Another reason that’s often cited for Indonesia’s social media addiction—and this is quite serious—is the traffic. Jakarta alone is responsible for 2.5 percent of all the world’s tweets, and most of them are probably composed while sitting stationary in the notorious macet, the gridlock that is one of the city’s abiding features. But personally, I think that Indonesia was always going to be a place that embraced social media with enthusiasm. Millions of Indonesians were using the long-forgotten Friendster network before anyone had ever heard of Facebook. It’s all down to the fact that this is a country where social contact is as fundamental a need as food and water.
Before There Was Facebook:
I’d been working in Indonesia for barely a week when the invites started popping up in my email inbox: Ari wants to add you on Friendster; Fitri wants to add you on Friendster…
The forgotten social media platform Friendster was launched in California way back in 2002. It had many of the features that would eventually make Facebook such a phenomenon, but it didn’t really catch on—apart from in Indonesia, that is. By the start of 2007 Friendster had something like 4 million users in Indonesia, which might not sound like much until you realize that in the entire world only 12 million people had Facebook accounts at that stage. But once the competition heated up, Friendster struggled to keep pace, and by the time it breathed its last in 2015 hardly anyone noticed its passing, not even in Indonesia.
THE INDONESIAN BLOGOSPHERE
There are something like five million Indonesian bloggers, furiously posting on every topic under the sun. The handy thing for foreigners is that a surprising number of the best Indonesian blogs are written in English. There’s the big cheese of the tech blogging scene, Budi Putra, the utterly awesome backpacking ladies of Indohoy, and a whole bunch of seriously glitzy fashion and lifestyle bloggers—amongst who the uncrowned queen is definitely Diana Rikasari, the woman behind the funky Hot Chocolate & Mint blog.
Unsurprisingly, the idea that you can make money—maybe even lots of it—from blogging, has caught people’s attention in Indonesia. In 2014 a cannily considered video appeared online of a 21-year-old high school dropout and sometime duck herder from Semarang named Eka Lesmana, supposedly collecting his monthly 120 million-rupiah pay-out from Google AdSense at his local post office. There was a lot of excitement on social media, and young Eka seemed to be established as something of a blogging-for-cash guru. The thing is though, the URLs of the dozen blogs he supposedly maintained were never revealed. In the world of blogging, as everywhere else, tales of impossible riches are always worth taking with a pinch of salt…
SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICS
Protest and activism have long been a phenomenon at the rowdier end of Indonesian politics, but these days there’s usually more noise online than on the streets. In 2012 a viral Twitter hashtag—#SaveKPK—actually succeeded in prompting the then president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to weigh in on the side of Indonesia’s beleaguered Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in a tussle with some very high-level officials. The presidential race of 2014, meanwhile, was one of the most social media-focused elections the world had ever seen. Facebook claimed to have identified 200 million election-related interactions during the campaign, and Twitter totted up 95 million election-related tweets. Inevitably, the dark side of social media was on full display too, with a barrage of malicious online rumors about the winning candidate, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
Community connectivity: “Kampoeng Cyber” is a traditional neighborhood in Yogyakarta with Wi-Fi for all, celebrated in colorful street art.
A Viral Tiger
Indonesia has a knack for online humor, often based on the most bizarre starting points. In early 2017 someone noticed that an army base at Cisewu in West Java had a very bad statue of a tiger for a mascot, snapped a photo of it, and posted it online. Within a few days hilarious memes featuring reworked images of the “Cisewu Tiger” were going viral, not only in Indonesia but around the world. The only people not to see the funny side were the soldiers. After several weeks of embarrassment they demolished the statue!
The crazy thing about all of this is that still only about half of all adult Indonesians use the Internet. If the country makes this much noise while running at 50 percent capacity, imagine the roar once the rest of its citizens get online…
Diana Rikasari, Indonesia’s Online Fashion Queen
One of the biggest names in the Indonesian blogosphere is the funky fashionista Diana Rikasari. Blessed with a canny command of English and a delightfully wacky sense of style, which she describes as “playful, colorful, and adventurous”, she launched her Hot Chocolate and Mint blog way back in 2007. Since then she’s become a veritable phenomenon, with endless awards, her own fashion line, a bestselling book, and more besides. Diana claims that the lucrative career she’s built off the back of her blog was all an accident. “I never planned any of this,” she says, “I didn’t even know that blogs (or mine, in particular) could open so many doors.” Mind you, her background in business and marketing probably helped.
These days she somehow manages to maintain the original blog plus wildly active Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts, a business, and various brand ambassadorships.
“I’m very strict about time management. I have a to-do list for everything,” she says.
As to just why Indonesia has such an addiction to social media, Diana has her own theory: “Indonesians really care about other people, sometimes even too much. I think most Indonesians use social media to stalk other people’s lives!”
www.dianarikasari.blogspot.com
CHAPTER 2
SOCIETY AND DAILY LIFE
From the office to the schoolroom, and from Saturday night to Monday morning, it’s time to take a look at Indonesian society and daily life. This is where we’ll find out why Indonesian kids get so stressed at exam time, what it means to be an Indonesian feminist, how to hang out Indonesian-style, and why it’s never normal to want to be on your own…
WORKADAY LIFE IN IDONESIA
When my class at primary school did a project on Indonesia we were given the idea that pretty much everyone in the country was either a pre-industrial rice farmer, or a becak (pedicab) driver! Needless to say, the world of work in Indonesia is a bit more complicated than that…
Traditionally, the Indonesian view of employment broke down quite simply. If you were from a poor, uneducated background you were set for a life of labor, probably on the land, and without much by the way of prospects. If you were rich, well you were rich already. And if you were somewhere in the middle, you aimed to join the public sector. The idea of a successful salaried career in the private sector was unusual: if you weren’t set for hard labor or public