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After the Internet, Before Democracy: Competing Norms in Chinese Media and Society. Johan Lagerkvist. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. 325 pp. $87 pbk.Lagerkvist's book is a thorough and sometimes overwhelming review of Internet practices and policies in China. His eight chapters and fifty-seven subchapters or sections attempt to organize and analyze a mass of data and relate them to the future of democracy in China. Thirty pages of bibliographic references plus numerous notes within the chapters testify to a careful gathering of the facts of Internet growth in China over the past thirty or so years. Still, it will be heavy going for anyone attempting to grasp the themes. Graduate students and those with a focus on the Internet in China are the likely readers.There are two main arguments about the Internet and democracy in China. One is that Internet growth is inevitably going to lead to the triumph of political democracy. The other is that there is no such inevitability. As the Internet grows along with Facebook, Twitter, or their Chinese equivalents, the Communist Party will learn to use them for greater control and censorship.Lagerkvist, a senior fellow at Stockholm's Swedish Institute of International Affairs, seems conflicted, and at times embraces both arguments. He says that in China there is a "peculiar relationship between state power and people power in the Internet age." Very early he admonishes Western scholars for wishful thinking when they directly connect growth of individual electronic communication with the growth of democracy or even the public sphere. But toward the end of the book he says freer speech is expanding on the Internet and a public sphere is appearing. He says that the public sphere and the media system can "under the right circumstances" become a platform for political change and democratization in China.In short, Lagerkvist says the media, especially the Internet, are bringing political change in China, but how and when are unclear. He sees an "ongoing erosion" of party-state power over civil society, but he is still very impressed with how resilient the regime has proved in upholding the political status quo.For example, social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, which are outside China, are difficult to monitor, and even blocking access is not always successful. So the government has allowed privately owned search engines within China to set up their own versions (Tudou, Fanfou, Houku), knowing that they will be carefully monitored and controlled by companies that do not want to be shut down. As the author points out, in this way the party has shifted the burden of control and negotiating which messages are acceptable in the media to the private sphere. Lagerkvist says the state wants to disguise its control over the media as much as possible, fearing outright repression will damage the successful Chinese economy on which the legitimacy of the regime is firmly planted.The book grew out of Lagerkvist's PhD thesis. Its thoroughness, at times spending time on minor online curiosities (e.g., the flesh search engines and the grass mud horse video), and its caution are typical of a young scholar who is having difficulty separating important themes from aberrations. …

Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace. Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. $48 hbk. $24 pbk. 432 pp.Reviewed by: James F. Scotton, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA DOI: 10.1177/1077699013506351"Access Contested" is the third volume in the editors' "Access" series ("Access Denied," 2008; "Access Controlled," 2010). Deibert and Rohozinski are at the University of Toronto while Palfrey and Zittrain are at Harvard. With expertise in political science, computer science, and law, they are considered by many to be the leading team in monitoring cyberspace battles of freedom versus control. This volume focuses on Asia. The editors believe the shift in cyberspace population to the South and the East in the world can make this the crucial area for the battle over who controls the Internet.It is a dense, fact-filled book that will require some serious attention to get through. Overall, it will tend to serve more as a resource for researchers than a reader even for a graduate seminar. The research is impressive with the China chapter alone having 151 notes, most of them quite recent and especially helpful to researchers trying to track down online government and other sources on these Internet topics. The writing is on the whole clear, but in some chapters, the details become a bit overwhelming to a reader trying to grasp the general sense of a chapter.The editors contribute two general chapters in which they suggest who controls the Internet is on the brink of being decided. The battle is between state sovereignty every- where (in this case in Asia) and the generally privately owned Internet infrastructure. The editors see corporate entities such as Google inevitably lining up with individual Internet users because it is the only way either can have any control in the face of steadily increasing government pressures.There are eight essays on Internet control struggles, some focused on individual countries (two on Malaysia, none on India). There are ten additional chapters on indi- vidual countries (China and South Korea are included but nothing found even in the Index on Japan). These chapters compare countries on the extent of government Internet filtering and whether policies are transparent and consistent. The editors said the countries included are those where they believed there was the most to learn about Internet filtering by authorities.The editors point out that to the extent that governments can control the Internet they can make sure that their own citizens will experience a different view of the world. Governments have been trying to isolate their citizens from critical outside views for centuries, of course, but the editors suggest that increasing dependence on the Internet is making it easier for authorities to do this. …

Tunstall, J. (2008). The media were American: U.S. mass media in decline. New York: Oxford University Press. 455 pages. Thirty years after his book declared The Media Are American, Tunstall has fou...

The African press of colonial British West Africa has been recognized for the role it played in moving the area toward independence (Crowder, 1968: 424-25). On the other side of the continent, however, the African press of former British East Africa-Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania-has largely been ignored by scholars.' One accepted view has been that the African press of East Africa, while contributing little to the independence movement, thrived on subversive attacks on government and irresponsible publications in general (Hatchen, 1971: 202). Some recent research has suggested that in Kenya and Uganda there was an important African press in the pre-independence period, a press that helped to spread social and political ideas and to mobilize the African population (Scotton, 1973: 1975). Almost totally ignored, however, have been the African newspapers of preindependence Tanzania, and more specifically those of mainland Tanganyika. This paper will examine the role of the African press of Tanganyika before that United Nations territory under British administration achieved self-government in 1961. This African press, perhaps on a more limited scale, played a role similar to that of the African newspapers of neighboring Kenya and Uganda. In all three areas, the African press provided an outlet for specific African grievances, challenged accepted social and political patterns, and helped to mobilize the African population in support of proposed new patterns and their African spokesmen. Early African spokesmen such as Harry Thuku in Kenya, Sefanio Sentongo in Uganda, and Erica Fiah in Tanganyika also saw the need for some kind of news sheet or newspaper to help legitimatize their arguments for equal treatment and eventually even self-government for Africans. As Apter (1961: 301) pointed out, African political leaders had to establish themselves as legitimate possible successors in the eyes of European authorities at the same time they were criticizing those authorities and appealing for African support. The efforts of such early African leaders to establish newspapers despite the fact that the vast majority of their potential followers were illiterates is a clear example of this. Thuku's short-lived Tangazo and Sentongo's Sekanyolya were publishing in the early 1920s, while Fiah's Kwetu, which means "Our Home" in Swahili, did not appear in Dar es Salaam until 1937. However, Fiah, a Muganda from Kampala, undoubtedly knew some of the Baganda editors of Sekanyolya and other African