No amount of help will ever be enough, but any help will do. We need to help our Indian community progress faster. How much has the New Economic Policy (NEP) helped the Indians? What then must all of us do? There is still too much infighting and problems of succession amongst the Indian Malaysians. Power is concentrated in the hands of the few. There is no evidence of transformative leadership. There is the ethos of overstaying one's welcome and not giving enough room for younger, brighter, more ethical and energetic leadership to emerge. These 'fights' must stop for the sanity of Malaysians in general.
A revolution is needed in the minds of the Indians. The revolution must be translated into praxis. Had all the warring factions of the Indian leadership spent less time arguing and torching newspapers and started reading what the chapters of the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of the Lord) said about greed, lust, power, the divine and the demonic self - the Indian population in the long run would be better off.
There is so much wisdom in this timeless text of the Bhagavad Gita that it can also be used to engineer profound social changes based on the philosophy of self-help/participatory democracy in the Indian community. There is the potential of embracing the philosophy of 'kampongism' - one that prioritises pastoralism and participatory democracy over profit-driven and parochial demono-cracy.
Multicultural marhaenism
It is time for the other races to engage in serious and sincere gotong-royong to help the poorest of the poor amongst the Indians. It is time that we become possessed with a new spirit of multicultural marhaenism. The great Indonesian leader Ahmed Soekarno popularised the concept of marhaenism as an antidote to the ideological battle against materialism, colonialism, dependency and imperialism. The thought that the top 10 percent of the richest Malaysians are earning more than 20 times compared to the 90 percent of the population is terrifying. What has become of this nation that promised a just distribution of wealth at the onset of Independence?
I have a perspective to resolve the issue of the Indian community.
The Malays and the Chinese too need to help the Indians progress. Malay and Chinese multimillionaires and billionaires can set up grants to help the poor Indians succeed in all fields of human endeavour. The Malays can get MARA (Majlis Amanah Rakyat) to share ideas, expertise and technology to make Indian children succeed and learn entrepreneurship skills.
The same strategies of affirmative action given to the Malays must be extended to the Indians and designed for their children. The Chinese can help with sharing of good business strategies that will help the Indian community create opportunities for their children. Indian graduates can continue to help the children of the less fortunate ones see the importance of education so that we will not see high dropout rates. They can help initiate the establishment of good boarding schools ala Mara Junior Science College (MRSM) to help bright Indian children from poor families succeed. Indian millionaires and billionaires can help create as many philanthropic organisations as they can to offer financial help based on merit and needs. Malay and Chinese teachers can volunteer to be transferred to predominantly Indian schools in the estates in order to see for themselves how much help people of other races need.
Those 60,000 unemployed graduates need to be trained as teachers and sent to the most economically-depressed schools in order to learn what social justice means and how to help solve social problems irrespective of race, creed, colour and religious orientation. Education is a gentle and humane enterprise that ought to teach teachers to fight prejudice, intolerance and to educate each child as if the child is his/her own. Each child is a gift, a bundle of love and joy, a khalifatullah (vicegerent of God) and an opportunity for the teacher to develop his/her fullest potential. Poverty creates more children that will have less resources and more emotional stress. Poverty must be eradicated regardless of race, creed, ethnicity and national origin.
Not an Indian problem
It is not an Indian problem. It is problem of humanity. Poverty cuts across racial lines. It is now a class issue that requires class struggle. Poverty creates mass anger and can result in revolutions. How much longer must the Indians suffer? They have helped build this nation we now call Malaysia. Their work in the rubber plantations has helped Henry Ford expand his global empire and Proton to spin its wheels of fortune. We are shackled too much by greed. The conversation between Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra is not about a 'battle'. It is about a jihad and a crusade against the injustices of man against man, man against nature and man against himself.
Stop fighting - think of what we are fighting for? But first, understand what the Gita, Sutras, Ramayana, Mahabharatta, Quran, Bible, etc. say about fighting over wealth and power. We'll all be humbled and will soon discover that all these will be left behind, in a world structured as maya and samsara (sengsara as the Malays would term it). Our common enemy is greed, materialism, militarism and corruption. That's our Mahabharata - our great war!
Our common enemy is our insatiable urge to acquire arta (harta in Malay, wealth in English). We have been building structures of oppression and setting up international advisory panels to help us plunder the natives in the name of development and Vision 2020. We do not understand enough the meaning of "trickle down" in capitalism, as we continue to create wealth that trickles up and finally flown outside of the country into bank accounts in Switzerland and Cayman Islands. We then claim that we are nationalists when those things we do are for our self-interest and greed at the expense of the rural, urban and middle class poor struggling to make ends meet and not knowing who has been making their lives chaotic.
Help the poor
A reminder to the wealthy and powerful. Help develop the poor – especially those from the Indian community. Detach yourself from your wealth, as the Bhagavad Gita, Sutras, Quran, Bible, Granth Sahib, etc, would ask you to. The wealth that you have acquired is not yours - they are those of the children of the poor and of the orphaned.
You must learn what 'detachment from worldly possessions' means in the context of a cutthroat economic system like ours. It is time to understand how our lives are connected in a complex web of power, ideology, technology and consciousness.
Help restructure the lives of the poor before they help restructure the lives of the rich.
En route from Amsterdam to London for the Oxford Roundtable, on board a Boeing 737 on March 25, my mind scanned memories of my childhood as the plane ascended.
Memories of my beloved grandfather who died more than 20 years ago took shape in my "mind's eye", as Jungian psychologists would say.
Like Irish poet James Joyce's "stream of consciousness" these images played out like a slide-show at intervals of several minutes.
My grandfather, a bicycle-riding government messenger for the royal court of Sir Sultan Ibrahim, taught us how to make kites. Born in the British Military Hospital in Alexandra Road in Singapore and growing up in Kampong Melayu Majidee in the late 1960s, my activities included kite-making.
Grandfather would patiently and meticulously guide me through the process: how to cut bamboo, make the frame, carefully refine its shape with special paper, and finally put designs on it. He was a man, though without much material wealth, imbued with good 'ol Johorean ethics which he passed down to his children and grandchildren.
He was a man who wept for hours beside his radio-gram the day a man named Tun Abdul Razak died. Perhaps the Bugis blood in Grandfather saw the connection between the leader and the commoner in a time when life was not yet complicated - a time when you did not hear of murder cases involving C4 explosives. This was a time when the Internet was not yet supreme.
‘Sir’ Sultan Ibrahim, like ‘Sir’ Sultan Abu Bakar, were Malay knights of the British Empire as much as Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney are English knights.
The Malay knights had their own army - Askar Timbalan Setia - maintained with the taxpayer's money. Sir Ibrahim, reportedly one of the richest individuals in the world, did not believe that the Malays could govern themselves.
Why did the British inscribe foreign titles onto the ruler of natives thousands of miles from the centre of the colonial empire? Perhaps this was a strategy of psychological colonialism that went well with material and physical colonialism.
