Krishna Sen

Wiring the Warung to global gateways: The Internet in Indonesia

The global enthusiasm about the Internet has infused the reception of this new communication technology in Indonesia. In much of this discourse—both in Indonesia and elsewhere—there is a tendency to invest the technology with a certain sociopolitical determinacy, that is, a belief that the technology will affect all societies in a particular way, regardless of its specificities. In our very preliminary survey here of the Internet in Indonesia, we want to test some of the Utopian projections about the Internets democratic potential in the context of Indonesian politics in the mid-1990s. While Indonesia remains one of the least networked countries in Southeast Asia,2 with an estimated forty thousand subscribers by the end of 1996, the Internet has been embraced by both the technophilic developmentalists (personified by Minister B. J. Habibie) within the New Order state and by the middle-class opposition to that coterie. Of course the Internet (or more correctly, CMCs, Computer Mediated Communications technology), like any other technology, lends itself to a limited, but varied, range of (occasionally contradictory) possibilities. We want to understand which of the technological options of the Net are political options in Indonesia.

'Chinese' Indonesians in national cinema

Abstract Through much of post‐colonial history and particularly during the so‐called ‘New Order’ (under General Suharto), Indonesian citizens of ethnic Chinese descent have been caught in a strangely ambiguous position: they have enjoyed enormous economic power while at the same time being threatened with politico‐cultural effacement. This paper is an attempt to understand that ambiguity in relation to the Indonesian cinema – both around questions of industry history and around issues of representation of national and ethnic identity on screen. The paper traces the presence, the erasure and the absent‐presence of Indonesias ethnic Chinese minority from the establishment of a film industry in Indonesia in the 1930s to the post‐New Order political shifts, opening up possibilities for a new public discourse of Chineseness. I argue however that the openness of current Indonesian culture and politics, while providing the necessary condition for re‐imagining the Chinese Indonesians, does not ensure a radical shift in a politics of representation, deeply embedded in the textual practices of the film industry and more widely in the cultural and political history of modern Indonesia.