ABSTRACT
How do mobile media technologies shape the identities of city dwellers? In Indonesia the mobile phone – or handphone – has rapidly gained in popularity (Figure 1). Reasons include the lagging state of fixed telephony in homes; its affordability even for low-income people; and omnipresent branding that induces an acute sense of “must have”. Most importantly and central in this chapter, mobile phones offer urban Indonesians rich opportunities for identity construction and expression. In this chapter, I look at how mobile media shape the construction and performance of identities that are specific to life in Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta. Jakarta is both a city-world and a world-city (Augé 2008, xii). As “Indonesia in small”, Jakarta reflects the nation’s ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. However, Jakarta’s urban culture and identity transcend this mosaic. Unlike most other Indonesian cities, in Jakarta the shared symbols, interactions in public, and modes of self-presentation are not based on the rules of one traditional regional culture. Young people in particular base their identities on shared (though contested) ideas about what it means to live a “modern urban life” in the capital city. Mobile media technologies have quickly become part of this dynamic urban culture and have helped to define what it means to be a “modern Indonesian”. In this chapter, based on ethnographic research, I examine two defining urban identity practices: gengsi (the display of prestige) and bergaul (the art of modern socializing), and explore some pervasive tensions that Indonesians feel between the adoption of new technologies and the construction of modern identities.
