Key Patterns: Information, Identity, Mobilization
The political impacts of new media in Malaysia fit a loose three-part
classification: media for information, identity-building, and mobilization. Any
serious analysis of the political power of new media thus requires taking
these media not as an undifferentiated quantum, but as a bundle of discrete
platforms and tools. Disaggregating in this way not only permits assessment
of the nature and extent of political effects, but also helps illuminate the
connections between online and traditional media on the one hand, and of
new media with electoral and civil societal campaigns, on the other.