But knighthoods as hegemonic tools are no longer necessary these days. Installations of McDonalds and Starbucks, British-style boarding schools, American-style MARA Junior Science Colleges, and 100-channel Astro TVs from satellites owned by Malaysian billionaires are what a nation need to create little ‘sirs’ and ‘madams’, mad-dogs and Englishmen, or little brown Yankees who pay taxes in an international and hidden system of ‘taxation without representation’ of the post-colonial empires.
A good system of hegemony - from physical to the psychological, from inscriptions to institutions - is what is needed to give the natives their daily "bread and circus".
Colonialism is pervasive and cancerous. It is an ideology that legitimises colonisation, slavery, dependency, and imperialism. Different epochs of colonialism style themselves differently.
Colonialism shapes the mind and consciousness and turns the body into mini-temples of colonialism - turning what the Algerian thinker and psychiatrist Albert Memmi called "the colonised into becoming like the coloniser???, in taste, language and disposition.
Colonialism as process
The process of turning the colonised into colonisers is a complex yet discernible one. This is how is goes.
First, the Empire must study the resource-rich area to be colonised. Second, use power and knowledge to catalogue all aspects of the lives of the natives. Next, study the local chieftains, sultans, kapitan, rajah or any leader of the natives. Study their strengths and weaknesses by going into their psyche and the system of social dominance they have created to sustain their power. Next, know what these local leaders want and how to create more ‘wants’.
Patrol their waters in a display of military might. If possible, as in the historical account of Kota Batu (Qota Batoo) in the mid 1700s, use the word "terrorists" to describe the pirates of the Malacca Sultanate, and crush them in order to create more inroads into the area to be colonised.
Use "economic terms" to describe the areas to be colonised. For example, ‘Spice Islands’ (The Nusantara) ‘Cape Horn’ (Africa), Gold Coast (Africa) Ivory Coast (Africa), Silicon Valley (California), Multimedia Super Corridor (Malaysia) and the latest ‘Iskandar Development Region’ (Johor) and perhaps the Johor Disneyland, should it come into being to complement Singapore's casinos.
When these areas are earmarked for conquest, make early contact with warring factions in order to make alliances. Divide and conquer is the strategy - then, now, and forever. Create maps that will define who will own what. In politics it is called gerrymandering. Refine the map as colonies are created. The natives, including the sultan, rajah, kapitan and village chiefs will not understand maps as these artifacts of power are of a different literacy genre. The natives are used to literacy of the Oral tradition. Maps are of Print Literacy.
Even the concept of space and time between the coloniser and the colonised are different. It depends on the concept of ‘the clock’, alien to the natives. Technology of ‘time-telling’ and ‘time-keeping’ varies among nations. ‘Chronos’ is a subjective concept. Whoever controls the more modern concept of ‘chronos’ controls the means of defining which native is the laziest. It all boils down to the mode of production and reproduction. All this must be done with one's mastery of the political philosophy of Machiavelli.
Finally, when the natives are colonised, turn them into images of the coloniser through indoctrination, education and the ideology of consumerism. Write history for them or, in the case of Africa, get Hollywood to create Tarzan movies to be shown to Africans and to tell them why they cannot govern themselves. Let them learn that only the diamond dealer Cecil Rhodes can perform miracles for Africa such as calling a nation ‘Rhodesia’.
Back to the story of my kite. I cannot remember any other design I would make except one - the Union Jack! It was one of the most glorious feelings to ‘fly’ my Union Jack. That beautiful blue and red striped flag of a nation thousands of miles from where I live - a nation that I came to be obsessed with in my study of the human condition years later.
Mental colonisation
In the story of the boy with the ‘British’ kite, lies the archeology of knowledge, the geneology of things and the nature of "psychological inscriptions" we all subjected to as "cultural beings constructed out of the invented reality of others".
Herein lies the hegemony of colonialism of all sorts - shackles that the human mind wishes to be liberated from. In my case, the feeling of wanting to constantly analyse myself as that "culturally constructed??? being is always there - especially when my senses interact with the "installations and institutions" that exist around me, those that are "inscribed" onto the landscape and forces humanity to become "objects of history".
What makes one a "culturally-constructed" being?
What makes us become the colonialist, the colonised; the imperialist, the imperialised; the racist, the humanist; the nationalist, the communist; the democrat, the technocrat; the dictator, the freedom fighter? All these perceptions are contingent upon the way we see ourselves as ‘beings’ being constructed by history as written by others.
This is an interesting notion of history - that the history of an epoch is the history of the ruling class. But the age of the bloggers might change this notion and prove Marx wrong. History marches on - from Pax Brittanica, Pax Nipponica and Pax Americana to Pax Barisan Nasionalisma and Pax Malaysian Bloggeria.
Bloggers have nothing to lose except their free accounts and passwords.
How we evolve out of these constructions and contradiction is a more interesting notion of history - that history is an enterprise that must undergo deconstruction.
How do we interrogate ourselves as active beings reduced to become objects of history by those who write history - the history of sirs and sultans, of colonisers and their consorts?
"Therefore, the rakyat must unite and never raise issues regarding Malay rights and special privileges because it is quid pro quo in gratitude for the giving in of citizenship (beri-paksa kerakyatan) to 2.7 million non-Malays into the Tanah Melayu federation....Thus, it is not appropriate for these other ethnic groups to have citizenship, only (later) to seek equality and privileges," said Tengku Faris, who read from a 11-page prepared text.
As a Malaysian who believes in a social contract based on the notion that 'all Malaysians are created equal', I do not understand the 'royal statement'. I have a view on this.
If it comes from the Biro Tatanegara (BTN), I can understand the confusion. But this is from a royal house.
This statement was valid 50 years ago, before Independence. This is an outdated statement that is not appreciated by the children of those who have laboured for this nation.
I believe we should look forward to institutionalising 'special rights for all Malaysians'. The word 'special' is in itself special. Culturally it can either denote an enabling condition or a disabling one.
In the study of religion, one is bestowed a special place for living life well or for doing good deeds. In educational studies, 'special education' caters for the needs of those with a disabling physical, emotional or cognitive condition.
In all these, 'special rights' are accorded based on merit. One works hard to get special offers and into special places.
In the doctrine of the 'divine rights of kings', one's special right is the birthright. Louis XVI of revolutionary France, Shah Jehan of Taj Mahal fame, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, Shah Reza Pahlavi of Revolutionary Iran, King Bumiphol Adulyadev, and the sultans of Melaka were 'special people' who designed institutions that installed individuals based on rights sanctioned through a 'mandate of heaven'.
Such people use specialised language to differentiate who is special and who is not. Court language is archaic, terse, meant to instill fear and to institutionalise special-ness.
The language of the street or market is fluid, accommodating, meant to instill open-ness and institutionalise creativity at its best and further development of the 'underclass' at its worst.
