The Polarization of Identity through the Internet

and the Struggle for Democracy in Indonesia

 

Merlyna Lim

University of Twente

 

 

 

Abstract. This article views the processes of localization and identity formation from two case studies in Indonesia: (1) the student movement during the political revolution in 1998 (Orba/New Order regime), and (2) the case of anti-U.S. (or anti-globalization) movement post 11 September 2001. Using these two case studies, the paper shows how the Internet can become a major technological factor in identity formation and filtering by enabling people to access global sources of information while interpreting them in local identity contexts through key nodes and sources.

 

Introduction

 

While every new communication technology raises issues of political democracy and global community, none has been more provocative in its promises than the Internet. Its potential to open channels of global communications and information creates possibilities for ordinary citizens to genuinely participate in public discourse unmediated by either the state or large capitalist-controlled media channels (Grossman, 1995). It thus raises the potential for more democratic forms of governance as people form autonomous political associations to engage in the politics of the public sphere.

Not all observers find comfort in this techno dream. Some see the Internet as a threat to democracy through the ways in which governments and big business use it to manipulate users and create a panopticon of intensified surveillance and control over civil society (Graham, 2000; Lyon, 1994). Yet another view posits that globalization and the Internet lead to a weakening of the state and dissolution of civil society into communes of resistance and projects of violence (Castells, 1997).

These debates are played out in the struggles for power among the state, corporate economy and civil society. In these struggles, the localization of global flows of information and symbolic representations is driven by the creation and assertion of identities. The processes of localization and identity formation are viewed from two case studies in Indonesia: (1) the student movement during the political revolution in 1998 (Orba/New Order regime), and (2) the case of anti-U.S. (or anti-globalization) movement post 11 September 2001. The question posed by contrasting these cases is whether the Internet will assist in expanding democratic spaces or will instead strengthen a tendency for cumulatively more strident communal resistance and political crisis.

By examining the flow of information from cyber to real space in the first case, this article shows how the Internet can be very instrumental to empower civil society in challenging the authoritarian state, thus emerging as a potentially new public sphere. In contrast, the second case shows how the Internet has potential as a site for the revival of primordial, ethno/religious, and communal identities as forms of resistance to both domination by “non-believers” and actors of global-capitalism. Moving beyond its use in resistance to a corrupt regime, the Internet now becomes a site for a project of creating identities for a new state that reverses the dissolution of traditional values and counters the materialism of a decadent world economy manifested in the increasingly monopolistic control and saturation of media for unrelenting accumulation.

This research proposes the idea of “identity filtering” as a way to understand how messages and symbols are received and interpreted by society through globalization and Internet. Identity filtering is a term coined here to indicate a process through which information – in the form of graphic arts as well as words and other symbolic configurations of digital electronic pulses of the Internet – is channeled through meanings, beliefs, accepted values and social institutions to enhance existing or build new identities. This can occur even in the context of information that is contrary to the beliefs underpinning an identity. Identity filtering is thus a process of simultaneously avoiding cognitive dissonance by disregarding unfavorable information while knitting together information that supports a given identity.

In this process, “truth” is inseparable from identity and becomes part of the contest for power relations among various identity groups. In the socializing processes surrounding identity formation, those entrenched in one identity see the views espoused by their leaders as being unassailable while, at the same time, they disparage the beliefs of others as fabrications and lies. In the extreme, truth becomes absolute, without nuance and is non-negotiable. [1] If it can be said that truth is power, it is also true that power is truth, and the Internet, through its ability to send information, symbols and news as truth, is playing a critical role in identity formation and filtering.

In the case of Indonesia, identity formation and filtering is a fundamental process underlying both the democratic and communal resistance movements in the country. Emerging from the conjuncture of religious, racial, and ethnic histories of its past with global forces and power shifts of the moment, the shifting terrain of identity formation in Indonesia raises a critical question for the future: will this basic human need to form collective identities be channeled toward more inclusive, civil and democratic forms of association in society, or will it instead succumb to divisive communal identities sculpted in cyberspace but violently played out in the real world as another attempt to capture the state by a segment of society bent on creating a new hegemony under its construction of truth and its exclusive identity?

