Web U2: Emerging online communities and gendered intimacy in the Asia-Pacific region

Unquestionably, the zeitgeist of Web 2.0 is symbolized by the dominance of social networking sites (SNS) and user-created content (UCC). MySpace, Facebook, and Cyworld mini-hompy are but a few examples of SNS that are becoming increasingly part of urban everyday life and interwoven into the historicity of the Internet. Web 2.0 has promised much about new forms of participation, creation, collaboration, and authorship, and yet within each location, we can find examples of both empowerment and exploitation. This is particularly the case in the divergent region of the Asia-Pacific. Rather than the region being a sum of 'imagined communities' (Anderson 1983), this paper argues that the distributed social networks of Web 2.0 UCC is formed, informed, and maintained through the perpetual process of 'imaging communities.' These imaging communities can be seen in the visual, textual, and aural modes of UCC and can be seen to reflect the region's new technocultural cartographies.