This continuum of language, power, and ideology is characteristic of histories of nations. In Malay history, istana language is enshrined in the hikayat and in Tun Seri Lanang's Sejarah Melayu. Street language used in Malay folklore and in bawdy poems, pantun and stories of Sang Kancil.
Class consciousness, many a sociologist would say, dictates the special-ness of people across time and space. Historical-materialism necessitates the development of the specialised use and abuse of language. One can do a lot of things with words. Words can be deployed to create a sustainable and profitable master-slave relationship.
A better argument
Let us elevate the argument so that we will have a better view of what race, ethnicity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism means.
I propose we review what "special rights of the Malays" mean in light of 50 years of Independence and post-March 8, 2008.
I agree we must give credit to those working hard to "improve the psychological well-being of the Malays" and for that matter for any race to improve its mental wellness. This is important. This is a noble act.
The question is: in doing so, do we want to plant the seeds of cooperation and trust - or racial discrimination and deep hatred? Herein lies the difference between indoctrination and education.
These days, the idea of Ketuanan Melayu is going bankrupt, sinking with the bahtera merdeka. It works only for Malay robber barons who wish to plunder the nation by silencing the masses and using the ideological state apparatuses at their disposal.
In the case of the BTN it is the work of controlling the minds of the youth. Its work should not be allowed any more in our educational institutions. It is time our universities especially are spared counter-educational activities, especially when they yearn to be free of the shackles of domination.
Over decades, many millions of Malays and non-Malays have not been getting the right information on our nation's history, political-economy, and race relations. History that is being shoved into us or filter-funnelled down the labyrinth of our consciousness is one that is already packaged, biased, and propagandised by historians who became text-books writers.
History need not be Malay-centric. Special rights for all Malaysians should be the goal of distributive and regulative justice of this nation, not the "special rights of a few Malays". History must be presented as the history of the marginalised, the oppressed and the dispossessed of all races.
We toil for this nation, as the humanist Paramoedya Ananta Toer would say, by virtue of our existence as anak semua bangsa ... di bumi manusia. Malaysia is a land of immigrants.
In this regard we can learn from the former British colony called America. Whatever its shortcomings, it is a land of immigrants and is still evolving. A black man or a woman can become president. This is what America conceives itself to be and this is what Malaysian can learn from. Can a non-Malay become prime minster if he/she is the most ethical of all politicians in the country?
No one particular race should stake a claim to Malaysia. That is an idea from the old school of thought, fast being abandoned. Each citizen is born, bred, and brought to school to become a good law-abiding and productive Malaysian citizen, is accorded the fullest rights and privileges and will carry his/her responsibility as a good citizen.
That is what 'surrendering one's natural rights to the state' means. One must read Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, and Jefferson to understand this philosophy. A bad government will not honour this - and will fall, or will sink like the bahtera merdeka.
The history of civilisations provides enough examples of devastation and genocide as a consequence of violent claims to the right of this or that land based upon some idea of 'imagined communities'. We must teach our children to make a history of peace among nations. This must be made into a new school of thought: of 'new bumiputeraism' that encompasses all and does not alienate any. Life is too short for each generation to fight over greed.
The eleventh hour of human existence and our emergence in this world has brought about destruction as a consequence of our inability to mediate differences based on race, colour, creed, class and national origin. Each ethnic group thinks that it is more socially-dominant than the other. Each does not know the basis of its 'self'. Each fails to realise its DNA-make up or gene map.
Life is an existential state of beingness, so must history be conceived as such. Nationalism can evolve into a dangerous concept - that was what happened to Europe at the brink of the two World Wars. It happened in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and in Indonesia when Suharto fell.
I argue that we must evolve in the historical presence of historical constructions. The past and the future is in the present. Let us no argue any more over this or those rights. Let us instead treat each other right.
‘Fazilah (a researcher at Universiti Malaya), when contacted by malaysiakini (Nov 1, 2006), declined to comment on her research. …She also refused to entertain questions on the issue of bumiputera corporate equity ownership, saying that as a university staff, she has to comply with the 'Akujanji' (pledge of good conduct). …Under the 'Akujanji', academicians are barred from making media statements without prior approval from the university's authority. … The government has always maintained that the country has yet to achieve the 30 percent bumiputera equity ownership target.’
‘All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black nor does a black have any superiority over white except by piety and good action (from Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) Last Sermon, 9th Day of Dhual Hijjah).
The two quotes above respectively represent a fear and a hope.
We need to start living with the reality of open dialogue and leave behind the fear of speaking up in honour of intellectual freedom. The quote from Fazilah is a testament to the totalitarianism of the document of blind loyalty called the Surat Akujanji. Even PhD holders with good training in defending dissertations become fearful of those out to destroy the integrity and honour of the academicians. We must take control or be controlled, speak up or be silenced.
Now that the Asli report is out, what do we do with it? As the prophets of any religion would enjoin, how should we abolish all forms of superiority by way of economic design?
How do we get our academicians, activists, students, scholars, farmers, workers and even our rulers to read it, make informed judgment and act upon the recommendations that call for human solution to statistical problems?
How do we perceive it as a national test by first respecting the enterprise of the interpretation of data as yet another reminder to do periodic reality checks on the state of our political-economic well being?
Fertile area of research
How do our local scholars/academicians transform this seemingly controversial report from a document of denial into a fertile area of research into this Malaysian post-modern human condition?
Will our economists extend the Asli study into a more complex analysis of the interplay between Capital, Technology, Nature and Labour? Will our historians see it as good platform for the study of the interplay between the history of the ownership of private property and revisit our analysis of dialectical and historical materialism we left off in our planning of the New Economic Policy (NEP)?
Will our sociologists now answer the question of how we have gotten to this critical juncture in history in which the accumulation of wealth has produced more visible class structure in all spheres of living? How will our educators see the relationship between schooling and labour, education and class-ethnic stratification, or even how the NEP continues to maintain the tyranny of racism and racial discrimination?
How will our political scientists use the report to understand the need to revamp the structure of political consciousness and to affect political action through grassroots activism when the NEP is showing signs of ideological bankruptcy and a waning of affect?
How do our social scientists learn from the report so that they can train social workers to be ‘colour-blind’ especially in helping the Indians and other marginalised ethnic groups gain their dignity as respectable Malaysians who laboured as hard as the other races in building this country into what it is now?
We need a kaleidoscopic view of research; one that will give us a holistic picture of the NEP and next give us academicians the tools to denounce our 'neutrality' so that we may become like engaged artists who subscribe to the idea of committed art (in the service of the masses) rather than to the ideology of art for art's sake (in the service of the bourgeoisie).
But our academicians continue to traverse the road to serfdom, carrying their backpacks of self-imposed fear. We need to groom the Jean Paul Sartre and the Albert Camus among us.
