Focus on Asia

摘要

The focus of four of the seven papers in this issue is on aspects of information development in Asia. We start with a paper by Nanang Indra Kurniawan of Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia and Stale Angen Rye of the University of Agder in Norway. In their paper, 'Online environmental activism and Internet use in the Indonesian environmental movement', the authors investigate the use of the Internet among Indonesian environmental non-governmental organizations and how this use influences the mobilizing structure of the environmental movement. Their study focuses on the domain of forest protection, and reveals that the Internet empowers the environmental activism of these organizations by enhancing opportunities for political participation. They find that well-established organizations with well-developed international networks benefit the most from the use of the Internet in their activism, while smaller, more informal organizations have a better capacity to connect unconnected communities to the global flow of information.