Under the Dome (2015) explores the environmental differences that China is dealing with, in particular pollution. The pollution is mostly caused by coal and gas fumes. This causes a horrendous amount of health issues for individuals especially if they are exposed to this air from a young age, as this causes children to grow significantly slower and develop lung issues later in life.

While live screening this film, I felt extremely grateful for what I have. In Australia, we have had one major experience to relate to this issue and it was the bush fires. Others within my class also felt this same way, and we can reflect on this issue, and appreciate what we have.

Overtime, Asian countries have made changes to provide better air quality. Research shows that governments and authorities are already taking action, with new laws and stronger enforcement in recent years. These include

‌The growing expansion of Digital Asia over the past decade has allowed for a greater exchange of information and media between people. The development of new platforms provides new ways of connection, with financial, social and political transactions all now possible via digital platforms, ultimately removing the barriers. This is especially apparent in the current environment with the existence of COVID19. The evolution of Digital Asia has allowed increased ability for information to be shared between Asia and the rest of the world, with global flows of information, culture, media and more coming in and out of the region. CNBC (2020) has shown an increase of “40 million new internet users” in SouthEast Asia.

I have been able to learn about key aspects of Digital Asia through the increasing distribution of Asia media. From documentaries such as the self financed and highly controversial documentary ‘Under the Dome’ which was created…

This week I am exploring my initial and present reflection of the popular Asian cinematic genre of Anime. During the current pandemic, my family and I have been exploring different genres in streaming services, which has led to me watching Anime series on Netflix. Anime originally came from the English word “animation” (Japan Info 2015), is a Japanese cartoon and has been very popular and influential in Asia from the 1980s to the present (Wai-ming 2002).
From my perspective in Australia, Anime is considered a niche interest in western cultures. However, since my progressing interest in Anime, I have realised that my reflection may be false and that Anime is not to be considered a niche at all. This makes me raise the question of how popular Anime is in western cultures? To what scale is Anime’s popularity in Asia? What digital transactions are involved within the Anime universe?

Within…

Enrolling in BCM320 ‘Digital Asia’ I did not think I had any preconceived ideas of what the subject would entail. My background (currently in the final year of an IT degree) didn’t really afford me any insight into the innerworkings of a BCM subject either. However, upon scrolling through the Moodle site on week 1 I discovered an innate bias, realising that I had made a de-facto assumption thinking that within the scope of this subject “Digital Asia” was really going to be shorthand for “Digital China”. From that somewhat dim starting point, the move away from typifying Asia as a collective same in the realm of digitalisation was a marked shift. As I had never really considered Asia’s digital scape under any form of scrutiny, be it personally or within a uni subject.

In the first week, I found myself incredibly responsive to the screening of Hao…

#bcm320 #DigitalAsia #blogpost3

I wanted to talk about the gaming industry in Asian countries for this blog post as I discovered that one of the most recent top selling video games in Japan was Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In week 3 of Digital Asia, we discussed Esports and Games in Asia drawing from our live screening, AlphaGo. So in this post, I will discuss the gaming industry in Asia, why it is so popular using statistics and facts, and how the online gaming industry in Asia is going to look in the future (will it grow?).

Week 3’s lecture reading on the digital gaming culture in Vietnam was an interesting read for me, I learnt about how big it is in particular areas of Asia, why it is so big in Vietnam and I was able to draw from this study and relate it back to the general topic of…

In a time of lockdowns and travel bands, the only way many Australians can explore other countries is digital. So while Asia in the digital age has encouraged many economic, political and social changes within, it has also had a flow-on effect to many western countries.

It came as a shock to me to learn that India is the world’s largest producer of films. Not only this, but the contribution the Indian film industry contributes for more than 50% of the Indian economy! This has a huge amount of benefits to local economies, as it boosts the number of tourists and features key Southern Indian languages.

When learning this I couldn’t help but think “how is that possible?!”, especially due to the fact that I am all too familiar with film releases being pushed back or cancelled due to Covid. So to have 50% of…

Alphago (2017) is a documentary directed by Greg Kohls that portrays the story of the artificial intelligence (AI) program that has mastered the most complicated board game Go, and competed with one of the world’s best players, Lee Sedol.

AlphaGo was first developed by DeepMind technology using ‘deep learning’ and ‘reinforcement learning’. Demis Hassabis, the CEO and Co-Founder of DeepMind, stated that “AlphaGo has the ability to look ‘globally’ across the world and find solutions that humans either have been trained not to play or would not consider” (2016). This suggests that technologies such as AlphaGo has the ability to find solutions that humans are not able to discover in other areas. But at the same time, it kept me thinking, AI does not contain any human emotions, with that being said there are still a lot of areas that AI can never satisfy as much as a human can…