Netizenship, activism and online community transformation in Indonesia

273 Pages·2017·2.937 MB·English

by  SETO, ARIO

NETIZENSHIP,
ACTIVISM AND
ONLINE COMMUNITY
TRANSFORMATION
IN INDONESIA
ARIO SETO
Netizenship, Activism and Online Community
Transformation in Indonesia
Ario Seto
Netizenship, Activism
and Online
Community
Transformation
in Indonesia
Ario Seto
Goethe University Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Germany
ISBN 978-981-10-5396-2 ISBN 978-981-10-5397-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5397-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950087
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P
reface
One night in September 2009 in Surakarta, popularly known by its shorter
name ‘Solo’, I was taking a public microbus on my return to Indonesia
after two years in field research. It was shortly after 10 p.m., about the
time when shops around the city were closing and workers were rushing
home. A few minutes later, I realized that, very much in contrast to my
experience a few years back while taking the microbus in Solo, the bus was
silent even though it was full. These passengers, who are co-workers, were
not talking with each other. That experience was both different and mem-
orable, as, a few years back, taking a ride together in such cramped space
in this small city of Solo would have unavoidably required small talk—at
the very least—in the interest of being polite. That night, instead of chat-
ting with each other, the passengers were engaging with their mobile
phones. Indeed, while everybody said goodbye to the other passengers,
and sometimes even exchanged hugs and handshakes, during the trip they
were absorbed with their phones.
Some weeks later, I met with some old friends at a small reunion in
Jakarta and there was a moment when they took a break from our cozy
chat in order to quickly check their phones so they could reply to their
messages before returning to our conversation. Although texting or online
short message communication has been popular on the archipelago since
the late 1990s, such avid use of digital communication was relatively new
for me even though I had only been away from Indonesia for two years.
These encounters also reminded me of a while back when I asked one of
my German friends about his vacation in Borneo in 2008. He quickly
v
vi PREFACE
recounted his fascination with the use of smart technology in Indonesia,
declaring: ‘Everybody has a Blackberry in Borneo!’
Besides these visible usages of smartphones, I also encountered the
gathering of a bicycle club while campaigning for bike-to-work. These
bicyclists had matching T-shirts with ‘Kaskus online community’ written
on it. I was intrigued at that moment. A few years earlier, Kaskus members
would not have gone offline publicly and called themselves a ‘community’
since, being famous for its circulation of illegal material circulation, the
forum was an underground online medium.
These relatively random experiences motivated me some years later, to
conduct research on the subject of digital (new) media engagement in
Indonesia. The basic question at that time was simply: What do Indonesians
like to do when they go online? One of the initial answers that I received
from my interlocutors is that they like to go to online forums to have
steady online chatting partners.
There are some issues that I would like to share in this introduction.
First, is the main challenge of undertaking a new media study, namely the
actuality of the research. As digital media rapidly changes, the study evolves
immensely as well. In 2015, Google Trends indicated that global searches
on ‘computers’ have been rapidly declining since April 2007 while inquiries
about ‘smartphones’ were steadily increasing. The same comparison shows
an even sharper result if the recorded search is limited to Indonesia, as
‘smartphone’ has been more popular than ‘computer’ since August 2013.
Google Trends shows that after September 2007, the then three-year-
old ‘Facebook’ was already more popular than ‘E-Mail’ and ‘Internet Relay
Chat’, which had been a popular entry in the early 2000s.1 Such data how-
ever does not guarantee that Facebook will always reign as a digital medium.
Studies show that with the exception of Twitter, there will be a general
decline of social media platforms including Facebook in the years to come
(Bauckhage and Kersting 2014; Miller 2013). Global public interest in
‘digital networks’ has been declining since 2004, while the ‘online com-
munity’ has remained relatively stable despite fluctuations.2 Google Books’
Ngram data from 1998 to 2016 show that there was a shift in 2002 when
‘social media’ became more popular as a subject than ‘virtual media’.3
During my research period from 2010 to 2015, several online threads
in the online discussion forum where I dwelled were archived, and some
even deleted; other online spaces like Politikana.com and Salingsilang.
com—which were famous in Indonesia during this research—have
PREFAC E vii
dissolved and their websites have met their end. As a programming platform,
technology, user interest, and inventors change; current research is required
to comprehend the rich texture of user-technology interaction. Accordingly,
this research is an attempt to determine what will outlast ‘smartphones’,
‘computers’, ‘Facebook’, ‘social media’, or maybe ‘digitality’ itself. I started
this research with a primary focus on mobile telecommunication and
Internet connection. At its end, I have written my ethnographic research
based on my interlocutors’ experience, which shows the pertinence of
‘online community’ more than anything proposed earlier.
The second concern is what I refer to as the ‘particularity-universality
discussion’. Studies on digital and online media have presented that although
media engagement creates shared practices across cultures, classes, genders,
and political constraints (e.g. Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002; Katz
2008; Jones 2002; Boellstorff 2008), they also show that each engagement
is particular and bound to the contextuality of the users, the gadget, the
platform, and sometimes their offline world (e.g. Castells et al. 2009; Smith
and Kollock 1999; Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002; Gerbaudo 2012;
Danet 2001; Barendregt 2005; Wellman and Gulia 1999).
This research is no exception. Therefore, in presenting the life of an
online community in Indonesia’s Java, I always kept the particularity of my