Cognitive Dissonance and Identity Filtering in Cyberspace

 

The theory of “selective exposure” states that people would prefer to be exposed to information that is supportive of their opinions and beliefs rather than to unsupportive information which would awaken dissonance (Erikson, 1975). To avoid dissonance, when people are assessing issues, they would rather accept supportive communications and disregard unsupportive communications. This is particularly the case when information counters a self-image or identity of a person. Avoidance of dissonance takes a socially collective dynamics that rely, in part, on the formation of networks that filter out dissonance while emboldening favored identity markers. The Internet is eminently suited to building such networks in a rapid, spatially extensive manner that can send images, icons and new truths around the world in the wink of an eye.

People look for consistency among their own experiences and memories and turn to others for comparison and confirmation. In social psychology, this is termed “cognitive consistency” (Norton, 1983). In facing inconsistency, a person would restore cognitive consistency by re-interpreting the situation to minimize any inconsistency occurs there. This is because people try to reduce the unpleasant internal state – the cognitive dissonance that is set up by any perceived inconsistency among various features of knowledge, feelings and behavior (Festinger, 1957).

This phenomenon is potentially magnified to a very high level when using the Internet. In cyberspace, there are always quantum magnitudes of digital bytes of information that might be available to an Internet user at any given moment. This presents a panoply of potentially overwhelming flow of “facts”, images, and representations of truth and ideas to encounter, process and rationalize. While it is impossible to access all information existing in cyberspace, the Internet technology itself makes it possible to filter the information. The major concern of this article is not the filtering processes done individually but that which is done by the group or organization in order to create or maintain certain identities using the Internet and other forms of media linked to it.

Scaling Up: Identity Formation and the Public Sphere

 

Castells (1997) argues that the formation of identities shared among individuals or collective identity is a fundamental source of meaning and a driving force in contemporary world history. These identities can go beyond small groups to scale up to societal levels of political maintenance, widespread resistance, and movements for peaceful reform or even revolution. To capture this higher level, Castells divides the principal forms of collective identities into three types:

 

·       Legitimizing identities created by dominant institutions of society – notably political regimes in control of the state apparatus and their followers – to extend and rationalize their rule;

·       Resistance identities generated by those who are being marginalized, devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination; and

·       Project identities that go beyond resistance to attempt to actively redefine positions in society and, by so doing, transform relations of power in the prevailing social structure.

Among these three types of identity, resistance identity is crucial in setting the stage for political reform in many parts of the world. It plays a pivotal role in endorsing the rise of civil society against authoritarian states and the domination of global capitalism. These identities also can turn themselves into projects that change the course of history by making a social or political revolution.

The processes of going from resistance to successful projects of political reform are neither universal nor linear. They do not occur with great frequency; successes can become regressive, history is not predestined. Caution must thus be taken in evaluating any one moment as a certain wave of the future. Indonesia is now at a critical juncture in the playing out of these types of identities. Identity filtering, as a psychological mediation of information flows, plays a central role in scaling up from the self to the group and onto the broader, often emotive, identity of “who we are” as a society writ large in relation to the state, economy and other identity formations.

This article is interested in how cognitive filtering mediations embellish “tales” by selecting and interpreting facts to scale up identities to reach levels of potential and actual political transformation. In the information age, the mediations mainly are now being processed to a greater degree through the Internet. By putting the concept of identity filtering in cyberspace, this paper attempts to add an overlooked theoretical contribution to the understanding of the linkages between the technology of the Internet and political change, particularly with regard to theories of social mobilization as they relate to democratization.

To understand the social and historical context in which cyber identity filtering and identity formation take place, the following section explains how Suharto’s New Order actively used control over media spaces to instill and sustain a society-wide legitimization identity necessary for him to stay in power for more than three decades. In terms of identity, the paradox of the New Order was that in fostering widening social divisions around ethnic and religious differences as a means of channeling loyalties to the regime while weakening opposition, the seeds were being planted for these identity divides that were being exacerbated by the state to eventually rise to the fore after its collapse and to threaten the very existence of the state as a multicultural, secular source of governance.

Identity Filtering and Suharto”s New Order

 

Heryanto (1998) indicates that Suharto’s New Order established its existence based on the exclusion of four major “Others” which included: Communism, Islamic fundamentalism, the West and the ethnic Chinese. He argues that Suharto’s New Order did not simply annihilate the Others. Moreover, the regime rapidly, systematically and continuously provoked society with “evil” elements of these Others.

For example, by paralleling communism with bahaya laten (latent danger), the New Order government invoked the horror and threat of communism in people’s minds. For more than a decade, the movie entitled “G30S/PKI” was broadcasted on all TV channels on 30 September each year. This film, that visualized the series of cold-blooded killings of high-rank generals by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), was meant to keep reminding people about how evil the PKI had been and how Suharto had saved the nation by fighting against communism.

