Intro to Electronic Media (Forthcoming in Asian Politics and Policy)
It is with great pleasure that I introduce a new section to the Asian Politics and Policy journal entitled “Electronic Media.” The frontiers of technology continue to push outward, altering both our personal and professional worlds, and we hope to be among the first journals devoting space to covering these important developments.

Technological innovations include the ubiquitous computing found in the myriad of portable data assistants, cell phones, and ebooks such as Amazon’s Kindle, the explosion of non-traditional media such as web logs (blogs), and the broad use of social networking technologies such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and Plaxo. These tools, alongside developments such as the low cost phone available via Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) programs like Skype, have drastically reduced the costs of staying in touch with colleagues and informants abroad.

The university classroom itself has been altered by these technologies, with a number of institutions, such as MIT with its OpenCourseWare (OCW) system, releasing full course content onto the internet and encouraging professors to podcast their lectures and develop online materials. Many university administrations hope to build (often profitable) distance learning programs which take advantage of teleconferencing, video, and graphic display technoloeis. Most professors based in North America use web-based platforms, such as BlackBoard and eCollege, in designing courses and transmitting grades to students and the administration. While some social scientists may imagine that these new technologies are relatively untested and that “serious” social science remains between the pages of peer-reviewed bound journals, a number of studies and events indicate otherwise.

The credibility of web based media has risen. More than four years ago Thomas Johnson and Barbara Kaye published results in the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (Vol. 81 No. 3 2004) of a large-N (3,500+) survey in which respondents often found weblogs as - if not more - credible than traditional media sources, such as newspapers, radio, and television. In 2005 Nature published the results of a blind review by experts comparing the accuracy of Encyclopaedia Britannica with the online, mob-sourced 4-million article Wikipedia, and found similar levels of inaccuracies between them (Nature 438, 900-901, 15 December 2005)

Blog Review of “Observing Japan” (Forthcoming in Asian Politics and Policy)
For students of the often smoke-and-mirrors world of Japanese politics, the blog Observing Japan (http://www.observingjapan.com/) is a light in the darkness.

The author of the blog, Tobias Harris, who jokingly refers to himself as a “Japan finger” as opposed to a more seasoned “Japan hand” is a graduate student at MIT who is studying, of course, Japanese politics. He certainly has more practical experience in the field than many of us who study it academically; Harris was on staff of a senior Upper House member of the Democratic Party of Japan, the DPJ, for a year between 2006 and 2007. The DPJ, for those of you who do not study Japanese politics, is the most serious threat to the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has emerged in the political arena. Charismatic DPJ leaders who may be well known to readers for their fiery speeches and writings include Ichiro OZAWA, Naoto KAN, and Yukio HATOYAMA. Various publications have taken advantage of Harris’ status as an insider (or, as one comment put it, his “front row seats” in the political game) and benefited from his insights, as seen by his writings for the Wall Street Journal Asia, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Japan Times, and CNBC Asia’s “Asia Squawkbox.”