So you want to bring the latest thing in online media to Asia, hook up 3 billion homes with a black box or silver dish, wire the region into contented middle classes and start sending out monthly bills. Will you succeed?

Well, yes. And no.

Yes, because some governments in Asia are committed to bringing their citizens into Cyberspace. Yes, because places like Singapore are rolling out infrastructure on a scale so grand that it is ahead of anything in the United States. But no, because the vast majority of Asia will never get near the Internet because of its cost. And no because many who have the money face severe restrictions on the medium's use as a political meeting place.

This isn't to say that Western media entrepreneurs have no hope of penetrating Asia. If you're going to do business there, you need to learn the basic facts about how Asia works on the inside. Microsoft and Oracle have learned this, and they are all but licensed to print money there. This article is the first part of an Online Journalism Review series that will examine how people in Asia communicate with each other -- and how their governments communicate with them. It's quite different from Western concepts.

Outsiders have quite a record of getting it wrong about Asia. We misread the bloom of Asian economies in the late 1980s and then misread their wither in the mid-1990s. Most pundits and investors now dismiss the region as fated to a 1930s-style Depression that will end up a middle-classless society of extreme haves and have-nots -- only this time there will also be the knows and know-nots.

Such punditry looks at economic statistics in a region run by sociology. The economic environment created by pre-1997 Asia wasn't designed for profit or return on investment to shareholders. It was for the perpetuation of family aristocracies. National identity in Asia doesn't pack nearly the wallop family and clan identity do. Now elder aristocrats from Tokyo to New Delhi are beginning to decline in authority and prestige. Young firstborn sons are stepping into their fathers' shoes, but doing so with MBA socks on.

Quite little of the force for change in Asia has come from the Western press. Most of it is evolving the way Asians have been doing things for millennia: quietly, on the inside, by shadowy decision-makers who pride themselves on their invisible power, and governments that take a much longer view of things than people living by deadlines and annual reports. What is replacing 'Asian Values' is the value-system of long-term managed growth. That means a prophylactic attitude about the amount and kind of information a society is allowed to absorb at any one time.

What can we learn from this informational style? Where can journalists unfamiliar with the region learn the ropes of who knows but does not say, and who says but does not know?

First we must know how Asians communicate with each other. There are four invisible communication styles that constitute cultures all unto themselves: Governance information is transmitted up and down a hierarchical silo. One's worth is defined as the worth he or she has in the eyes of a superior. The value of information is that it is valued by a boss. This is where the so- called Patriciate Model of management came from.

Institutional information is disseminated in triangular patterns linking two out of the many levels of an institutional hierarchy. One person in the higher layer communicates to a small group of subordinates beneath, who redefine it across their layer of colleagues before disseminating it to those below. Information has to be validated within the triangle before it goes anywhere. The validity of an agreement comes from the collective assent of many small, semi-anonymous niches. (It is jokingly said that nobody in a bureaucracy decides anything because everybody does, and everybody knows who did it because nobody does.) Japan's Finance Ministry is Exhibit A of the built-in myopia of this system.

Urban information is generated at levels of identity -- say a social or class group -- and disseminated to others on the same level, but not to other levels. The authority of information often equates to class approval. This isn't a mere matter of socialites nodding to other socialites, it also works within and across ministries in governments. Hence it is one thing to listen to leaders proclaim grand schemes at their annual ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) class reunion, but another thing to realize how third- to fifth-rank 'implementaries' will configure the system so it cannot work without their hands on the levers, or bring undue stress into their lives.

Village information is distributed evenly in every direction -- up and down and across -- but rarely beyond communal boundaries. Validation is communal. Knowledge from outside the system is suspect unless it has the approval of local authority. This authority is usually the government's political representative, who, come election time, doles out perks and cash. This sounds remotely rural until you realize that 3 billion people acquire their sole knowledge of the world from a black-and-white TV sitting on a chair outside the front door of the local political representative's house, which also houses the village's only electricity and telephone line. Marrying the telephone to the TV the way that Web and Net TV do isn't going to change whose house the television is in. Beyond better technique, those enamored of all things online seem not to have much to offer in this milieu of institution-conserving fact proprietorship. Westerners tend to think information is a good thing all by itself, which in most cases has the additional virtue of being able to fetch a price. 'Asian decision-makers see information as useful not so much for niche advantage as for social glue,' notes Zoriani Wati Abas, a Malaysian educational writer.

