moral panics in Malaysia weaves through a host of hazily connected concerns, both of the government and of its critics.

These complaints aside, Lewis offers an intriguing investigation into “virtual Thailand,” which is used as a metaphor to highlight the ambiguities of international claims and ambitious self-promotion. Communications regionalism, in this account, lies at the nexus of national security, cross-border flows of cultures and people, and business. Lewis traces the development of new public and private communications initiatives in each country: complex narratives of regulatory frameworks, ownership patterns, censorship regimes, and more. Indeed, the initial chapters may include more obscure details—and may drift further into larger tales of labor migration and regional growth patterns—than really germane. (Lewis prevaricates, too, between a focus on telecommunications broadly and on media specifically; his forays into cell phones and landlines, for instance, add little to the thesis.) Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, he argues, all have had ambitions since at least the 1990s to be regional growth centers and media hubs; even though Singapore has led the drive to become high tech and wired, Lewis offers a somewhat tortured justification for Thailand as the “regional centre of mainland Southeast Asia.” Driving all three states' information technology policies are more a new form of economic “techno-nationalism” than movement toward a “borderless world,” however tied in to the global economy each may be. Moreover, rather than laud the market, Lewis reveals an apparent preference for state-directed IT and telecoms development—nor does he overplay the democratizing potential of media. Indeed, Lewis usefully situates Thaksin's forging of a new, less democratic “media order” within a broader reordering of Thai society after his victory in 2001, suggesting the reverse causal pattern. Even here, though, it is not clear whether private capital, Thaksin, or the army bears primary responsibility for the media's problems, or what priority media manipulation enjoyed among state law and order campaign strategies.

Likely to be of particular value for communications and media scholars are details here on less frequently touted dimensions such as the short-lived rise of progressive community radio starting in the late 1990s, as reformists were increasingly shut out of mainstream broadcast media, or of tourism promotion materials as part of a broader media landscape. (His discussions of how mass tourism distorts collective memory, or of how films embody Thais' difficulty coping with postmodernity, though, do not really seem to fit.) Overall, Lewis's book would have benefited from more stringent editing to draw out a clear analytical logic. Amid poorly integrated, sometimes repetitive or disorganized details, Lewis tends to lose the plot of how media control or resistance changes political dynamics, while the intriguing juxtaposition of media as business versus as discursive and political field is too shakily articulated. Indeed, he concludes by arguing for the relative success of Thai campaigns for media reform as part of a domestic push for democratization—yet a clear preponderance of the preceding analysis seems at best tangential, if not directly contrary, to this finding.

If Lewis is overly expansive in his framing, George is the opposite. Rather, the former journalist offers a tightly woven, theoretically rich, but decidedly narrow account of the rise of politically relevant, online alternative media in Malaysia and Singapore. The book engages usefully with both social movement and media studies in proposing a genre of “contentious journalism.” Explicit in its application and extension of McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's “contentious politics” framework, the book makes a real contribution to that literature in exploring a subset of journalists as key players, with unique advantages, in contentious episodes. Where Lewis focuses on how states control the concrete tools of communications, George shifts the gaze to discourse and resistance. He starts with the premise that political control in both Singapore and Malaysia is consciously not overly coercive, but sustained in large part by such subtle means as limiting popular exposure to innovative possibilities and interpretations through regulation of media content and access. Contentious journalism subverts that project by directly, explicitly “challenging the consensus that powerful interests try to shape and sustain through the mainstream media” (p. 3). Guiding George's comparative approach is a seeming “participation/penetration paradox”: Singapore has clear technological superiority, yet Malaysia has more vibrant online contentious journalism. In both, though, given all the reasons Lewis also details, mainstream print and broadcast media offer less space for critical engagement than do online counterparts. Hence, George sets out to explore “how technology can be used to democratize public discourse” (p. 4).

George is careful not to oversell the regime-changing power of the Internet. Indeed, he frames his theoretical objective specifically in terms of changing understandings of the Internet and encouraging scholars to heed local sociopolitical context in evaluating the impact of new communications technologies. Such attention readily reveals that Malaysia's eschewal of online censorship should not be seen as a harbinger of liberalization of politics or even just the media. Given both states' concern to woo high-tech investors and the availability of open-minded, technopreneurial elites with significant clout over online media, censorship is limited—more formally in Malaysia than Singapore, though actual practice is comparable. Yet even if online journalists face few prior restraints on expression, they remain vulnerable to politically motivated post hoc reprisal. Moreover, neither all online nor all “alternative” media qualify as “contentious”; what defines alternative media are their “emancipatory missions” and structural positions, regardless of how public or state-engaging their ambitions. Nor are contentious journalists only to be found online, even if political opportunities shunt most to the Internet.

The study begins with an extended, but readily approachable, discussion of the theoretical and empirical setting, from the state of play in Singapore and Malaysia to the nature of the Internet as a communications medium. George then offers four case studies: Sintercom (Singapore Internet Community) and the cross-platform Think Centre in Singapore, and in Malaysia, HarakahDaily (an online publication of Parti Islam seMalaysia) and the Web-based news site Malaysiakini. These cases, he suggests together cover an especially wide range of possibilities for the organization, operations, and foci of contentious journalism since at least the late 1990s; looking at them over time, too, offers evidence of how both the architecture and the idealism of the Internet have changed since the technology went public in the mid-1990s. The volume concludes with a systematic discussion of contentious media and a cogent argument for media diversity as prelude and buttress to democracy.

Sintercom is composed of open, informal, organic networks; the Think Centre combines advocacy with journalism; HarakahDaily is a public party organ; and Malaysiakini approximates a mainstream media organization, albeit with a more activist bent (and very limited resources). For all four groups, though, online media represent not an escape from the polity, but social capital-generating facilitators of “Internet-assisted mobilization”—in all four cases (but not inevitably) with a pro-democratic bent. The range represented here allows George to examine the “movement-like qualities” of contentious journalism through a political process approach (focusing on opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framing), as well as the ways in which contentious journalists tie their online efforts to a “broader offline strategy” (p. 17). At the same time, the variation here is necessarily limited; one wonders whether the empirical evidence is adequate to allow generalization—particularly of the inverse relationship George notes between technological penetration and intensity of contentious online participation (traced to Malaysia's comparatively “broader political society and thicker civil society”). Moreover, as George notes, all he describes in terms of space and allies could come to seem anachronistic as Internet usage grows ever more commonplace.

Taken together, George's and Lewis's books dovetail at points, but operate largely on different planes. George gives short shrift, for instance, to the issues of regionalization so central to Lewis's analysis. Lewis, for his part, puts mainstream media, including the full array of “telecommunications,” front and center; the Internet—and alternative media more broadly—is less central to his narrative. Moreover, while state strategies offer the backdrop to both accounts, Lewis focuses more on the state side of the coin, and George on how activists subvert those strategies. Finally, there is the quality of the work itself. George presents a coherent, provocative, theory-building narrative; Lewis's analysis wanders unsteadily and unevenly. Scholars of communications or of Thailand will still enjoy the latter work, but only George's is likely to be of interest outside the ranks of area specialists or among students of politics, regardless of disciplinary perspective. Ultimately, though, both authors posit some degree of change, driven in part by the quest for an autonomous public sphere. Lewis finds promise in quests for press freedom, while George insists that with their control over information and opinions diminished, both Malaysia and Singapore have had to become more overtly coercive, signaling “strains on their hegemony” from which he seems to take heart.