This is the second in a series of articles about the Internet in Asia written for OJR by Douglas Bullis, a freelance writer based in Malaysia.

Hazidi Hamid, a Malaysian linguist, is also a features writer for one of the most politically controlled newspapers in the region, the New Straits Times. He has traveled widely, including much time in the United States, and knows his Western literature and history far better than most Westerners know Asia's.

I asked him what he -- as one who is on the Net much of the day and who also is a patriotic Malay (which is not necessarily the same as Malaysian) -- thought the Net should bring to Asian society.

'Business people see the Web as a tool of technology or business,' he said. 'They neglect what it can do for history and literature. If you'll notice, most non-business content is old-wine-in-new-bottles stuff. It restates the past in a new medium. We haven't yet figured out how to invent our future with it.'

It might be rejoined, 'Neither have we in the West.'

Hazidi is Muslim. Many of my Asian friends are Chinese Confucians or Indian Hindus. Each of them has inherited calligraphic and literary traditions that predate Gutenberg by millennia. None has a vested interest in information as a commodity, yet all rely on it for their future careers.

I queried some of my friends, 'What will the Net do to your future?'

Some responses: 'The Net is directionless, dimensionless, designless, and soulless. We don't know how to find our own way in it. A lot of us will flounder.' 'You see no faces on the Net. You have no idea who you are dealing with. In Asia, so much depends on what you see on a person's face.' 'Beyond money, there's no philosophy of what meaning is.' 'The Net is about imagining from software, not imagining from inner experience.' 'If the Net is so revolutionary, why do screen dumps come out looking like a printed page?' 'What we know will be channeled by portals even more narrowly than the way publishers channel the novels we get.' 'It changes us from eyewitnesses to sifters of words. There is too much information and too little us.' 'It can become the mightiest sword in the hands of those like McCarthy who accuse first and ask questions later, or those like Ken Starr who shape their prosecution for effect rather than accuracy. The Net is a perfect Iago, you never know who's doing the whispering or if what they say is true.' 'A fully wired world is an almost perfect tool to craft a society that believes only what it is told.' 'Information is the ultimate commodity, and most institutions think of constituents as commodities.' What makes these comments so tartly ironic is that they come from ordinary people in societies Westerners consider repressive, and criticize information ideas we assume to be so liberating. It is also worth considering how lucidly these respondents see the West's relationship to information, and how very little we know of Asia' s equivalent relationships. One of these days, our own Net is going to force us to notice that our fatal flaw isn't that we know too much, it is that we are so often unaware of anything else.

These are the misgivings. What do Asia's OIS's (Original Information Suppliers) think?

'Our model is basically consumerist,' observes Saw Ken Wye of Singapore's National Computer Board, which recently signed on with Microsoft there. 'We see IT as the lever to massively transform Singapore into an information-adept society. Our basic tool is supply-side push services in which every useful kind of database is laid at the public's door to see which information is the most demanded and fruitful. There is no real motive of profit involved. This is a purely governmental initiative, although it is clear to everyone that once the market for information demand is defined, there will be substantial opportunities for private enterprise.'

To that end, in 1996 Singapore undertook a plan to wire every home and business on the island with fiber optic lines, which now carry over 100 databases, with a strong weight on the educational side. There is an obvious, though unstated, intent to develop a socially meaningful alternative to satellite TV. This project is now near completion and should fuel no end of PhD theses devoted to what happens when you completely hardwire a complex and affluent society with a very different standard of media content -- Courtyard Content -- than the Market Content of the West.

Malaysia has taken the opposite approach: elitist exclusionism intended to benefit a handful of the politically connected. The so-called Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is not at all the advanced information infrastructure it is claimed to be; it is a high-tech IT park designed to attract multinationals with cheap land and labor much the same way the country first lured semiconductor operations. The few applications that will be allowed into society at large tend to help the government control its citizens: national identity cards, electronic government, telemedicine.