Likewise, although Islamic fundamentalism was not directly excluded, it was systematically marginalized from the political ground (Lim, 2002). The Ministry of Religious Affairs was established mainly to control Islam. By publishing Islamic da’wah (sermon) on television and radio and through literature and books, governing the development of Islamic discourse produced by Muslim subjects and institutions, and establishing so-called legal Islamic institutions (based on the state Pancasila ideology and not Islam shari’a), Suharto, via the Ministry of Religious Affairs, created an allegedly “modern, tolerant, and a-political” Indonesian Islam. This ministry also published an official translation and commentary on the Koran and watched over the non-official ones. Another form of marginalization was to force Muslim parties to be united under one party, Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP), which for decades gave support only to the rule of Suharto.

Exclusion of the ethnic Chinese and the West was not straightforward. The regime somehow needed the “Chinese problem” to stabilize the political dominance of small number of political elites (Heryanto, 1998). By “Othering” Chinese, this ethnic group became invisible in the national space. The banning of the use of Chinese characters, personal names, firms and shop names, and all Chinese schools that took place in 1966 as a part of anti-communism and anti-Chinese drives meant effectively eliminated Chinese identity from the national landscape.

Meanwhile, the West held a somewhat ambiguous position. While it was seen as an Other that could endanger the unity and unification of Indonesia, the New Order developmental state under Suharto needed its financial and technical support. Due to this ambivalence, the New Order government selectively chose its own version of Western aid and technology but Indonesian values by labeling the West as “a partner for economic growth” that was nonetheless also a source of bejat moral (low morals) and pengaruh (negatif) asing (negative, bizarre foreign influence).

As an addition to these exclusions, Suharto consciously divided races and religions as a means of staying in power; he also prevented or suffocated religion as an active political force. By these divisions, Suharto was able to break the connectivity between races and religions and at the same time made each of these sources of social identity weaker in power. Thus it is easy for Suharto to label them by the uniform identity; the so-called “unity of diversity”. The identities that were considered as inappropriate were buried deep down and only the identities that were fit with the “developmental state” were allowed to stay on the ground. Suharto’s New Order created legitimization identities by pushing the social contract which exchanging the civil liberties with economic advance under the flag of “developmental state”.

For more than three decades, the Suharto regime effectively selected information, images, and symbols to legitimize its identity. The identity filtering processes functioned during this time as a means of controlling society from being “contaminated” by any alternative sources of identity that could destabilize the regime. One of the effective tools used for this controlling and filtering purpose was the media, both traditional and electronic. This partly was manifested in control over information via the existence of Minister of Information through the censorships and outright banning over news media.

It is important to emphasize that with the 1997 economic collapse, Suharto’s ability to fulfill the social contract of the “developmental state” also collapsed. This loss of legitimacy was so profound and catastrophic that the identities that had been paradoxically repressed and fomented quickly turned from everyday forms of resistance to massive social mobilization against the state. As in many nations enduring long years of political repression, the tactic of forced legitimization through, in part, control over media had at last come to an end with the inability to sustain the regime’s Machiavellian social contract (Crawford, 1998). For a moment, at least, identity divides among the populace were overcome by a national resistance identity against the corrupt and finally tottering Suharto regime.

Coming of Internet: The Rise of Alternative Identities

 

It might be a blessing in disguise that the Internet technology came to Indonesia when the country was in the middle of socio-political and economic crisis. While the government welcomed the technology for its business advantages, with the 1997 crisis neither the state under Suharto’s New Order nor the crony corporate enterprises could effectively pursue their agendas to capture this technology and place it under their domination and control. The state agenda, partly through the national telematic project, and the corporate agenda, with the emergence of Internet service providers (ISPs) in 1995-1996, lost all manner of social, political and economic support (Lim, 2003b). However, one segment of civil society composed of young people mainly from ITB (Onno Purbo and his Computer Network Research Group) was able to survive and even expand into global cyberspace by initiating the spread of low-cost Internet access for society in the form of warnet, small places equipped with several computers hooked at the Internet with access to the computer rented on an hourly basis (Lim, 2001, 2003a, 2003c).

