"The articles collected in this special issue share a common focus: young adults’ use of new media for civic engagement in South and Southeast Asia. Youth engagement problems are evident when established democracies witness a decline in youth participation in traditional civic activities (e.g., voting) compared to the participation levels of older generations. MacKinnon et al. (2007) stated, ‘[y]outh are turned off by the game of partisan politics and increasingly refuse to learn or apply the rules. In large measure, they are reinventing civic and political engagement.’ We began our project with the observation that the youth in South and Southeast Asia demonstrate distinctive patterns of civic and political engagement, and we sought information about whether these patterns are a consequence of a generational shift or a result of contextual changes, such as those in political systems and media technologies. We examined two propositions that are often associated with youth engagement and new media. First, new media change the relationship between youth and existing political systems. Second, new media change the nature of civic engagement itself, especially for the youth.
As we inquired further, we found that using established democracies as our reference point might have been incorrect. The difference between the so-called young or semi-democracies and established or mature democracies is not that the former is an inadequate version of the latter. Instead, the political systems found in South and Southeast Asia have their own characteristics, and these systems cannot be simply classified as a lack of democratic components. The same thing can be said about new media. The difference between the region in question and other regions, such as North America and Europe, is not that the former lacks access to technologies that are common in the latter. Instead, the type and use of technologies in the region show unique patterns that cannot be simply defined as less advanced. When we refer to the region, we make no attempt to generate a singular discourse for all the countries involved. Instead, we are highly sensitive to the diversity presented in the individual cases that belong to the region in this study. The end product, therefore, becomes a juxtaposition of multiple reference points that can be not only compared to established democracies but also compared to the other countries in Asia." (Page 249)