Asia Pacific news

This column provides a country-by-country analysis of the latest legal developments, cases and issues relevant to the IT, media and telecommunications' industries in key jurisdictions across the Asia Pacific region. The articles appearing in this column are intended to serve as ‘alerts’ and are not submitted as detailed analyses of cases or legal developments.     

Asia Pacific news

This column provides a country-by-country analysis of the latest legal developments, cases and issues relevant to the IT, media and telecommunications’ industries in key jurisdictions across the Asia Pacific region. The articles appearing in this column are intended to serve as ‘alerts’ and are not submitted as detailed analyses of cases or legal developments.     

Fostering the post-development debate: the Latin American concept of tecnologia social

This essay revisits the historical development of a concept – tecnologia social – as one avenue for discussing alternatives to post-development, arguing that the Western-based historical path of technology development is one of the main sources of growing human impoverishment, social inequalities and economic dependency. The concept of tecnologia social points towards political processes that create opportunities to redefine the arrangements among social groups, artefacts and methods used in everyday life, particularly for production and consumption. Because the post-development debate has been criticised for formulating a sound and strong critique to mainstream development but failing to propose concrete empirical alternatives, we seek to foster the debate through the Latin American concept of tecnologia social.     

基于十八大精神的陕西创新驱动发展战略路径研究

创新驱动是社会发展的不懈动力和永恒主题,陕西在当前经济发展过程中,由于要素驱动难以为继,投资驱动日显艰难,面临经济结构战略性调整,亟须转向创新驱动发展战略。为加速实施创新驱动发展战略,在确立创新驱动基本格局下,以科技创新为核心,搭建创新驱动平台,完善创新驱动机制是推动陕西创新驱动发展战略实现的必由之路。     

技术性：司法权威的一个内在面向

在当前我国司法实践不断呈现社会化发展趋势的时代背景下,热点司法个案已开始成为社会舆论所关注的焦点,相关的司法风险也在逐渐地呈现.就司法的社会公信力而言,中国司法似乎已经无奈地陷入到了塔西佗陷阱当中.在司法权威的建构上,中国司法迫切地需要在司法的技术性层面不断地努力.虽然司法技术并不构成公正司法的充分条件,但无疑却是必要条件和最低评价标准.对于司法权威而言,技术性乃是司法权威的一个内在面向,技术性司法权威的建构需要通过自身的不断努力来获得社会的普遍性认同.     

Digital Technology and Cultural Heritage Sites in the City of Tshwane

This article examines the feasibility and sustainability of digital technology to promote cultural heritage sites in the City of Tshwane (CoT), South Africa. Post-Apartheid development imperatives compel the CoT to construct new cultural sites. Over time, the number of visitors to the places declined. The CoT introduced digital technology to collect and repackage information on some of the cultural edifices to add value to them. However, the absence of heritage/digital technology impact analysis and cultural policy in the CoT could compromise the program. The article recommends further introduction of important facilities and services in the sites to increase public interest.     

Sexual exploitation of children in europe: Child pornography

Abstract

Summary: This article is taken from a report entitled: Rhetorics and Realities: Sexual Exploitation of Children in Europe, of a study funded by the European Commission under the STOP Programme. It begins by re-visiting the knowledge base of child pornography and addresses a range of issues including: children's access to pornography; law enforcement and European policy. The article concludes with a number of pertinent questions which need both attention and answers.     

mStories: exploring semiotics and praxis of user-generated mobile stories

Innovations in information and communication technologies have allowed people to actively author multimodal content and engage in new meaning-making practices. New Literacies research has gone some way to understanding new meaning-making behaviours. However, this research often derives its understandings from studies undertaken with students enrolled in formal educational settings. Mobile technologies are increasingly situated outside such domains; the informal use of these devices by adults remains on the periphery of scholarly focus. mStories is a creative participatory digital mobile storytelling project. Taking a multidimensional perspective, this article presents the in-depth case analysis of one participant and their mStory. A semiotic analysis found that the user-generated content demonstrated complex and sophisticated multimodal sense relations. However, control over the textual or compositional meta-function of the text was determined largely by the computer interface, with users habituated to relinquishing authorial control over this element. Within this study, mobile literacy praxis was characteristically ad hoc and contextually embedded, and though mobile technology invites such practices, users were neither determined nor limited by this, and happily turned to other devices where necessary.     

Intellectual property,indigenous knowledge,and biodiversity

ABSTRACT

This is Part 1 of an article arguing for an extended application of Karl Marx’s insight that the apparent reciprocity of free market exchange is to be understood as an ideology that obscures material processes of exploitation and accumulation. Rather than to confine this insight to the worker’s sale of his or her labor-power for wages, and basing it on the conviction that labor-power is uniquely capable of generating more value than its price, the article argues that capital accumulation also relies on asymmetric transfers of several other biophysical resources such as embodied non-human energy, land, and materials. It proposes that the very notions of “price” and “value” serve to obscure the material history and substance of traded commodities. Such a shift of perspective extends Marx’s foundational critique of mainstream economics by focusing on the unacknowledged role of ecologically unequal exchange, but requires a critical rethinking of the concept of “use-value.” It also suggests a fundamental reconceptualization of the ontology of technological progress, frequently celebrated in Marxist theory. Part 1 of the article introduces the argument on unequal exchange, the ideological function of money, some concerns of ecological Marxism, and the conundrum posed by three contradictory understandings of “use-value.”