Interestingly, for Internet users in Indonesia, warnet emerged not only to provide a public sphere in which everybody can freely be engaged in any (political) conversation in cyberspace at a distance from state’s intervention. It also provides a private sphere to give space for users, mainly youngsters, to seek and re-create their identities, autonomous from the intervention of the older generation (parents) and the state as well (Lim, 2003c). Via the network of warnet across the archipelago, the Internet thus helps society to foster the building of alternative identities that were buried by the Suharto’s New Order. The combination of growing openness in global-local information exchanges and the internal crisis has made the boundary of Indonesia that was legitimized by national identity and New Order very porous. When the state entered its period of legitimization crisis, it became the moment for the uprising of all suppressed identities against the oppressive states. These identities include ethnicities, religions, and the “Otherness”; all raised up as alternatives to the uniform identity provided by the state.

While there are various alternative identities emerging in cyberspace, the strongest ones emerging in Indonesia are those that were previously suppressed. From 1996 to 1998, the so-called “unavailable and controversial” information related to these identities were mushrooming in cyberspace (Lim, 2002, 2003b). Political parties took advantage of the open information system of the Internet. The party in opposition to Golkar (Suharto’s party), the Democratic People of Indonesia in Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) under Megawati Sukarno, [2] put together a homepage about Megawati and her party to raise public sympathy for the repression it had experienced (Wirantaprawira, 1998). The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which had been banned for more than 30 years, appeared again on the Internet, and no government official could effectively ban it, although today the site has disappeared from the Internet. The Democratic People’s Party (PRD), a small pro-labor, largely student-based party, despite a Government crackdown on the PRD and the trial and continuing detention of the party leadership and the harassment of the rank-and-file, continued posting on the World Wide Web and on the Apakabar mailing list, maintaining its profile and openly challenging the Suharto regime. The leftist Indonesian author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose books were banned in Indonesia, had his own Web site created by a group of young people (Ticoalu, 1996). Some students who called themselves The People’s Resistance in Indonesia bravely announced resistance to the state by providing information about Marxism, Leftist Parties and the Liberation Movement, East Timor, the Indonesian Communist Party, and other left-wing perspectives and information (CSVI, 1998).

Obviously, when any other channels to express the identities and opinions are closed, one opened channel would become a new vortex pulling all forms of resistance into it. For the “Others”, mainly communists, and the political parties in opposition, cyberspace was a new playground where they found real freedom to express and to disseminate information.

On Democracy:

Connectivity of Student Activists and the Anti-Suharto Movement

 

With the ability to provide alternative information and spaces for dialogues that are free from the intervention of the state, the Internet became a potential aid to democratization in Indonesia. Before the finance crisis broke, a number of web sites had been set up abroad by Indonesians and by foreigners with an interest in politics and political reform in Indonesia. These publicized the country and also began to run chat rooms where Indonesians could discuss politics in relative anonymity. Until the emergence of warnet in the country, this remained a fairly minor activity among a small minority of people. But with the arrival of the warnet, the flows of information among Indonesians in cyberspace increased exponentially. Moreover, those who had access to the warnet then spread information by word of mouth amongst their acquaintances, thus re-multiplying the effect. While the it cannot be called as the only tool that caused the political revolution, nevertheless, there is no doubt that without the Internet, Suharto’s regime would have been much better able to continue suppressing dissent, as it had been doing so well for over three decades.

During the crisis, political communications became of great importance. Politically related information matters more than it does in a normal situation. The content of such information spreads in society also really matters; it can either calm or boil the emotions of people in crisis. With economic and political crisis, Suharto’s New Order was in a very critical situation. The state almost lost its legitimization and the people became very sensitive to all kinds of information they were able to get. The Internet at this juncture quickly began to function as one of the main sources of “outside” information. How the sources of information were chosen, filtered and spread in Indonesia became crucial to the continued existence of the New Order. Here, the process of identity filtering is explained in the example below.

As mentioned, among the information dominating the Indonesian cyberspace during the crisis, the most popular ones were those that were classified as “unavailable and controversial”. There were a few major sources of this kind of information. Among the most important were: the Apakabar mailing list, George Aditjondro, SiAR (1998) mailing list, Pijar (KdPnet, 1998) mailing list, Munindo (1998) homepage, and CSVI (1998) homepage. These sources selected the content of information they disseminated based on their purposes, beliefs, and identities they chose to project. These people and their sites played key roles as global sources for Indonesia related information. They activated filtering processes on information flows at the global level before they entered Indonesia.