Westerners often think of information as just another commodity in the marketplace. Asians often think of it as part of a courtyard -- a communal meeting ground -- in which many attitudes about truth and wealth coexist. What journalists face in the Asia now remaking itself is learning to switch from market-economy thinking to courtyard-economy thinking.

'Businesses are in a better position than politicians to leap political borders with image identity,' observes Subha Segaram, a consultant with Coopers-Lybrand, Kuala Lumpur. 'But brand identity is not idea identity. There is the prospect of political forces using online information to consolidate power while business forces use it to consolidate markets.'

Both of these are likely to exclude information that threatens them, and unlikely to tolerate complaints about things like wealth inequity, environmental decline, or the way the online world is becoming a Versailles in a world dividing into knows and know-nots. Case in point: How many information providers are thinking about the needs of the people who need information the most -- the world's rural markets?

Even now, multinationals are forging relationships with government ministries far stronger than they are with local businesses, yet it is the middle-class, small-business community that most needs the alliance. Unfortunately, the middle class, the one group that could have most challenged proprietary ideas about information, 'was so devastated by the 1997 debacle that most Asian prognosticators do not see it becoming a force for social innovation for five to 10 years,' observes Frank Small Kuala Lumpur's director Iain Bell.

This does not sound encouraging to the freedom-to-opine value-set of the average Western journalist. That's not quite true, however. Fact has a way of escaping one's grasp. Governments that so strongly advocated IT (information technology) in their educational system are now discovering this to their rue as their mouse-adept youngsters 'chatterbox' all over the Net with other youngsters all over the world.

What Asian young people are discovering -- at least the privileged and affluent ones who in their time will be calling the shots -- is something Western journalists need to pay more heed to.

A great deal of insight can come from RBLA (Reportage By Looking Around). Take a Malaysian video arcade. Amid the din of simulated laps at Sebring, tactical tank wars and guttural karate hulks, one notes three things: (a) Indian teenage women consistently beat the boys in the auto race games; (b) the Chinese boys crowding around an action game placing clandestine bets on the outcome win much more often than non-Chinese boys; and (c) Malay boys playing dungeon games always seem to know which door the lurking monster is behind.

Why? ? Unmarried Indian women face a cruel combination of sexist, ageist, and parentist constraints that Asia's hip fashion magazines inform them they should never put up with. The way they achieve their liberation is by mastering quick-witted response. Boy-meets-girl issues aside, race-car video games are an excellent training ground for situational management. When these women later go on to careers, they become the quickest decision-makers and the most responsive mid-level managers to be found in Asia. (And, given those magazines they read, the best-dressed.)

The Chinese boys win their bets so often because their hacker counterparts have bought the retail version of the game, dived into its programming code and learned which play options to choose to amass the highest scores. Malay boys dive into the same binhex, but their search is for knowing where the game has programmed the monster to lurk, so they will be ready for it. They are not after money, they want prestige among friends.

All this would be mere reportage but for the fact that the typical image path for the young Chinese MBA is to build the highest profit performance by mastering the rules of financial score-keeping, and the typical image path for the Malay PolyTech graduate is to get a job in government or education where power comes from controlling the rules of game.

In these teen-year behaviors we can see parallels in how Asia's governments have configured their informational delivery systems to advance not merely political and economic agenda, but the preservation of cultural dispositions about what knowledge is supposed to do for the public weal: Malaysia has opted for a government-controlled IT system in which online delivery exists largely to attract capital to its sequestered showcase industrial park, the Multimedia Super Corridor; very few applications will move into society at large.

Singapore has embraced a government-vested informational infrastructure that is the most elaborate and liberal anywhere in Asia; the main taboos are porn and politics.

India is adopting the hands-off system of Bangalore in which pure market forces focus on information management as a job-creator. Malaysia's approach is further isolating a government-controlled hermetic society. Singapore's was designed (starting in the 1980s!) to produce a society that places more value on education than on entertainment, which is why it wants the Internet in every home. India's system has created the largest middle class, but one whose intellectual products have little effect on the rest of society; India's technoclass also tends to be the most hindutva (culturally conservative).

The economic fallout from 1997 will not change the long-term attractiveness of Asia as an info-place. Asia has surprised us many times before; it is in the silent tsunami phase of the next surprise even now.