interlocutors—Indonesian, Javanese, Solonese, online dwellers, online
forum members—and their universal digital and online media engagement—
online dwelling, forum making, cyberculture, online chatting, shielded
identity chat, and communication organization—as two sides of a single
coin. For this reason, other media studies drawn from other parts of the
world are included in the discussion to seek out enriching comparative
insights. For example, Tom Boellstorff (2008) and Celia Pearce’s (2009)
approaches have been pivotal in underscoring the creativity and reproduc-
tion of online communities, while the classic works of Howard Rheingold
([1993] 2000) and Brenda Danet (2001) are reminders of the online-
offline reciprocity in digital media engagement.
On the subject of community and digital media-based social m ovements
or citizenship in Indonesia, Merlyna Lim (2003a, b, 2005, and 2013) and
David Hill and Khrisna Sen (2005) are fundamental authorities. Their
findings have provided entries into observing the contours of Indonesian
online and civic participation, especially while capturing the media engage-
ment dynamic after the fall of the authoritarian government of President
Suharto in 1998.
viii PREFACE
Since digital media engagements are closely related to communication
and the subject of perception, the work of Tim Ingold (2000, 2010,
2011), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002), and George Herbert Mead
(1938) offer a helpful frame for the discussions on the procedural course
of intersubjective communication and individuals’ relation to their envi-
ronments both online and offline. Taken together, their studies enrich the
effort to understand the unique online and gadgetry experience of my
interlocutors.
It is also worth noting that I differentiate ‘digital’, ‘online’, and the prefix
‘cyber-’. While ‘digital’ underscores the technical terms of a multimedia
technology which is not analog, ‘online’ signifies the existence of an Internet
connection and connectivity. Taking a picture with a smartphone is a digital
practice as the visual scene is captured, stored, and manipulated with a digi-
tal gadget, but it only becomes an online practice when the picture is
uploaded to the online space. Digital practice could be conducted offline,
while online practice refers to the existing flow of data bytes. When a par-
ticular case, event, practice, or act involves both states of digital and online
or when it is to be approached as an entirety, I use the prefix ‘cyber-’.
This book contains seven chapters. The first chapter delivers my doubt
about today’s fascination with social media and online-based digital pro-
tests, arguing that it is misleading to be optimistic about digital citizenship
simply by looking at the large number of protests, because netizens’ strug-
gle to establish civic participation that goes beyond the time of the event. In
this chapter, I also discuss how Tim Ingold’s (2000, 2010, 2011) approach
on wayfaring by reflecting on the dynamics of environments could help in
understanding the struggle of netizens. I will do this by advocating
approaches to the online community by looking at members’ experience of
‘being-in-the-online world’ (e.g. Rheingold 2000; Jones 1995; Pearce
2009). Chapter 1 also illustrates the history of Kaskus, the online commu-
nity in which I dwelled, and its surrounding environments, in an effort to
make sense of the cultural resources of my subjects, the Solo Kaskusers.
Chapter 2 explores the online forum as a place of dwelling where
cyberspace and cyberculture intersect to simultaneously guide both the mer-
riness of chatting and the discipline required for online dwelling. It purports
that for Kaskus members, or Kaskusers, the experience of being online is
as meaningful as face-to-face interactions as it signifies the community’s
presence tied to five modalities that shape Kaskus: colloquial language,
norms of equality, continuous participation, databanking, and online
r eputation in fighting against hoaxes and fake news or simply bad information.
PREFAC E ix
The members’ discipline in establishing digital footprints acted as an early
filter to identify who could become a netizen and deserves to dwell in the
online community.
As the community expanded their activities, the borders between online
dwelling and the offline worlds became obscured. It is this intersection
that Chapter 3 explores as part of online community activity transforma-
tion. It explains how going offline became a rite of passage that allowed
users to pursue a deeper relationship in both worlds with their fellow
online community members, while also acting as a medium by which
online norms could be advocated in offline practices. The reflective detach-
ment between the two worlds allowed the online community’s role in the
society to take shape, influenced by the Javanese approach to body and
sense, and of the world and self.
Chapter 4 further explores Kaskusers’ efforts to make sense of the
parallel online and offline realities by looking at their struggle to establish
a normative order. As Kaskus members began to realize that their chat
c ommunity was becoming more involved in various social movements
while taking their leisure time away, they determined that a narrative of
justification, such as the notion of prudence, was urgently needed. This
p roduction of ethic for netizenship was a contingency to keep the com-
munity alive at the risk of losing those members who refused to participate
in such engagements. Accordingly, the chapter also describes how the shift
from the online to the offline marked how ‘social activism’ becomes a
tangible realization of digital power.
Chapter 5 describes the effort of members of the Kaskus online com-
munity to become active netizens in everyday life through monitoring
sanctions, and civil correction. Chapter 6 summarizes the problems they
are facing because of their ‘organic community’ model. Chapter 7 offers
the reasons why the current practice of digital citizenship remains unset-
tling. Accordingly, it discusses how the approach on the organic co mmunity
is methodologically influential since Kaskus, the community of netizens,
was not shaped overnight; instead, it evolved through procedural
consequences.
Frankfurt, Germany Ario Seto
x PREFACE
Notes
1. Each word and keyword was entered on https://trends.google.com/
trends/
2. Ibid.
3. Ngram data analysis on October 2016: https://books.google.com/ngrams
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