What we need to do with the Asli report will be the intellectual task for our nation. This exercise should take us away from the increasingly fruitless and nauseating squabbling between the previous and the present prime ministers on the issue of whose family is amassing more wealth than the other. This debate is not adding value to our need to look at the NEP in newer perspective.
In fact, the Mahathir-Abdullah debate is only good for matters of ‘issue versus non-issue’ and for the clever design of ‘mystification’ - in the ultimate analysis, it creates a mental smog over the issue of alternative ways of looking at political, economic, social and cultural change.
Radical redesign
I have read the Asli report produced under the direction of Professor Lim Teck Ghee, an academician of high intellectualism and integrity. The report is an encouraging inquiry into the possibilities of social justice and radical economic desconstructionism and redesign.
There is a human face to the findings of the report. It confirms the perception that our politicians, especially the ones that went berserk/haywire after reading the findings, have not evolved much in their critical and intellectual sensibilities. Yet they still want to represent the people in public office. This is troubling. Hegemony lies in the rule of the blind but arrogant.
The Asli report is the kind of report and reporting we are used to in doctoral work in institutions such as Columbia Princeton, Stanford, Harvard or even Oxford - a place we now often hear as a model of Malaysia's emulation for ‘world class-ism’.
I see the possibilities of extending the inquiry and going into deeper analysis of the geneology, anatomy, post-structurality and possibilities of the NEP, using the language of neo-marxism and post-structuralism. Academicians should continue to comment on the Asli report and demand that the government explores the nature of poverty as it neatly and artificially create a new class of multi-cultural poor (immigrants and all), creating a powerful political elite that will devise strategies to protect their interest by buying over our universities and all academicians in them.
We should move towards a symbolic analysis of wealth and power and deconstruct these symbols both in their physical as well as in their symbolic manifestations. We should explore what the Japanese Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata would call "neo-sensualism" in the way we compose the portrait of progress and its contradictions.
So, what next after the Asli report? How do we reflect upon the findings? How do we enrich the data and design cumulative studies that will explain why are how we have arrived at a juncture where political ethics seem to be worsening as economic power of the bumiputera and non-bumiputeras continue to be concentrated on the few.
The acronym ‘Asli’ tells us something. Its means ‘original’ (in Bahasa Melayu) or the real things in its original state, of Man/Human Being in its Natural state of things.
This means that the Asli report is inviting us, like Jean Jacques Rousseau did in his essay ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, to go back to the natural state of things.
What this means is a challenge for us all - academicians, students, scholars, tinkers, tailors, soldier, spies, politicians - and all Malaysian who were made to believe that poverty will be restructured and wealth equitably shared.
Fellow academicians wake up! The greatest enemy of fear is fear itself. We must become the organic intellectuals the rakyat is waiting for.
From Srivijaya to Cyberjaya: Thoughts on the cultural impact of computer-mediated technologies on schooling in Malaysia and preliminary propositions for a Theory of "Cybernating Nations"
by Azly Rahman
In the following passages, structured as a reflective essay, I will discuss the following ideas:
a) prologue; being on the relationship between culture and technology
b) the relationship between historical-materialism and literacy
c) operational definition of "Cyberspace"
d) relationship between the concept of schooling in Malaysia's Cyberjaya
e) some propositions concerning the development of "cybernated" nation-states
The relationship and interplay between culture and technology has been and continue to be a paradoxical one; on the one hand culture as it is taken to be a system of variegated meanings which coerce and chaotize peoples, and technology, on the other which rationalize and open up new horizons of more systematization of cultural psyche are both mirror images of materiality and ideology. Embalmed within this proposed set of relationships is the classic proposition in modern-day capitalist thought that the fruits of technological and material advancement will "trickle-down" to the masses . I believe we are to rigorously explore these that interplay for us to arrive at an understanding of not only the political-economic, but also the post-structurality of the phenomena of technological change in transcultural settings.
By "political economic" I mean the close relationship between the forces of decision making with the forces of material production and by "post-structurality" I mean the complexity of phenomena can analyze beyond the Structural-Functionalist or the neo-Marxist paradigms. We begin with these questions: At what point does culture cease to become imaginative and become a system of control in its entirety?, And when does technology cease to be shackles of human consciousness and become horizons of the possible, or to inhabit the futuristic meadows of cultural creation? These are paradoxical questions with inherent contradictions when we speak of the aesthetics of technology and the virtuality or even the spirituality of machines when we frame the question of looking at technology from the lens of materiality as well as imaginative virtualities. The discussions which follow is not an attempt to be a fully structured essay as I feel that this will be rather limiting in terms of addressing some of my thoughts on the interplay between technology ,culture, and education from post-Industrial development bringing in Malaysia as a case in point.
True to the spirit of it as being reflective moments which somewhat will capture some of my cumulative thoughts concerning the development of nation-states, I have thus loosely structure it. I have attempted to treat it as a piece of writing in the tradition of James Joyce's stream of consciousness which address primarily the question of how the definition of literacy is taking a technological dimension and one in which I am exploring from the perspective proposed by McDermott and Varenne (1995) in which they wrote that " the concept of culture has always had a utility to those with a sense for patterns in the work people do in organizing their lives together" (p.344). Though the authors' analysis primarily focus on the culture of literacy and schooling in the United States, contextualized in the discussion of "culture as disability' in general, I believe the analysis is relevant at the international perspective. I read the proposition above as one which can be appropriately applied to any discussion on technological culture as defined by current trends in cybernetics as they are, as further defined as "new literacies", as a disabling factor on a grander scale. By this I mean the way computer literacy is defined as the literacy of the Information Age and how this consciousness (superstructure, ideology, whatever one may call it) is a juxtaposition of the material development and infrastructural arrangement of the culture in question.
My example of Malaysia as a "cybernating nation" as I call it and how its historical-materialistic development is a case in point of how the new meaning of literacy is extended even to the transformation of the entire nation based on computer-mediated communication technologies. Marx writes about the idea of humans making their own history under existing circumstances based upon the material life they live. By producing their means of subsistence, they are indirectly producing their actual material life, goes the Marxist conception of historical materialism. And later Gramsci wrote of the "common sensical" aspect of the adoption of the ideas of the ruling class by those ruled, when a particular innovation in technology becomes "hegemonic". Hence the idea of technological/digital literacy in this age of computer-mediated communication technologies, becomes a "hegemonized" idea non-conspiratorially produced by those who owns the means of production.
Historical-materialism and Literacy
Pure historical materialists might argue that human beings produce their actual material life by producing their means of subsistence. Ideology emerge as a natural progression of the need to maintain the class distinction and hence to rationalize and to order society into one emblematic of the capitalist formation and formulation. And at every epoch, according to this Hegelian view of social movement and transformation, the ruling class maintains their control over productive forces via the control of the means of intellectual production. There are limitations to this analysis nonetheless. If intellectual means of production can be equated with the idea of literacy, then at every epoch and historical march of Capital --- at every notch carved by the logic of capitalism --- the idea of literacy is shaped by the notion of how this definition "disables" culture. By this I mean, the notion of control exercised by those who owns the means to produce Oral, Print, and next, Digital definitions of literacy so much so that at every juncture of historical materialistic progress those who are enabled are the ones who are in "deep play" with the notion of literacy and those disabled are those who are outside of the pre-defined system of literacy.