The MSC's other applications -- R&D clusters, worldwide manufacturing and borderless marketing -- are conveniently firewalled into an enclave that markedly resembles the enclave system that kept Malacca's worldly traders away from inland populaces during the pre-colonial sultanate era.

South Korea's approach is a mix of the two. The government there is homing in on multimedia content as a way to link up with U.S. and European partners, while laying a fiber optic backbone network covering most of the country to link households to consumer-type interactive applications by 2000, according to forecasts.

Note that all these are efforts to contain delivery in a medium Westerners generally believe cannot be contained. Why are Asian governments trying so hard to control their spigots when so many are gushing elsewhere?

Some of the anti-free-flow arguments are visceral. My friend Hazidi told me, 'I read online where in early November somebody on eBay offered two cases of hypodermic needles, five sets of Kevlar body armor, 33 AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, four lots of Talon flesh-shredding ammo, 148 switchblade knives, and six Uzi submachine guns. We Asians wonder why a country should be more worried about the First Amendment than helping people traffic in lethal goods with no apparent socially redeeming value.' (In Malaysia possessing an unlicensed gun or ammunition is a capital crime.)

Other anti-free-flow arguments reveal conflicts between borderlessness and taboos. In India, when Maharashtra-state political activists tried to close the doors of the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, the international business press interpreted it as hostility to multinationals. It never dawned on them that, to Indians, KFC had come to their country to make money by killing things.

The fiercest anti-free-flow argument is governmental fear of Liberation by Depression. As standards of living go down, people tend to demand greater accountability in government. Governments see this translating into a demand for greater popular participation and equity.

Governments are frightened by the hollowing-out of the stability-loving middle classes, many of whose members are presently descending into penury.

Indonesia has been through riots before, but what happened on the streets of Malaysia after the Anwar Ibrahim arrest terrified government officials everywhere. They finally realized how swiftly information can move off the Net into Internet cafes and living rooms -- both of which mainly accommodate the middle class.

These arguments for containment are, from their articulators' points of view, solid ones. Have we considered how our Web assumptions look in others' eyes?

If there can be said a single, recurring theme in Western assumptions about information, it is that facts promote liberal democracy. Not just multi-party politics, but all the things that underpin it, such as the rule of law, respect for property rights and absence of authoritarian repression. The main role of business interests is to shepherd this along using the latest technology, for which due profit motive is ensured by the size of the market created from personal expression.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison articulated the Net's update of this attitude at the Asia-Pacific IT Conference in Tokyo last November. 'Everything is going to electronic markets,' he said. 'If you want an efficiently educated population at a reasonable price you have to do it electronically ? The World Wide Web can be accessed by a multiplicity of inexpensive devices over software that no one company controls. More and more markets will become networked and electronic, from stocks to designer clothing and even labor.'

But isn't there a danger that commoditization of this kind will do to information what it does to food and clothes? Many Asians see standardization as deculturing. They see the Net as a pretty constricted content provider compared with the insights of their local news outlets. Portal-site reportage stripped from the wire services comes off as a blitz of quick cuts not much more pertinent than any single image in a car ad.

Multimedia special effects make it hard to see where the visual glitz ends and visual truth begins. ? Financial reporting combines too much pretense with too much hindsight. The pyramid style comes off as crude to a people brought up on the literary ideal of a grand procession of emotion beginning with the subtle and ending with a cataclysm.

I once attended the dedication ceremony of an industrial park development in Bintulu, Sarawak. At the terminus of the newly paved access road was a splendid gate, two stories tall, made of plastered brick, effusively decorated in the Uzbekhi style of pale-pastel traceries. It was truly a monumental and quite lovely proclamation of what was to come. But at that moment it led to nothing. Beyond it lay barren ground and stakes connected by ribbons. Nothing else.

In Asia, ideas about the Net are like ideas about industrial parks and religions and gods. The splendid facade must rise first, to demonstrate that the ideal is worthy of being made real.

The Net we want may not be the Net others want. Shouldn't we listen to them?