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 service, and didn’t already have a silver spoon in your mouth, then you went in for entrepreneurship, be it selling snacks at the side of the road, or creating a booming import-export empire.
But things began to change from the late 1960s as technological advances in agriculture suddenly freed up large numbers of one-time field laborers—especially women, who’d traditionally done much of the planting and harvesting. So where did they go? Into the factories, of course, where Indonesia’s manufacturing economy was just getting going. And as the country industrialized, burgeoning financial and service sectors and a growing consumer economy were part of the package too. There’s been a bit of turbulence along the way, but these days Indonesia’s economy and workforce are as diversified as anywhere—even if some people actually do still work as rice farmers or becak drivers!
Office life at a Jakarta cable TV company.
A JOB FOR LIFE
For much of the 20th century the most attractive employment prospect was a position in the ranks of Indonesia’s vast body of state employees which included military, police, and the sprawling apparatus of the Pegawai Negeri Sipil, PNS, the Civil Service. A civil service position might not be particularly well paid, but it was a job for life with lots of extra formal benefits, not least a pension. There were also, it has to be said, often opportunities for considerable illicit additional earnings in a system notorious for its institutionalized corruption. But perhaps even more importantly than the financial rewards, a civil service job brought prestige. Many of 21st-century Indonesia’s solidly middle class families attained and consolidated that status through the civil service careers of previous generations.
Poking fun at the pegawai negeri—A cartoon mocking civil servants; the captions read “What my friends think I do. What the public think I do. What my boss thinks I do. What my parents think I do. What I think about. What I actually do.”
Even today, amongst the ranks of the lower middle classes, especially in outlying provinces away from the big cities, the chance to don the olive-green civil service uniform remains a very alluring prospect, not least because of the security and prestige it offers.
LIFE IN THE KANTOR
It sometimes seems to me that the various primers and orientation courses aimed at Western expats heading to Indonesia for work do their very best to cast a pall of mystifying orientalist bunkum over the Indonesian office. Take them too seriously and you might come away with the idea that Indonesian employment is an impenetrable labyrinth of arcane eastern mysteries where nothing is as it seems. In reality there’s nothing particularly exotic about the average Indonesian office, although, just like wider Indonesian society, it usually consists of a layer of easy-going warmth over a careful framework of hierarchy and respect. There’s a lot of unspoken emphasis on harmony, and so being disrespectful or doing anything likely to mess with someone’s hierarchical prestige will always cause problems.
Another endless round of meetings and presentations…
The importance and respect given to formal hierarchy in Indonesian workplaces reflects the values of wider society. But I suspect it also has something to do with the fact that Indonesian office culture was originally forged in the civil service, which, like civil services everywhere, is very hierarchical indeed. Indeed, the very word “office” in Indonesian—kantor—still conjures up images of a dimly lit space, filled with untidy files and shuffling olive-green figures, even though these days it’s more likely to refer to a bright room full of frantically motivated techies.
