New Mandala

Sitting here at the National Thai Studies Centre’s 2009 Thai Update I am struck by the news that two Thai citizens have been charged with ”feeding untrue information through a computer system which undermined the security of the nation”.  They have been accused of spreading rumours about the king’s health.  Apparently a translation of a Bloomberg article is [...]

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If you go the website of Thailand’s Ministry of Information and Communication Technology there is a page where you can alert the authorities to the existence of any “inappropriate website”. 

The “types of complaint” to choose from  includes lèse majesté, obscenity, gambling, narcotics, etc.
Do any New Mandala readers have experience with the site?  Has anybody made [...]

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“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real”
- The story of the stone, or the dream of the red chamber, Xueqin 1973, p.55)
The award winning NGO “Reporters Without Borders” (RWB) noted that Thailand has slipped to 130th this year from 124th the previous year in terms of comparative [...]

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Patchara [Kerdsiri, a 32 year old Web program developer] said Twitter opens the chance for users to be close to famous people. Fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, or @thaksinlive, veteran politician Chaturon Chaisang, or @chaturon, and Patee Sarasin, or @patee122, have replied to his “tweets”.
- Extracted from Kornchanok Raksaseri, “Calling Twitterers…to Thai coffeeshop”, Asia [...]

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If everything goes according to plan New Mandala will transfer to a new address (asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala) on Wednesday, 28 October 2009. We have enjoyed almost three and a half years on our current site but organisational changes here at the ANU mean that this is a good time to make a new home.  There will be [...]

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Still Life in Moving Vehicles is a wonderful blog on a very distinctive aspect of urban Thai culture. Enjoy!

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Those who hang around the Thailand Internet scene will probably be aware that for the past few years young Thai webmaster extraordinaire Panrit (formerly Nattawud) Daoruang has been locked up in Samut Prakan Central Prison.  Known by the nickname “Gor”, he was recently released.  One of the websites run by his long-time teacher, mentor and [...]

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Web censorship regimes in mainland Southeast Asia are a regular topic of discussion here at New Mandala. Of course, anybody who spends time in Burma gets used to the government’s relatively consistent effort to block potentially subversive online material.  And, jokes aside, since the coup of 2006 Thailand has also beefed up resources to clamp [...]

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While people may and should debate on the merit of the lese majeste law, outright verbal attacks online, especially those that are unsubstantiated have led to a feeling that the online virtual debating community is degenerating into verbal abuse and uncompromising dogmatism, both from the political left and right. These reckless and vicious contributors end [...]

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Most people who arrive at New Mandala are looking for something meaty about the countries of mainland Southeast Asia.
A quick glance at the search engine terms that consistently bring readers to rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/newmandala gives a strong indication of reader interests.  Some of the phrases that rank particularly highly are the predictable ones: “sufficiency economy”, “burma cyclone”, [...]

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