This first level filtering process was mostly based on the degree of negation of the “one in authority” (Suharto and his New Order). The higher the degree, the more likely that it would be transmitted onward to Indonesia. Thus, these global sources emboldened resistance in a very explicit way via the provision of this filtered information. It is also obvious that these global sources were among those that were being suppressed at that moment. George Aditjondro who focused his information on the corrupt practices of Suharto’s family and cronies, was an Indonesian professor teaching the “Sociology of Corruption” at University of New Castle in Australia who called himself the “scent dog of Suharto’s wealth”. He fled the country after being too outspoken in revealing the oligarchy of Suharto regime. While he failed to confront the hegemony of the state through his actual activities within the state’s national territorial bounds, he successfully challenged the cordon of the state from outside of Indonesia by selectively spreading the information that discredited the Suharto regime in cyberspace. Another global source, apakabar@clark.net, was the mailing list set up by John A. McDougal, an American holding PhD from Harvard University living in Maryland. This mailing list actively provided the “controversial and unavailable information on Indonesia” to its members. His mailing list also became the major “public sphere” where people could talk freely about the New Order and its wrongdoing.

Munindo was set up by the active member of PDI-P, the supporter of Megawati Sukarno and the opposition to Suharto. This Web site basically provided spaces for Aditjondro and other global sources to show the “dirt” of Suharto and his cronies. At the same time, this source also kept trying to provide information reflecting a positive image of Megawati Sukarno (Munindo, 1998).

SiaR (1998), Pijar (KdPnet, 1998), and some other important mailing lists were set-up by Indonesian students abroad. They were highly educated – mostly pursuing graduate degrees and middle-class urbanites with good connections in Indonesia. Some of the most militant ones were Chinese, who during the New Order had never stepped into the political arena in Indonesia.

The second level of filtering processes was done by Internet communities inside Indonesia. They were mostly mature and/or early Internet users. They were politically engaged in active discussions, reading and rapidly spreading heavy political information. These users got their information from the global sources and disseminated them within Indonesian cyberspace among Indonesian users.

The other group of players at the second level were the youngsters who accessed the Internet at warnet all over the country. They were not particularly interested on political discussions. Some were joining politically related mailing lists but mostly were only passively engaged in political discourse. These youngsters liked to chat and talk about “light” issues. Regarding politically related information, they selected the information they read and spread to others based on the types of content. Mostly only gossip-like political information was disseminated by and among these young warnet users. The information that was low in complexity, easy to chew and digest, was favored by these youngsters. The simplified information of Aditjondro’s essay on Suharto’s practices of corruption, named as “The List of Suharto’s Wealth” or Daftar Kekayaan Suharto (Luknanto, 1998), was one of the most favored pieces of information among these Internet users.

The third level of filtering processes was done through linkages to other domestic media, which actually happened outside cyberspace. On this level, the sources acted as mediators between cyberspace and real local social and physical space – between Internet users and non-users, between “techno-elites” and ordinary people (lim, 2002, 2003c). The term “techno-elites” is used here instead of “elites” since the common notion of elite mostly refers to class and status, while in this case the group of Internet users is considered elite not because of class, economic or political status, but because of technical literacy, including literacy in using the Internet. At the same time, it is probable that Internet literacy is related to economic status. 

On this third level, among the mediators were newspaper sellers, taxi-drivers and kiosk owners (see Lim, 2003c). Newspaper sellers selected information to disseminate according to the economic returns it would bring by charging a price. They spread the information by selling photocopied versions of pages printed from the Internet. They were particularly interested in spreading information that was easy to sell, which was the light, simple, gossip-like, and bombastic. Not surprisingly, the “list of Suharto’s wealth” was one of those kinds of information because it appeared more like gossip rather than political information, and was thus much more popular than information with serious political discussions. In the end, after such processes of filtering, the message that came to the “street” and was acquired by ordinary people in the form of bullet lists, popular, gossip-like statements that offered a very simple causality: “Suharto(‘s wealth) is a cause of economic crisis”. Figure 1 below suggests the filtering processes that took place in this case.

Figure 1

From this case it is shown that on all levels, active filtering processes occurred based on the purpose, goal, and agendas of information sources or disseminators, which were rooted in their identities. Through the identity filtering processes in disseminating information, the resistance identities against Suharto. The information disseminated in this manner also supported identity formation and strengthened collective opposition against Suharto. This phenomenon demonstrates that the role of the Internet needs to be taken into account in understanding the democratization processes that took place in 1998.

On 9/11:

Rise of Fundamentalist Groups and Anti-U.S. Movement

 

With the downfall of Suharto, the nation-state entered a more democratic mode, but it still very immature, unstable and weak. It struggles in an extended period of legitimization crisis and has been unable to be a vehicle for social, political and economic justice and security. Meanwhile, the identities that were suppressed under the New-Order state emerge as re-invigorated collective resistance identities that began to be formulated into communes rather than sustaining a national consensus on democracy in Indonesia.

