Merlyna Lim
Cyber-Urban Activism and the Political Change in Indonesia
Abstract
Focusing on cyber and physical urban civic spaces in Indonesia, this paper attempts to provide detailed instances of the ways in which space and place have been bound up with the formation of (political) identities in the history of conflicts and struggles over political power. By tracing the emergence of cyber and physical civic spaces during and after the political reform of 1998, this paper argues that cyberspace and physical (urban) space have become interdependent dimensions of political activism.
This paper uses the case of the May 1998 popular activism against the state to show how cyberspace provides an opening for political activism to, first, break through the barriers of state monopoly over the production of knowledge and flows of information and, second, to reach a national and even international audience through the cascading of information from the Internet to people on the street using other media technologies.
By examining the existence and roles of both cyber and physical civic spaces in the routine urban city life of Jakarta after May 1998, this paper further argues that the future continuity of these civic spaces in everyday life very much depends on the roles of the state, corporate economy actors and civil society in governing the provision of and access to them. Processes to transform overtly-contested, often violent and yet ephemeral sites of political action into routinely accessible spaces for tolerance and peaceful civil society are a central issue in the ongoing political reform in Indonesia.
Merlyna Lim: Universiteit Twente, Afdeling TDG / KPMG Building, 1st Floor. Postbus 217 / 7500AE, Enschede, The Netherlands