translation goes wrong: the Indonesian phrase here really means “stay away from drugs”!
Still, Indonesians definitely want to be able to speak English, and if you’re a foreigner wandering in a place popular with tourists—Bogor’s Botanic Gardens, Jakarta’s Fatahillah Square, or the Borobudur temple—you will be pounced upon by gangs of students looking to practice their English skills. And they seem to be getting somewhere. English is definitely now more widely spoken than when I first came to Indonesia, and in the last couple of years I’ve started hearing trendy young Indonesians speaking English amongst themselves in cafés and shopping malls. Social media and the Internet has had a lot to do with this—the posts and comments on the average Indonesian Facebook page these days come in a glorious mishmash of English, regional languages, and Bahasa Gaul.
An Archipelago of Languages
Bahasa Indonesia might be spoken from one end of the country to the other, but it’s just the start when it comes to Indonesia’s linguistic make-up. There are something like 700 local languages, plus infinite dialects. The big regional languages are spoken by millions of people, and the biggest, Javanese, with nearly 100 million, has more native speakers than French. Others are the preserve of a vanishing handful. The little island of Alor in East Nusa Tenggara Province is home to just 150,000 people, but it has 15 distinct languages!
INDONESIA: THE SOCIAL MEDIA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
A few years back I spent a night hanging out with a bunch of local mystics at an ancient temple in the mountainous wilds of East Java. Sitting outside a bamboo shack, only an oil lamp to stave off the velvety darkness, they talked to me of supernatural energy and invisible realms. It was the sort of thing that foreign travel writers love to think of as “the real Indonesia”. By the time I got back to Surabaya the next day, three of the amulet-toting mystics had added me on Facebook…
Yogyakarta school kids getting online.
When I first traveled in Indonesia, “Internet” generally meant a bank of rickety old desktops in a warnet—a warung Internet, or “Internet café”—with appalling connection speeds. But these days the whole country sizzles with digital connectivity. There are housewives on Twitter and grannies on WhatsApp, and an army of commuters furiously updating their statuses in the midst of the Jakarta rush hour each morning.
INDONESIANS ONLINE
Go into just about any café in the country—from a rickety roadside coffee stall in rural Sumatra to a branch of J.CO (like Starbucks, only with added donuts) in a Jakarta shopping mall, and look at the customers. As each newcomer takes his or her seat there’s an audible clunk. It’s the sound of a weighty bit of Internet-ready mobile technology hitting the table where it has to sit, in line of sight at all times.
As in many countries with less than perfect infrastructure, lots of people in Indonesia skipped the stage of home Internet connection and went straight to mobile. And it’s always easier to keep up a lively Instagram account when you carry your main form of Internet access with you wherever you go. Something like 90 percent of Indonesians with personal Internet access—and there are about 100 million of them—use social media.
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
