Document details

Epilogue: Media Studies in Myanmar. Where Do We Go from Here?

In: Myanmar Media in Transition: Legacies, Challenges and Change
Lisa Brooten; Jane Madlyn McElhone; Gayathry Venkiteswaran (eds.)
Singapore: ISEAS (2019), pp. 387-394

ISBN 978-981-4843-09-6

Signature commbox: 303:10-General 2019

"Academic studies of Myanmar media in English are few and far between, although this is starting to change as the country continues to open and a new generation of Myanmar scholars emerges. Many of the studies that do exist fall into common conceptual traps, such as an overemphasis on journalism or the conflation of "media" and "journalism"; the tendency to analyse texts combined with a relative lack of attention to audiences' uses of, trust in, and interpretations of media; a media-centric focus that does not take into account the context in which events occur or pay attention to the political economy of the media or those key structural issues such as the interconnections between ownership, economics and political interests that also influence content. Much of the recent media research is focused on digital media, especially Facebook and its role in the violence that began in 2012 in Rakhine State. Major gaps in the English language scholarship on Myanmar media, which mirror critiques of media studies generally, are the relative inattention to the study of Myanmar language media, the study of audiences, and research on the political economy of media. Those studies in English that analyse content tend to focus on English-language media in Myanmar." (Page 388)