Indonesia is undergoing a process of rapid change, with an affluent middle class due to hit 141 million people by 2020. While official statistics suggest that internet penetration is low, over 70 million Indonesians have a Facebook account, the fourth highest group in the world. Jakarta is the Twitter capital of the world with more tweets per minute than any other city around the globe. In the past ten years digitalisation of media content has enabled extensive concentration and conglomeration of the industry, and media owners are wealthier and more politically powerful than ever before. Digital media is a prominent place of contestation between large, powerful oligarchs, and citizens looking to bring about rapid and meaningful change. This book examines how the political agencies of both oligarchs and ‘netizens’ are enhanced by digitalisation, and how an increasingly divergent society is being formed. In doing so, this book enters this debate about the transformations of society and power in the digital age.

This book examines the media in the post-authoritarian politics of twenty-first century Indonesia. It considers how the media is being transformed, its role in politics, and its potential impact in enabling or hampering the development of democracy in Indonesia.

This book analyses the transformation of political representation in contemporary Indonesia to argue the need to better understand how political representatives use claims to engage in storytelling about themselves and the community they represent. By adopting a new approach that focuses on the cultural and performative aspects of representation and draws on a substantive evidence base of representative claims, this book examines common narratives developed by Joko Widodo, Tri Rismaharini, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Ridwan Kamil and Nurdin Abdullah. Through this analysis, the book highlights two key foundations of their claims: technocratic focus and innovative engagement. This study considers how the ideational power generated through the representative claim-making of these leaders interacts and competes with other forms of power. Moreover, the author emphasises the success of the representative claims developed by the innovative technocrats, while noting the impact their emergence has had on the broader context of Indonesian politics. An empirical monograph on new and upcoming leaders in Indonesia, this book will be of interest to scholars of democracy and democratisation and political change in general, and Southeast Asian politics and Indonesian politics in particular.

Entertainment media comprises one of the worlds largest industries and this collection is important not just for explaining what is happening in Indonesian entertainment media, but also for establishing a theoretical framework for the study of entertainment media in other societies.

In the age of digital communication and global capitalism, people’s mental, social and natural environments are interconnected in complex and often unpredictable ways. This book focuses on the visual media, one of the key factors in shaping the contemporary ecology of colliding environments. Case-studies include video artists, community media activists, television programme makers and literary authors in the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia. The author demonstrates that these actors are part of an international creative and social vanguard that reflect on, criticise and rework the multidimensional impact of the visual media in imaginative and innovative ways. Their work explores alternative and more sustainable presents and futures for Indonesia and the world. This research is urgent and timely, as Indonesia has emerged in recent years as one of the world’s most vibrant hubs for contemporary art and media experimentation. Using an innovative interdisciplinary framework of visual culture analysis that derives from a wide range of academic fields, the book will be of interest to academics in the field of Southeast Asian Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies and Art History, Anthropology and Sociology.

The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories brings together research on the diverse Internet histories that have evolved in different regions, language cultures and social contexts across the globe. While the Internet is now in its fifth decade, the understanding and formulation of its histories outside of an anglophone framework is still very much in its infancy. From Tunisia to Taiwan, this volume emphasizes the importance of understanding and formulating Internet histories outside of the anglophone case studies and theoretical paradigms that have thus far dominated academic scholarship on Internet history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the collection offers a variety of historical lenses on the development of the Internet: as a new communication technology seen in the context of older technologies; as a new form of sociality read alongside previous technologically mediated means of relating; and as a new media "vehicle" for the communication of content.

Media, Culture, and Politics in Indonesia is about the institutions and policies that determine what Indonesians write, read, watch, and hear. It covers the print media, broadcast radio and television, computers and the internet, videos, films and music. This book argues that the texts of the media can be understood in two broad ways: 1. as records of a "national" culture and political hegemony constructed by Suharto's New Order and 2. as contradictory, dissident, political and cultural aspirations that reflect the anxieties and preoccupations of Indonesian citizens. Media, Culture, and Politics, now brought back to life as a member of Equinox Publishing's Classic Indonesia series, explains what has escaped state control, not only by self-conscious resistance, but also because of the ownership patterns, technologies, and modes of consumption of media texts and institutions. The role of the media in the downfall of Suharto is examined and the legacy of his New Order is analyzed. This dynamic and innovative text is suitable for all students of Indonesian languages and culture, Asian studies, Southeast Asian studies, cultural studies, media studies, and contemporary politics. Krishna Sen is Professor of Asian Media and Dean of the Humanities Research Centre at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia David T. Hill is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Fellow of the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia

Indonesia, the state with the largest Muslim population in the world, is in a process of continuous societal transformation. From the perspective of Media and Communication Studies, recent political developments towards an increasingly consolidated democratic system are of great interest. The comparison with Germany may seem unusual and asymmetrical. The countries differ with regard to the religious and cultural practices, and media and social developments are neither intertwined nor similar at first glance. A closer look, however, reveals structural similarities between Germany and Indonesia: dynamics and regressions of political transformation under pressure from radical political movements; hyper-modernization in parts of the economies and social life-worlds of post-modern urbanization; a heritage of genocides and cultural struggles over the multi-ethnic and multi-religious fabrics of society. The book deals with the role media play in the course of these political, economic and cultural transformations. Do they ‘follow’ or ‘lead’ the changes in political systems and societies? What can countries learn from each other if they step outside the usual ethnocentric comparisons and engage in a more intense global dialogue? The book is a groundbreaking endeavour in comparative Media and Communication Studies and brings together wellknown researchers from hitherto largely separated academic communities.

This book places Indonesia at the forefront of the global debate about the impact of 'disruptive' digital technologies. Digital technology is fast becoming the core of life, work, culture and identity. Yet, while the number of Indonesians using the Internet has followed the upward global trend, some groups "e;the poor, the elderly, women, the less well-educated, people living in remote communities"e; are disadvantaged. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading researchers and scholars, as well as e-governance and e-commerce insiders, examines the impact of digitalisation on the media industry, governance, commerce, informal sector employment, education, cybercrime, terrorism, religion, artistic and cultural expression, and much more. It presents groundbreaking analysis of the impact of digitalisation in one of the world's most diverse, geographically vast nations. In weighing arguments about the opportunities and challenges presented by digitalisation, it puts the very idea of a technological 'revolution' into critical perspective.

Focusing on the concept of prudence as ethical groundwork for digital practices and activism, this book considers digital media expediency and populism as conflicting required experiences that lead digital citizens to discover activism. It highlights the importance of digital citizens’ experience of ‘being-in-the-digital sphere’ and encourages the reader to look at the dynamics of online movement as a part of a community’s search for significance between the online and offline realms of activism. Based on ethnographic research about the largest Indonesian online community, Kaskus, this book uses Indonesian digital citizenship as an example of online activism in a post-authoritarian state, with media viewed as a tool for democratic advancement and a catalyst for social movements among activists, students, and citizens both in Indonesia and further afield. Set at the intersection of media anthropology, sociology, Asian studies, and Citizenship studies, this book considers the shape and future of digital democracy in post-authoritarian state.