Religious fundamentalism is not something that is just being invented these days. These identities, which also have well-known global origins, have already been locally (re-)constructed over centuries and show great variation among provinces within Indonesia. With the long suppression and tight control under Suharto’s New Order, these religions in Indonesia, mainly Islam and Christianity, developed as a-political religions. However, with the rise of a network society in an informational age, and with the support of the Internet and other media, the connectivity between local (Indonesia) and global has intensified and become more visible.

In other words, for historical reasons, recent global movements based on fundamentalist beliefs resonate with local society in Indonesia. The global movement itself has its own long history. The rejuvenation at this particular juncture in history has many causal factors, including the high dependence of the world on fossil fuels that brought riches to OPEC members, the failure of authoritarian Islamic states and the market to provide meaningful work or incomes for the masses, and the “winning of hearts” by these religious groups who began to provide welfare services to those groups abandoned by the state and the market. By identifying their religious groups with messianic visions, they promised their followers a non-Western and distinctly Islamic path to the “good society” (Crawford, 1998). These phenomena obviously impacted not only the countries from which these movements emerged; their specter spread to other countries, especially to a populous Muslim country like Indonesia. Increasingly through the technological power and growing use of the Internet, Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia could link with the historical rise of the similar movements in other parts of the world.

It is important to note that Islamic fundamentalism, while it has existed since a long time ago in the history of Indonesia, only recently succeeded to rise again. In cyberspace, the Islamic fundamentalism mailing lists, Web sites and news services were burgeoning just in the last couple of years, which was after political revolution May 1998. Among the events that triggered the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism was the World Trade Center tragedy on 11 September 2001. This event created a moment of alert in Indonesia. Since the U.S. related this tragedy with Osama bin Laden and Islam, the Indonesian community, particularly the Islamic community, felt involved in this event. Indonesian media, especially Internet based media became such sources of Indonesians to follow “news” updates. Within a month after the tragedy, almost all active mailing lists included discussions on the 9/11 tragedy. Some new mailing lists were also created in the first few days after this tragedy, mainly to discuss bin Laden and Jihad movement.

The postings related to the 9/11 tragedy appeared frequently in religion based mailing lists, particularly Islamic mailing lists. The news mostly originated from either other mailing lists (most were global mailing lists and mailing lists of Indonesian communities abroad) or the translations or transcriptions of other forms of media (newspapers, books, televisions and radios). While all of postings talked about the same event, they were different in content, which depended on where the posting originated and the identity of the mailing list. For the same story there were many different versions, which were mainly based on who originally wrote the news/information.

Surprisingly, the first posting about the 9/11 tragedy in many religion based mailing lists was not narratives describing the event itself. Islamic forums, like Da’arut Tauhid, Laskar Jihad, Islam-Net (Isnet), and Hidayatullah skipped this kind of message. Instead, they started their 9/11 related discussions by directly jumping to the issue on Islam and terrorism.

Da’arut Tauhid, the moderate Islamic group based in Bandung, had its mailing list – daarut-tauhiid@yahoogroups.com – created in August 1999 and in October 2001 already had 5,116 members (in September 2002 it has 9,279 members). Less than 12 hours after the attack, the first 9/11 related posting appeared in the mailing list. An email written by one member of mailing list was a religious sounding poem, which indistinctly described the unreality of the event and the unfairness of the impact – “slander” – on Muslim society.

If I see the real painting of today’s event

I could not say it was a Hollywood movie

Because the real tears were there.

 

If I read again the real news of today’s event

I could not say it was a Hollywood movie

Because the real vengeance was there.

 

If I see again the today’s event

I could not say it was a Hollywood movie

Because the real slander was there. [3]

 