McDermott and Varenne (1995) writes about the disabling tendency of culture in which definitions and conceptions of what it means to be cultural, be it from the Oral, Print, and Cybernetic traditions might also mean to be included and excluded from the democratic lives. I read this notion of culture as disability as a radical way of looking at what it means to be literate in this so-called Age of Information and primarily from the point of view of schooling in a technological society, this dimension of disability can be extended as an analysis if we look at education as a means to define the level of development of a particular society as defined by those who owns the means of global production. My interest in this inquiry particularly is to look at and to describe how nations "cybernate". In the process of moving towards a definition of a "cybernating nation" following the road most taken by those which have historically developed and via the philology, ideology, and semanticity of how these nations define "development", how might technological advancement become enabling or disabling? How are the productive forces of the society organized with regard to schooling as mass reproduction and as a means of harnessing human capital? Cui bono? Or who benefits? And what gets enculturalized for what purpose? These are essentially the questions, framed from the perspective of Critical Theory, which interest me and of which I find appropriate as a framework of inquiry into the impact of new technologies on peoples, societies, nations, etc. In this inquiry, I am taking Malaysia as an example of a nation-state and as a unit of analysis of how the evolution of literacy accentuate the question of base and superstructure of the culture and society and how, next, the notion of radical cultural reengineering is shaped as agenda instead as shaped by historical-materialistic forces.
For this notion of literacy, instructive are Conklin's (1949) work on the poetics of literacy, termed as "bamboo literacy" of the Mindoro and of those in Southeast Asia as exemplified by the complexity and aesthetics and systematicity of the writings systems of the people of the region (Kupers & McDermott, 1996.) These findings point to the idea of the primacy of the Print tradition in defining the intellectual tradition of pre-cybernetic societies. I am looking at the nation-state of Malaysia from the historical-materialistic perspective in which I view the development of the nation as one passing from pre-Capitalist, Colonialist, Independent, and post-Colonialist stages. The starting point is the ancient Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Srivijaya as a context of governance in which ideology is maintained via a systematic manner albeit religio-mythical in character and will end in an elaborated discussion on the establishment of a new and "post-modern" kingdom with cybernetics as the nucleus of control and a means to control the minds of those governed. My focus, nonetheless in the discussion of this cybernetic kingdom of Cyberjaya is on the means by which schooling is used as a means of social reproduction in which the productive forces of Malaysia is harnessed, under the name of development and rhetoricized under the banner of anti-Western hegemony, to participate in this global production house of materials and ideology and cultural industry.
Hence this reflection paper "From Srivijaya to Cyberjaya" to contextualize the inquiry into one which will focus on the development of the notion of culture in pre-Capitalist stage in which ideology is one evolved from religio-mythical sources to the notion of culture in a cybernetic era in which ideology is ritualized and disseminated via broadband and terabytes per second. I will first provide a brief history of Malaysia particularly with emphasis on its British colonial history. Brief Concept of Cyberspace Because the overarching and most central theme as well as most used terminology in this essay is that of "Cyberjaya", the following brief discussion is necessary for the purpose clarity: Central to the concept of Cyberjaya as embalmed in the concept of Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor is the idea of "cyberspace" which has become a catchphrase for many a popular writing on technology, as well as a leitmotif of a new from of postmodernist conception of a "digital self". And since in this reflection paper, I will utilize extensively the pre-fix "cyber", it is necessary to look at some of its operational definitions. One of the definitions of "cyberspace" states it as a "metaphor for describing the non-physical terrain created by computer systems." Online systems, for example, create a cyberspace within which people can communicate with one another (via email), do research, watch videos, listen to music, or simply engage in the act of virtual shopping.
Like physical space, cyberspace contains objects (files, mail messages, graphics, etc.) and different modes of transportation and delivery. Unlike real space, though, exploring cyberspace does not require any physical movement other than pressing keys on a keyboard or moving a mouse. This definition however can be further enriched by looking at it from several categories of definition. We look at the nominal, denotative, and connotative definitions of "cyberspace" For nominal definition, we will say that cyberspace mean the environment in which we interact as beings in a digital context. This would allow us to assume that the words surrounding --- words such as "environment", "interact", "beings" and "digital" --- will be primitive terms understood by those in this postmodernist era. For denotative definition, it could be crafted as such: "Cyberspace can mean either of the following; a digital space where text, audio, video and graphic intermingles, or a space wherein human interaction depends on the use of 'clickstream' technology as well as well as the creation, destruction, or recreation of data" And the list of terms which denotatively refer to cyberspace can be extended as it would allow for empirical import as well as fertility because of the availability of primitive terms in it.
For connotative definition which lives and breathes on a combination of primitive and denotative definitions and one which allows especially for the fertility of the concept and attempt to arrive at precise communication so that empirical import can be build in, I would craft the term as such: "Cyberspace is an abstracted area in which the human self participates in the exchange of social messages in an environment characterized by the complex communicative system in which information in digital form and character is encoded, coded and decoded for a particular purpose". Having looked at the operational definition of the word "cyberspace", we now proceed to looking at the unit of analysis by first understanding what Malaysia's project is and how it has evolved historically in response to a range of phenomena such as colonialism, Independence, and national visioning on a grand scale.
Malaysia before Cyberjaya and "Multimedia Super Corridor"
It is useful to look at a brief historical aspect of Malaysia, particularly as a former British colony, as we attempt to situate the development of The Multimedia Super Corridor. Arguably the history of modern Malaysia began with the kingdom of Melaka (Malacca), Islam was the religion of the traditional rulers of the kingdom and the feudal system was the feature of statecraft. Historical records state the founding of Melaka as in the early 1400; the Malay kingdom established by a Javanese prince in exile from a power struggle in Palembang, Sumatra. The kingdom of Melaka was short-lived in that the navigational and gun power of the Portugese was more superior to those of the Melakkans. The kingdom fell to Portugese rule in 1511. The date became the earliest of a series of colonialism which "ended " with the granting of Independence on August 31, 1957 by the British. Melaka, after the Portugese, was taken over by the Dutch who saw the entire region of Southeast Asia as an economic region rich in spices. The superior sea power of the British Empire as well as its sophistication in gunnery, coupled with the slogan of "Guns, Guts, and Glory" led Malaya to be taken over from the Dutch.
