ABSTRACT
It is difficult to talk about the Indonesian Internet or the Indonesian ‘World Wide Web’ (WWW) as one talks about other national media. The Indonesian limits we are trying to impose here on our study of the Internet and WWW, which are by definition global, are much less self-evident than notions of other national media such as Indonesian cinema or the Indonesian press or television.1 Even our attempt to talk about the Internet in Indonesia is imprecise as some of the groups and individuals who enter the bit of cyberspace on which we are focussed are not necessarily in Indonesia or Indonesian by any legal or ethnic criteria. We have therefore set boundaries for this study not by defining what is ‘Indonesian’ on the net, but in identifying online activities that are overtly connected to street demonstrations, parliamentary debates and other material sites of Indonesian political life. Such analysis is necessarily based on assumptions emerging out of Indonesian studies about the fall of Suharto and its aftermath on the one hand and theories of the connections between media and politics on the other. The rest of this chapter is an attempt to lay bare those assumptions.
