Culture Shock /Cyber-Age Ends a Quasi Monopoly on Information : As Internet Opens Up Malaysia, Not Everyone Is Pleased
International Herald Tribune
September 23, 1999
Thomas Fuller

Things have not been the same in this small rubber-tapping town since Jason Thomas opened his Internet café three months ago.

Teenagers flock to the café after school instead of going home to study.

Parents accuse their children of stealing to pay for their "Internet habit." Proof of this came several weeks ago when a 12-year-old boy was caught trying to pawn stolen chickens to pay for a few sessions at the café.

Police have come three times to the café with threats to close it.

Palong's Internet tensions tell a story about what happens when a global computer network gets plugged into a small, relatively poor town that has long been buffered from the outside world by thousands of acres of rubber trees.

More broadly, it is the story of a small country, Malaysia, eager to impart high-tech values to its youth but grappling with an uncomfortable corollary: With technology comes social turbulence.

The Internet's effect on the developed world is well-known — everything from flowers to stocks are bought and sold on-line, and financial markets are buoyed by the success of technology companies. But that does not quite match the effect the global network has had on Malaysia in the past two years.

The first unsettling hint for the government came last year in the form of a "virtual riot" that caused temporary panic in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.

Thousands of Kuala Lumpur residents stayed holed up in their offices after receiving e-mail messages about a riot that, it turns out, never happened. Police arrested two people suspected of spreading the e-mail and detained them under the Internal Security Act.

The Internet's deepest impact has come in the wake of a political dogfight between Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad and his former protégé, Anwar Ibrahim, who is now in jail.

Mr. Anwar's dismissal from government last year prompted the creation of a rash of Web sites that ridicule the prime minister and flay his policies, all with the anonymous impunity that the global network provides.

Within a few months, the government's quasi monopoly over information — by virtue of its control over printing licenses — had collapsed.

"The government never anticipated this," says Khoo Kay Kim, one of the country's leading historians. "When they introduced the Internet, they were worried about Western influence, pornography and so on. But with the sacking of Anwar, the situation took a completely different turn."

Undoubtedly the Internet's biggest fans in Malaysia today are government critics whose voices are rarely heard in the often slavishly pro-government press.

Witness an anonymously written note posted by the people who run www.freemalaysia.com, one of the most popular anti-government Web sites.

"The Internet has become such a magnificent platform," the authors gleefully noted. "Politics in Malaysia can never be the same again."

"One damning photo, one preserved incriminating record," they said, "and now not even the muzzled press can bury it."

The government began promoting the Internet two years ago as a means of training a generation of software programmers and specialists in information technology. - LED BY Mr. Mahathir, Malaysia invested hundreds of millions of dollars in information technology, opening a multimedia university and offering foreign companies incentives to set up shop in a massive technology park still under construction called the ''Multimedia Supercorridor.'' But erstwhile sanguine advocates of the Internet, including Mr. Mahathir, are now having second thoughts. Mr. Mahathir recently spoke of the Internet's ''assault on the moral values of people, of the young in particular.'' He mentioned how easy it was to download pornography from the Internet, or to learn how to construct ''lethal weapons'' from the global network. ''Such is the effect of society's inability or unwillingness to prevent the abuse of information technology,'' he said. The prime minister's fears are echoed here in Palong, in the breezy tea shops across the street from the Internet café. Sitting in a restaurant filled with plastic tables and chairs, Amran Harun, 43, cast a suspicious eye across the street. ''I want to close it down,'' said Mr. Amran, the father of eight children who was spending the afternoon sipping coffee with members of the pre-Internet generation. ''The kids are addicted to it, so they steal to maintain their habit.'' The café's fees are a big complaint among parents. It charges 3.5 ringgit (90 cents) an hour, a modest fee by big-city standards, but a substantial sum for schoolchildren who use the café often and do not have much in the way of an allowance. But usage fees are not Mr. Amran's chief gripe. He is worried that the Internet is perverting minds. Boys and girls go to the Internet café to visit pornographic sites, he said, and then they go off to the rubber plantations together. ''The next thing you know the girl is pregnant,'' he said. For many parents here, the sudden infusion of technology has been dizzying. Many schoolchildren who use Palong's Internet café do not have telephones at home, but nearly all of them have e-mail addresses. For girls, in particular, the Internet is eroding Palong's traditional Islamic values. Schoolgirls who are banned by Malaysia's Islamic laws from spending time alone with boys, sit in the café for hours ''chatting'' on-line with boys from around the country. Zuriana, a 15-year-old high school student in Palong, comes to the Internet café every day and sends e-mail to her 18-year-old boyfriend. They met in Malaysia, but he is from Pakistan, where he now lives. ''Local boys aren't open-minded,'' Zuriana said. Siti Sara Mohamed Said, 16, comes to the café once a week and chats with friends she has met on-line. Sometimes, discussions turn to politics. ''People say Mahathir has been unjust to Anwar,'' she said, sitting in the café with a picture of the prime minister hanging on the wall behind her, a customary sight in many shops in Malaysia. ''Not many people talk about politics, but when they do they say they support Anwar,'' Siti added.

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