British rule was the longest; having its impact on the historical-materialistic and ideological aspect of the once considered glorious Malay kingdom. British colonization of Malaya, much like that of the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, the Spaniards in Philippines left a lasting economic impact on the peoples of this nation-state. Whilst it is not the intention of this introductory section to dwell into the details of it, suffice it is to state that the part of the history of modern Malaysia is about, among others, learning how to built a multi-racial foundation of national identity based on the advanced applications of science and technology. History perhaps taught this nation-state that technology is an extension of the "body of this nation-state" and that those who owns the means of (advanced) technological control will survive different forms of colonialism. In the following paragraph we look at the historical background leading to the granting of Independence in Malaya. Malaysia was officially and peacefully granted independence on August 31st, 1957. It was in September of 1963 that the Federated and non-Federated states of Malaya, Sarawak, Sabah, and initially Singapore united to form what is now known as Malaysia. In 1965 however the busy port of Singapore ceased to be a member of the Malaysian federation and became an independent city-state. There were several reasons why the British gave Malaysia its independence. One is that it is costly for the Britain to maintain the states because Malaysia's population was growing, and the ailing British Empire saw that it was no longer profitable to maintain colonies.
Another reason was that trend of self-determinism was gaining momentum especially in the form of nationalist struggles, armed or un-armed, all over the world. In Malaysia, education in various forms was beginning to produce people within each of the ethnic communities not content to leaving their future entirely in British hands. Anti-colonialist attitudes were stirring in the 1930's, heralding strong Malay political organization later . Another reason independence was granted was because the native has been given enough skills and training in the style of British colonialism, to govern the country. Many from the aristocratic class went through the process of education for social and political enculturalization through the British education system. In Malaya itself, English-type schools proliferated in all the states paving way for a systematic form of education for social reproduction and for the continuation of Imperialist ideology. The structuring of hegemony, at the level of education of the nations was a feature of the strategy of colonialism. Of importance as a result of this form of mental colonization was the creation of a class of administrative elite among the "sons of the soil": or the Bumiputras out of the sons of the Malay Sultans. Malaysia's first Prime Minister, Tengku Abdul Rahman Putra Alhaj, was educated in Britain. So, naturally he would govern more like the British, with British idealism, because of his training. Malaysia's second Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, and the third Prime Minister, Tun Hussein Onn, was also British-educated. Malaysia's fourth and current Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, is the only Malaysian Prime Minister that was not British-educated.
The education of Mahathir Mohamad and the system he evolved through, has contributed much to the manner the nation-state's development policies were engineered. His fondness of "Looking East" and "Buying British Last" and his suggestions of creating an "East Asia Economic Caucus" are among the slogans and proposals used to create a sense of identity for in the few decades after Independence.It is against this backdrop of the character of this nation-state's fourth Prime Minister and the his administration's coming back to "Asian values" whilst at the same time seeing the power of Information Technology that the Multimedia Super Corridor was created. In the following paragraphs I shall detail the development of The Multimedia Super Corridor.The medical doctor turned politician has been the Prime Minister of Malaysia for almost 20 years and Malaysia has been independent for 44 years.
Discourse on Developmentalism, Cyberjaya and Malaysia's Supercorridor
Malaysia, under the rule of its Prime Minister of 20-years, Mahathir Mohamad has of late embarked upon the creation of a cyber-society run from an administrative capital called CyberJaya within the techno-cultural context of so-called a "Multi-Media Super Corridor" (MSC). The MSC is a built on several hundred square kilometers of area in which "seven flagship applications" will be its feature. It mimics California's Silicon Valley and Singapore's cybercity concepts among others of which Malaysia will be moved to a new paradigm of living based upon the "humane application of high technology" manifested in the sub concepts of electronic government, tele-medicine, electronic banking, electronic commerce, and pertinent to our analysis, the smart schools. The biggest airport in Asia, the Kuala Lumpur International Airport was recently opened to facilitate the development of CyberJaya.
From the "wired-up" capital city as the initial program of mega-structural change, the Malaysian government planned to create cyber-principalities out of the thirteen states constituting the federation. It is envisioned that by the metaphorical year of 2020 the country will have achieved the status of an advanced fully-industrialized nation able to compete with other advanced industrialized economies namely the United States of America, Europe, Japan and Singapore. Accordingly, the notion of such an advancement would however be based upon a strong foundation of religious and moral values. Thus, through its "smart schools" of which the prototype will be operating on January 1, 1999, future generation of this nation will be able to fully and democratically participate in the Information Age grounded in a strong sense of nationalism. The country now has specialized universities among them moving towards the total implementation of the Internet as a mode of delivery. One that was recently established itself as the first "virtual university" in the country prides itself in its total absence of physical interaction between the student and the instructor.
In the rhetoric of change embedded in the discourse concerning Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor, one finds such cluster of words to be more developed, couched in even neutral and positively appealing terms, signifying the nation's unbridled faith in quantum leaping into the era of cybernetics. Words like "world class", "world's first", "leading edge", "high powered", "top quality", "bold initiative", and other "magnificio"-resounding ones are employed in the discourse. Illustrative of the use of these is in the vision statement of the Multimedia Super Corridor; a blend of aesthetics of technology and the drive to be technologically competitive in a borderless world.
In describing Cyberjaya (Malay for "Cyber City") the Prime Minister eulogizes:
Cyberjaya is envisaged to be the model multimedia haven for leading, innovative multimedia companies from all over the world to spin a 'web' that will mutually enrich all those involved with it. Especially created as the first MSC designated cybercity, it enables world-class companies to take full advantage of the unique package Malaysia offers to create an environment that is fully conducive towards exacerbating the growth of information technology and multimedia industries. It offers a high capacity global and logistics infrastructure, backed by a 'soft' infrastructure, which includes financial incentives and competitive telecoms tariffs, as well as a set of new cyberlaws that will form a legal framework to facilitate the growth of electronic commerce. (p.1) And his rhetoric on the importance of accepting the futuristic idea of the MSC is summed as such: … it will enable Malaysia to leapfrog into the Information Age. The establishment of the Multimedia Super Corridor, of which Cyberjaya is the nucleus, is an evolving step towards embracing the future. It's long-term objective is to catalyze the development of a highly competitive cluster of Malaysia multimedia and IT companies that will eventually become world class. (p.1)
And thus, Smart Schools ("wired" schools) is designed to become the means of social reproduction to live with the nation's fantasy of becoming technologically aggressive and competitive and one in which the MSC will become, as the Prime Minister's technocrats say "Malaysia's gift to the world". The setting up of the Smart Schools within the Malaysian government's project to establish Cyberjaya and Putrajaya as two of the world's first intelligent cities, is a technological deterministic step towards further linking the nation to the world's financial capital. And within the perspective of schools as a means of social, economic, political, cultural, and technological reproduction, Smart Schools are aimed at producing citizens able to function effectively in the Information Age.
