The Malaysian dilemma: advertising's catalytic and cataclysmic role in social development

Abstract

This article is concerned with how ethnic harmony, national identity and political ideology are delivered, then disrupted by advertising, consumption and a globalizing world. Working with a sample of over 250 television commercials culled from the (then) three commercial networks in Malaysia in 1997, I show how ads are used by government as an intentional tool to manage the multiethnic, stratified social relations that comprise Malaysian society. This, in turn, produces three dilemmas. (1) potentially greater racial segmentation where the government was seeking to eliminate it entirely; (2) in part, because the nation is being united under the traditions and beliefs of only one (the dominant) ethnic group; (3) an attempt to repudiate the very exo-cultural system which is serving to remediate these perceived dysfunctions. In a concluding section the author introduces the concept of `semiotic literacy' to argue that ideological domination by the Malaysian government is possible given the relatively low level of symbolic fluency held by the consumers of television advertising. However, such control will be increasingly difficult to maintain as the audience becomes more symbolically fluent, in part because of the increasing number of signs entering the context from an increasing number of external sources.