Asia Digital Life Podcast

In Indonesia, innovative companies have reinvented on-demand car-hailing services for the local culture. Smartphone apps from Go-Jek and GrabBike can instantly summon a uniformed motorbike taxi driver, traditionally known as "ojek." But some independent ojek drivers are unhappy about the new services, and the clash between tradition and innovation in Jakarta has recently begun spilling out into the streets with banners, bullying, and even fistfights. Host Patrick Sharbaugh talks with Jakarta...

Last week, a viral video of a Chinese couple having sex in a Uniqlo store fitting room in Beijing played into hyperbolic media reports that new mobile dating apps, such as Momo, are fueling a casual hookup culture there -- and even that they’re bringing on a sexual revolution among China’s youth. Fact? Or merely highly clickable headlines? Researcher Dino Ge Zhang looks at how Chinese people are actually using Momo and similar dating apps, and finds a rather different story.

In this episode of the Asia Digital Life Podcast, Patrick Sharbaugh speaks with Hasit Shah, a former producer for BBC News and now a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. At Harvard, Shah has received a grant from the Knight Foundation's Prototype Fund to use the principles of human-centered design in developing an innovative new mobile news platform for India that takes its inspiration from comic books. He's also been researching the impact of the rapidly rising...

Lifestyle blogging is big business in Singapore, where hundreds of online influencers in the city state are reshaping brand marketing and carving out an entirely new professional niche for social-media savvy youth. Top influencers can earn hundreds of thousands through corporate sponsorships and brand endorsements. And all it takes is an Instagram account and a fetish for selfies. Patrick Sharbaugh talks with digital anthropologist Crystal Abidin about the booming online influence industry...

The Japanese are among the heaviest users of Twitter in the world. It's not uncommon for a Japanese user to have as many as a dozen different Twitter accounts, and to maintain a different identity on each. Unlike other East Asian nations, Japan embraces and celebrates online anonymity. In this week’s Asia Digital Life podcast, I try to unravel Japan’s singular stance toward online identity with Atsuyoshi Ishizumi, a Senior Research Executive at Japanese market research firm Flamingo Tokyo.

While pro-democracy protests continue to grip the streets of Hong Kong, the struggle has also been playing out on social media there. Australia-based researcher Crystal Abidin followed the #OccupyCentral hashtag on Instagram for three days at the start of the protests and discovered some fascinating themes that provide unique insight into the protest and those participating in it.

Since 2003 China Digital Times has been tracking Internet culture in China and aggregating content that has been censored or blocked in Chinese cyberspace. In this podcast, I talk with CDT translations editor Anne Henochowicz about Chinese netizens' use of homonyms, memes, and satire to tweak censors and why a brand of instant noodles there has become a proxy for talking about political corruption.

For the fifth Asian Digital Life podcast, Patrick Sharbaugh sits down with Jillian York, the EFF's Director for International Freedom of Expression, for a conversation that ranges across Vietnam's new strategy for targeting the Facebook pages of dissidents, the challenge of what constitutes online hate speech in newly open Myanmar, and how Asian nations are appropriating the U.S. and U.K.'s strategy of using "cybercrime" laws to quash other kinds of online expression.