The second part contains four chapters about digital media governance. We begin with Ana Gascon Marcen's chapter on data privacy protection in Japan and South Korea, followed by Deirdre Sneep's chapter on government warnings about playing Pokémon GO in public places. Both chapters look at regulations of digital technologies at the national level. The next two chapters focus on North Korea: Micky Lee and Weiqi Zhang discuss why the Western concept of intellectual property does not apply to counterfeit media content in the country, while Elizabeth Shim discusses how the North Korean government borrows images from South Korean popular culture imagery to showcase its nuclear weapons to citizens and the world. While the first two chapters examine digital technologies in East Asia from a regulatory perspective, the next two use governance as a jumping board from which political-economic and cultural critiques of digital technologies are effected.

This introduction does not aim to provide an exhaustive account of how the three countries respond to technological advancement and international pressure. It will however point out how the four chapters illustrate two tensions in regulating technologies at the national level: First, national governments take into account international governance of digital technologies; second, the ‘objects’ that need to be regulated are often deemed harmful or undesirable to citizens even though they find loopholes in the regulations and use banned technologies behind the back of the state. These two tensions illustrate the dynamic relationship between structure and agency: To what extent do East Asian governments have complete agency to shape international regulations or do international standards constrain national policies? Can national regulations change how citizens conceptualise technologies or does active use of technologies shape regulations? In addition, humans are not the only actors who have agency (Latour, 2005), technologies also have agency to shape how social actors interact with them. As a result, even though governments try to control how technologies are used, technologies also enable users to do things that governments cannot control. The dynamic relationship between structure and agency once again affirms why this edited book uses three approaches – political economy, critical cultural studies, and science and technology studies – to examine media technologies in East Asia.