Discourse on Malaysia's Smart Schools
The idea of the "wiring up" of the Malaysian schools can be summarized by a communiqué from the Ministry of Education (1997) which read: By the year 2010, all approximately ten thousand schools will be Smart Schools. In these schools, learning will be self-directed, individually- paced, continuous and reflective. This will be made possible through the provision of multimedia technology and worldwide networking. (p.1) The plan for such a purposeful change was thus to utilize computer-mediated learning technologies particularly the Internet and World Wide Web so that the national agenda of creating a "cyber society" will be realized by a targeted metaphorical date of year 2020.
Echoing Sarason (1996) on the need to look at changes in the school system as derived from inside and outside of the schools (p.12), the case of the initiated "smart school" concept can be said to be derived not only out of "first order analysis, but particularly apparent and dominant out of "second order " dictates – out of political-economic perception of what constitutes progress and how education must be made to respond to them.
As the "smart school" concept relates to this second order changes, the Ministry of Education (1997) notes that:
Malaysia needs to make the critical transition from an industrial economy to a leader in the Information Age. In order to make this vision a reality, Malaysia needs to make a fundamental shift towards a more technologically literate, thinking workforce, able to perform in a global environment and use the tools available in the Information Age. To make this shift, the education system must undergo a radical transformation (p.1)
The Minister of Education announced that the first Smart School is being built with a cost of Malaysian Ringgit 144.5 million of which, aside from it being "wired", "will also be equipped with a hostel for 800 students, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a hockey pitch, a hall, and other facilities" (Business Times, 1996, p.3). It was also said that the school would start operating in January 1999 and eventually all Malaysian schools will be operating based upon this concept. Within the rhetoric embedded in the discourse on Smart Schools, what is the issue in the larger context of the meaning of "development" for a nation mimicking advanced capitalist countries? Whether the control of high technological production in the hands of the few in the techno-industrialized West and whether nations such as Malaysia plunging itself into this long term program of uncertainty and in the wheel of the international capitalist machine – all these are not issues in the educational and social reform. The idea and implementation of such a controlled paradigm of "progress" and "development", once institutionalized may carry consequences anathema to the idea of reform based upon the use of "available technology and appropriate resources" constructed within a paradigm celebrating grassroots, bottom-up, and humanistic initiatives with philosophies "closer to the people". In what way is Malaysia attempting to realize its fantasy of cybernating its society entire?
In realizing this dream, this post-colonial cybernating nation has invited a panel of advisors more impressive than those who sat on the advisory board of the National Council of Educational Excellence (NCEE) of the United States of America whose report "A Nation At Risk" evoked a national debate on the "rising tide of educational mediocrity". In the case of the Malaysia's project those in the panel, among other are Chief Executive Officers/Presidents of the following corporations: Acer Incorporated, Alcatel Alsthom, Microsoft Corporation, Bechtel Group Incorporated, British Telecom, Cisco Systems, Compaq Computers Corporation, DHL, Ericsson, Fujitsu Limited, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Motorola Corporation, Netscape Communications, Reuters, Motion Picture Association of America, Twentieth Century Fox, and tens of others of global giants in the telematics and media-related industries. Professors of Business and Public Policy from Silicon Valley's Stanford University are among those guiding the development of Malaysia's cyber initiatives. Malaysian subsidiaries of these giants in the world of multi-billion dollar club transnational corporations have been set up for such a project. The multi-billion dollar airport recently opened thus is an important infrastructure to help these companies land quickly and safely on the Multimedia Super Corridor. What do all the interlocking directorates and picture of controlling interest have got to do with the discourse on "development"?
Discourse on development: Further questions
The shibboleth of developmentalism embraced as discourse of technological progress by Independent nation-states quantum leaping into the Era of Informatics most often mask the ideology, power relations, and human agents involved in the production of the discourse itself. As it concerns dependency, is the involvement of major Silicon Valley corporations signifying what Latin American dependendistas would call an era of Center-Periphery pan- and virtual capitalist formation, or in what Frederick Jameson would call, a cybernetic era of late capitalist formation? Whilst Marcuse (1941) may see the progressive dimension in modern technology as it may shape social relations, in the case of cybernating Malaysia, will the technological deterministic and hypist mentality embraced become yet another tool for social control and as a cybernetic extension of patriarchal "Big Brotherish" brand of Asian Machiavellian political machinery much needed to be dismantled?
And as it relates to learning, as Turkel (1997) put forth in her critique of computer-mediated learning technologies, will the rapid, massive, unavoidable, irreversible deployment of computers in all Malaysian schools bring schooling closer in meaning to education and liberation – or will it be another means to coerce Malaysian children to help realize and carry forth the agenda of computer hardware and software giants fighting their unending battle over global domination? And finally, in relating to Bakhtin's (1981) notion of heteroglossia, is the term "development via technological progress superficially analyzed by technocrats of the MSC such that much of the "pollutants" which has glossed over a more liberating meaning of the term, are taken ass aura itself? In other words, who defines what the meaning of technological progress mean and in what ways do that definition get embraced uncritically and contextualized and next be turned into policies in a megastructural scale as such as in the case of the MSC?
Closing Remarks
In this brief paper I have discovered more questions on the issue surrounding Malaysia's technological fantasy. Paradigmed from the Critical Theory perspective in looking at power and ideology embedded in the transfer of discourse, I have looked at Malaysia's strategic plan, the Multimedia Super Corridor as a text to illustrate the nature of change and the notion of interplay between culture and technology. The contradictions inherent in the development of pan- and virtual capitalism (see also Kroker & Weinsten, 1998) is alluded to in the discussions on the tension between this nation-state's wanting to be free from the economic label of "underdeveloped and developing". And there are inherent contradictions too in its effort to leap into a more sophisticated world of globalism into a "borderless world"; the world of virtual and post-post-industrial capitalism, beyond the classic Rostowian definition of "mass consumption" as the highest stage of capitalism.
Some afterthoughts and propositions yielded
But is this analysis adequate when looked at from the point of view of culture, communication, and imagination as we meditate into the meaning of the interplay between culture and technology? What would the notion of possibilities mean as a form of utopianism we can derived from this brief survey of Malaysia as a nation experimenting with national development? In deriving patterns and translating them into propositions which will contribute to a possibly new "Theory of Cybernating Nations" what can we uncover? Having briefly analyzed the context of change and situate the discussion within a Critical Theory perspective and anchoring it with the idea of "technological culture as disability", what might also be the poststructural dimension to this character of Malaysia as "cybernating nation"? It may seem peculiar that this reflection paper does not end with a conclusion but instead go in a different tangent in the direction of looking at the aesthetics of technology and offering a proposition that Cyberjaya, Malaysian Multimedia Super Corridor, and The Malaysian Smart Schools Projects may indeed be seen from the point of view of technologizing the nation so that the creative dimensions of living can be realized. In short, cybernetic culture can promise to be a means to communicate and cultivate the imaginative aspect of civilization, somewhat in the context of technology as "exteriorized imagination" and the tools of mind expansion?