Over the next couple of days, from all of the 9/11 related postings, none of them explained or described the tragedy itself, but were instead more into religious reflections on the tragedy, which explicitly said that the U.S. had thrown a fitnah by blaming Arabs and Islam. In the following week, there were more postings on 9/11, all rooted in the belief that it was Israel who did the attack while the U.S. blamed the Arab world. The days with the highest density of messages were 22 and 23 September 2001, where one person sent 23 emails among which 20 strengthened the assumption about the involvement of Israel in terror while the rest contained news about the statements not to blame Muslims. The mailing list was full of emails with subject titles like “Anti-U.S. and Jews, The Brain of WTC Tragedy”, [4] “Americans and Zionist are united to fight Islam”, [5] “4,000 Israeli absent on the day of WTC attack”, and “Israel the puppet master of WTC tragedy”, [6]. The later emails also still took the side of bin Laden by portraying him as a hero rather than a terrorist. At least two emails about the Declaration of Osama Bin Laden, one email with the story about Invisible Afghanistan, and another one about the letter of Bin Laden to the chairman of this organization were passed around. Other related emails were about Jihad and the so-called truth behind this movement. Most of these emails were forwarded from sources outside Indonesia, mostly from the mailing list of the Indonesian Muslim community in New York (Inmucony).

The content of other Islamic mailing lists showed the same tendency. A couple of weeks after the event, the information spread through Indonesian mailing lists and other Internet pages shifted from the event itself to discussions about Osama bin Laden, the possible attackers (terrorists), and particularly negative opinions about Israel.

While the more moderate Islam community like Nadhatul Ulama (KMNU2000@yahoogroups.com) could still take the considerations of attackers besides Israel into account, the more radical Islam communities put the involvement of Mossad in the 9/11 attack as a truth. Some articles disseminated in cyberspace tried to connect the U.S., terrorism, and Zionism, and thus by making this connection they portrayed the 9/11 attack as a result of evil collaboration between the U.S. and Israel (Primamorista, 2001). The Jihad Troopers leader stated that the attack on WTC and the Pentagon was the response of God Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala to the arrogance of the U.S. (Laskar Jihad, 2001a). At the same time, bin Laden was positioned as a scapegoat or even as a victim of the game mainly played by Israel in order to discredit the Muslim world. To some degree, the Islamic fundamentalism groups in Indonesia positioned bin Laden as a hero; yet they did not want to be suspected as having links with him. [7]

The 9/11 attack related discussions also occurred in Christian based mailing lists and Christian-Islam dialogue mailing list. However, these kinds of mailing lists seemed reluctant to discuss this attack in depth. Most of the dialogues just floated discussions that avoided making any explicit statement.

It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attack, while raising the sentiment against Israel and the U.S. (especially after U.S. attacks in Afghanistan), it also raised an anti-globalization movement. The U.S.-Israel duo was seen as forging a hegemonic power of globalization and capitalism. This was heavily reflected in the content of information in Indonesian cyberspace not long after U.S. efforts to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The anti U.S.-Israel movement was declared in particular through the cyber-campaign to boycott the use of U.S.-Israel products. [8] These boycotts first occurred in cyberspace and were followed by real protests in the street and in front of the U.S. embassy. The places that symbolized U.S. domination like McDonalds restaurants were also becoming the target of attack. Among some companies that became targets were McDonalds and Coca-cola. [9] The emails about how McDonalds funded Israel in fighting the Palestinians and how Coca-cola donated money to the American army to fight in Afghanistan were widely disseminated.

Below are illustrations of messages sent per email as well as included on posters that could be downloaded from Web sites. One Web site was intentionally built for this purpose just to let people know the list of U.S. and Israel products that should be boycotted. [10]

“Please note how unfair the world is: McDonalds Restaurant in the USA will give their Saturday Income to Occupational Authority “Israel” on a weekly basis to “help” them against the Palestinians” Terrorism!!!”

 

“Do not buy Coca-cola. For one bottle of Coca-cola – (you are) giving USA money to buy a bullet to shoot an Afghani.”

 

While it might be in doubt whether the actors in the anti-U.S. Israel movement in cyberspace were also the actors in street demostrations involved in the same movement, it is probable that there is a connection between the two. Although the anti-U.S. Israel activists in cyberspace are mostly highly-educated “techno-elites”, it is improbable that they would engage in street actions. Still, their role in filtering and disseminating information that eventually came to Indonesian society should be taken into account. It seems clear that the Islamic communities in cyberspace (e.g., mailing lists), particularly the fundamentalists, engaged in tight identity filtering of information regarding information about 9/11, and labeled the information they forwarded as being the non-negotiable “truth”. This approach suggests that the information they brought had been vital in creating the “truth” behind the movements these groups constituted in the physical space.

