The upcoming issue of the Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies (ASEAS) 9(2) features a focus on new media in Southeast Asia and the online-offline nexus as a field of emerging forms of sociality, social practices, and their local implications.
We consider new media as an umbrella term for various internet- and mobile device-based forms of communication such as email, instant messaging, and social networking sites, but also blogs, personal websites, and other sites of visual and textual material display. Irremissible in the digital age we live in, these media are deeply embedded in the offline lives and real-time practices of real people living in real places. While new media provide ample space for crafting a personal image or connecting and communicating with “the rest of the world”, eventually it is the users themselves who decide upon the use and utility of certain media. People’s ideas, practical orientations, and social and cultural contexts shape new media as much as new media offers seemingly endless opportunities for self-expression and self-assertion while conducting relationships.

The employment of different media for a plurality of purposes calls for studies of ‘polymedia’ and the ways users ‘socialize’ new media and re-configure social practices and relationships by using one or the other medium. ‘Power’ is another recurrent theme in this topic, particularly with regard to social, political, and economic contexts as well as regulatory infrastructures. This online-offline nexus implies that new media technologies exist within the political economies of other (local and global) networks and institutions. Studies of new media thus ultimately reveal information about the nature of the offline, “non-mediated”, and non-digital world.

With this regard, we welcome submissions that consider one or more of the following aspects:

- New media technologies, changing media ecologies, and their implications for social life (e.g. appropriation and navigation of new media for community-building purposes; new media and the constitution of ‘self’);
- New communicative environments and the concept of polymedia (e.g. new conflicting media ideologies and idioms of practices);
- Emerging forms of sociality, social rules, and forms of expression (e.g. re-socialization of media; implicit and explicit social rules and the use of new media; online replication and remediation of social orders; new social formations and affiliations);
- New media and power dynamics in social and political contexts (e.g. interconnections between policy, regulations, and users’ practices; digital divides and new forms of digital inequality; new media in the contexts of migration, e-governance, etc.);
- Participatory forms of content production and redistribution (e.g. online “projects” mediated by blogs, online campaigns, and other social networking sites, and their local impact);
- Alternative communication technology and communicative ecologies (e.g. projects of empowerment through combinations of new media and public facilities).

Deadline for Submissions
15 January 2016

If you intend to submit a paper, please contact dayana.parvanova@seas.at

We also accept contributions outside the focus; in this case please contact the ASEAS editorial team aseas@seas.at

Please submit your paper online at http://aseas.univie.ac.at. You can find more information on our submission guidelines here: http://www.seas.at/our-journal-aseas/submission-guidelines/.