Teleview and the aspirations of the infrastructural state in Singapore

Stevens, Hallam

Abstract

[Extract] In 1988, Singapore rolled out a pi lot for a homegrown digital computer network. Teleview, as it was called, was a videotex system that used the public telephone network to connect paid subscribers to a central computer via a modem. Users could gain access to information about a variety of topics, including weather, stock market prices, and travel. They could also use online banking, business communication, ticket reservation, and educational services, as well as electronic directories, games, and magazines (Keong 1990). Despite significant government promotion of the project, the rate of uptake was slow. Although the cost was low—equivalent to about USD 5.50 per month, plus three cents per message and thirty-five cents per hour of connection time (Sandfort 1993)—only 5 percent of Singaporean house holds ever subscribed to Teleview (Wong 1997). The system was eventually modified to become a portal through which users could connect to the global internet. Given this brief account, it is tempting to understand Teleview as a kind of failure—something that was not widely adopted and was quickly displaced once the real thing (namely, the World Wide Web) came along. As a corollary, it is also tempting to read Teleview as some sort of desperate (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt by an authoritarian government to curtail the democratizing forces that the internet promised to bring with it. Indeed, Cherian George (2012, 216), one of Singapore’s foremost media critics, quickly dismissed Singapore’s native network: “The Internet’s big bang in the mid-1990s turned the likes of Teleview into white elephants and relegated what were grand national projects to mere footnotes in the history of the online revolution.”

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Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia

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9780824892920

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University of Hawai'i Press

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Honolulu, HI, USA

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