Can Cyberjaya also be seen as a form of bricolage by the powerbrokers and policy-implementers in which the deep play of culture is operating at a sophisticated and hegemonic level? To elaborate this further, I would propose that Malaysia as a nation-state is not only attempting to harness the power of digital technologies to transform and communicate a newer form of civilization in order for the older structures --- pre-traditional, Sultanate, colonial, etc --- to be dismantled. It is a form of cultural bricolage when the ideas of development and progress as well as the religious dimensions of it are weaved into the program of "technological determinism" (or "cultural engineering"?) and a newer scenario of progress is created. These, I believe are some of the post-structural questions I wish to further explore as a continuation of the inquiry concerning Cyberjaya. I would like to close these moments of reflection by reporting on some of the propositions I generated out a pilot study conducted in May 2000. Using a some aspects of The Grounded Theory Methods of generating concepts from documents related to Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor Project, I generated the following propositions to be further developed.
Thirteen Propositions on "Cybernating" Nations
1. In a globalized post-industrialist world, the development of a cybernating nation will continue to follow, to a degree or another the Center-Periphery perspective of development.,
2 .Pure historical materialist conception of change cannot fully explain why nations cybernate; the more a nation gets "wired" the more complex the interplay between nationalism and internationalism will be.
3. The more a nation transforms itself cybernetically, the more extensive the enculturalization of the word "cybernetics" will be.
4. The extent of the enculturalization of the concept of "cybernetics" will determine the speed by which a nation will be fully integrated into the global production-house of telematics.
5. The stronger the authority of the regime the greater the control and magnitude of the cybernating process. In a cybernating nation, authority can reside in the political will of a single individual or a strong political entity.
6. The advent of the Internet in a developing nation signifies the genesis of the erosion of the power of government-controlled print media. Universal access to the Internet will determine the total erosion of government-produced print media.
7. Creative consciousness of the peoples of the cybernating nation will be centralized in the area of business and the arts, modeled after successful global corporations.
8. Critical consciousness of the people of the cybernating nation will be centralized in the area of political mobilization and personal freedom of expression, modeled after successful Internet-based political mobilization groups.
9. At the macro-level of the development of a nation-state, the contestation of power is between the nation cybernating versus the nations fully cybernated, whereas at the micro level, power is contested between the contending political parties/groups.
10. The more the government suppresses voices of political dissent, the more the Internet is used to affect political transformations.
11. The fundamental character of a nation will be significantly altered with the institutionalization of the Internet as a tool of cybernating change. The source of change will however be ideologically governed by external influences, which will ultimately threaten the sovereignty of the nation-state.
12. Discourse of change, as evident in the phenomena of cybernation, is embedded in language. The more a foreign concept is introduced, adopted, assimilated, and enculturalized, the more the nation will loose its indigenous character built via schooling and other means of citizenship enculturalization process.
13. Postmodernist perspectives of social change, rather than those of Structural-Functionalists, Marxist, or neo-Marxist, can best explain the structure and consequences of cybernetic changes. These thirteen propositions most obviously need to be refined in order for us to look at the phenomena of transcultural impact of computer-mediated communications from perspectives beyond ones characterized as pure Structural -Functionalists or neo-Marxists.
I have mentioned this idea at the beginning of this reflective paper. I end this reflection paper with the suggestion that technological development as it impacts Independent nation-states must be looked at from the perspective of "interplays and deep plays" and then to look at how these two notions relate to the transformations of social relations. These fertile areas of research are even more interesting for us to engage in precisely because the transplantation of dominant concepts can have both hegemonizing as well as enculturalizing effects with long term-consequences.
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). "Discourse on the novel," in The dialogical imagination: four essays. Holquist, M. ed. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press
Conklin, H. (1949). "Bamboo literacy on mindoro" In Pacific Discovery, 2, 4-11
Fullan, M. & Steigelbauer, S. (1991) The new meaning of educational change, 2d. Ed.. New York: Teachers College Press.
Kupers, J.C., and McDermott, R. (1996). "Insular Southeast Asian scripts,"In P.T. Daniels and W. Bright. The world's writing systems, 474-484. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marcuse, H. (1941). "Some social implications of modern technology" in Studies in philosophy and social sciences, Vol. IX
McDermott, R., & Varenne, H. (1995). Culture as disability. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 26, 324-348.
Ministry of Education Malaysia Communique (1997) "Implementation of smart schools" Available: http://eprd.kpm.my/imp smart.html.
Ministry of Education Malaysia Communiqué (1997) "Smart schools in Malaysia: A quantum leap" Available: http://eprd.kpm.my/prosmart.html
But knighthoods as hegemonic tools are no longer necessary these days. Installations of McDonalds and Starbucks, British-style boarding schools, American-style MARA Junior Science Colleges, and 100-channel Astro TVs from satellites owned by Malaysian billionaires are what a nation need to create little ‘sirs’ and ‘madams’, mad-dogs and Englishmen, or little brown Yankees who pay taxes in an international and hidden system of ‘taxation without representation’ of the post-colonial empires.
Use "economic terms" to describe the areas to be colonised. For example, ‘Spice Islands’ (The Nusantara) ‘Cape Horn’ (Africa), Gold Coast (Africa) Ivory Coast (Africa), Silicon Valley (California), Multimedia Super Corridor (Malaysia) and the latest ‘Iskandar Development Region’ (Johor) and perhaps the Johor Disneyland, should it come into being to complement Singapore's casinos.
This is an interesting notion of history - that the history of an epoch is the history of the ruling class. But the age of the bloggers might change this notion and prove Marx wrong. History marches on - from Pax Brittanica, Pax Nipponica and Pax Americana to Pax Barisan Nasionalisma and Pax Malaysian Bloggeria.
This statement was valid 50 years ago, before Independence. This is an outdated statement that is not appreciated by the children of those who have laboured for this nation.
The language of the street or market is fluid, accommodating, meant to instill open-ness and institutionalise creativity at its best and further development of the 'underclass' at its worst. 
These days, the idea of Ketuanan Melayu is going bankrupt, sinking with the bahtera merdeka. It works only for Malay robber barons who wish to plunder the nation by silencing the masses and using the ideological state apparatuses at their disposal.
In this regard we can learn from the former British colony called America. Whatever its shortcomings, it is a land of immigrants and is still evolving. A black man or a woman can become president. This is what America conceives itself to be and this is what Malaysian can learn from. Can a non-Malay become prime minster if he/she is the most ethical of all politicians in the country?
How will our political scientists use the report to understand the need to revamp the structure of political consciousness and to affect political action through grassroots activism when the NEP is showing signs of ideological bankruptcy and a waning of affect?
So, what next after the Asli report? How do we reflect upon the findings? How do we enrich the data and design cumulative studies that will explain why are how we have arrived at a juncture where political ethics seem to be worsening as economic power of the bumiputera and non-bumiputeras continue to be concentrated on the few.