ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to conceptualize technology as one of the several global and local inequalities associated with twenty-first century modernity, Asian or otherwise. It argues that the uneven landscape of Asian modernity may be implicated in the development of technological identities, as citizens are interpellated as technological subjects, albeit in varied and culturally specific ways. Schmidt is also skeptical about the notion of multiple modernities and argues that scholarly explorations using this lens have invariably limited themselves to cultural factors, rather than taking a holistic structural approach of modernization theory. Keyman and Koyuncu use the framework of alternative modernities as explicated by Ong and highlight the key role played by new economic and civil society actors in repositioning the discourses of modernity within the Turkish state. Thompson suggests that economic crisis forms an effective critique for ideology in light of the collapse of the Asian values argument following the financial bust of 19970-1998.
