Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

digital change in Indonesia beyond its current focus on how civil society groups leverage digital media to gain
political influence. It does so by considering the determining role technologies play in precipitating novel cultural
forms that remain under-researched in scholarship examining the Indonesian digital.
Alila Pramiyanti Hijabers on Twitter
In recent years, the hjab has emerged at the centre of a new market for commodities identified as Islamic.
Muslim women have been active participants in this new Islamic culture industry as both consumers and
producers. It is significant that female consumers participate in Muslim fashion not just as shoppers in malls
but also as users of interactive social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, establishing online
communities of consumption around veiling, such as Hijabers’ Community – the subject of this paper. This
paper enquires into how social media platforms enable and/or limit the way the Hijabers Community
present themselves as modern Muslim women. It aims to provide new knowledge of Twitter’s role in
shaping the modern Muslim self, as well as to bring the case of the Hijabers Community to advance
understanding of twitter, and its inherent potentials and limitations with regard to digitally mediated
consumption and identity.
Rido Panjaitan Officials in Online Spaces
In recent times, it has become common for Indonesian government officials to rely on online social media to
directly communicate with their constituencies. This paper presents findings of a research project enquiring
into whether this new form of government to citizen communication enhances civic participation in decision
making. I argue that reliance on social media urges public officials to adopt an increasingly informal style of
public communication that contrasts the stock rigidity and superiority of officials’ public communication in
the past. I further argue that, as well as reshaping the officials’ public communication styles, social media is
also exposing them to the banal, everyday concerns of their constituents – matters from which they were
hitherto distanced.
Fiona Suwana
Youth, media literacy and democracy
Through a focus on youth involved in two activist movements - the Save KPK Movement 2015 (an anticorruption
movement in Jakarta) and the ForBali13 (an anti-reclamation movement in Bali) – the paper
explores how online social media afford new kinds of political participation, but also discusses the new risks
politically active youth face when they rely on social media to build and participate in movements. Youths’
uses of social media reveal the emergence of new kinds of political tactics, but also the new threats to
freedoms of expression posed by the Electronic Information and Transactions Law/ITE Law).
Emma Baulch
Mixed messages: telco ads on television
The article examines telco ads made for Indonesian television in order to understand the qualities of
powerful narratives about what it means to be networked in that country. Based on an understanding of
telco ads as texts that encode telecommunications infrastructure with social meaning by turning it into a
commodity form capable of addressing a consuming public, the paper studies the cultural forms the ads
throw up in order to articulate this address, and the media ecology that enables these cultural forms to
circulate. In both their cultural forms and modes of circulation, I argue, telco ads contain mixed messages
about the networked consuming public and the extent of its novelty.
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