Similar to the case of 1998 student movement, the mediator between the “techno-elites” and ordinary people played a significant role in translating and widely disseminating messages from the cyberspace. As described elsewhere (Lim, 2002), the use of the Internet by the Indonesian fundamentalist group Jihad Troopers (Laskar Jihad) and the rapid dissemination of information to people who were not Internet users was actually done by a group of mediators. This process took place in mosques, schools and universities, Islamic boarding schools. This was done mostly by religious leaders and teachers using traditional ways of disseminating information: newsletters, pamphlets and especially the khotbah (sermon). In the case of the anti-U.S. movement, a similar pattern was identified.

 

What makes this slightly different than the case of 1998 student movement is that this post-9/11 anti-U.S. movement took place when the political system exerted less control over society, particularly over the media. This also meant that freedom of speech and expression was much greater than in 1998. Thus, while logically this situation supported the dissemination of any kind of information, this also limited the significance of the Internet as the only source of alternative information as people could get alternative information from other sources more easily than before 1998. At the same time, this situation also allowed non-Internet media to freely cite any information from the Internet, including material about which the validity could not be verified. In the case of the anti-U.S. movement, the Republika newspaper published a story based on an email with the headline “4,000 Israeli absent on the day of WTC attack” (21 September 2001).

Figure 2 below suggests the processes that took place in this case. While the information flow as described in this Figure represents the general pattern of information dissemination related to the post-September 11^th anti-U.S. movement, the transformation of information scheme shows only one alternative path of transformation and filtering processes derived from some observation in select mailing lists in this case study.

 

Figure 2

 

 

Conclusions 

The intention of this paper is to illustrate how identity is transformed into social and political power capable of scaling up social responses to reach levels of political transformations at national and international levels. Identity filtering is posited as a chief mechanism that enables this process by reinforcing identities of affiliation while shielding or screening out opposing messages. The Internet is becoming a major technological factor in identity formation and filtering that can access global sources of information while interpreting them in local identity contexts through key nodes and sources.

 

The case of Indonesia has been presented to illustrate how the Internet has plays a key role in creating and sustaining three identity forms: political legitimization, resistance and anti-regime projects. It shows how the identities forming around struggles against the Suharto regime where fundamentally different than the ascendant identity formations following his downfall. The following points summarize the historical relationships between identity formation, filtering and political change.

 

The Role of “Techno-Elites”

 

From these two case studies it is clear that for countries like Indonesia where the penetration of the Internet (and other ICTs) is still low – less than 1 percent in 1998, 2 percent or 4 million in 2001 (ITU, 2002) and 3.8 percent or 8 million in 2002 (ITU, 2003) – the role of the Internet in Indonesia must start with the impact on ‘elite politics and perceptions’ (Winters, 2002) and particularly on the shifting of control over information from “political-elites” to “techno-elites”. The emergence of “techno-elites” thus strengthens the connection between democratization of media (the Internet) and democratization in general.

 

The Linkage between Cyberspace and Physical Space – A Multiplier Effect

 

The Indonesian story shows that the Internet could have wider impacts than those apparent through statistical analysis. These impacts are greatly facilitated by the convivial attributes of the Internet itself, which in turn foster a multiplier effect starting from the cyberspace and spreading – after being transformed and translated by mediators – to people and places throughout Indonesian society. The linkage between cyberspace and physical space, as well as the processes of transformation and translation of information taking place within and between, is a significant dimension that should not be overlooked in studying the impact of the Internet (and other ICTs) on society in countries like Indonesia.

 

Multiple Identities and Filtering as Historically Contingent Processes

 

People have multiple identities, any one of which can be brought to the fore at a given historical juncture. In the two cases presented, the first instance heightened a common identity of people as Indonesian citizens struggling together against an oppressive political regime in power. In the second instance when the state was not longer capable of maintaining its hegemony over identity formation, struggles shifted toward identity differences based on religion, race and ethnicity. How shifts occur in identity formation cannot be posited in the abstract but is instead a question for historical analysis.

 

State Involvement in the Rise of Communes of Resistance

 

In the specific case of Indonesia, the conscious manipulation of identities by the Suharto New Order government fostered the conditions for the rise of “communal” identities based on religion/ethnicity after his removal from power. By purposefully exacerbating historical lines of social cleavage, the processes of identity formation around communes was well underway before 1998, but could only surface after the removal of hegemonic state control over media and the public sphere. As concluded by Crawford (1998) in her comparative study of ethnic violence following the collapse of the Soviet Union:

 

When state institutions are weakened, transformed, or simply disrupted by internal or external forces, cultural violence will erupt and become more violent in those places that had previously politicized culture. Violence is less likely – even where states have collapsed – in those places where culture had not been previously politicized. (1998, p. 531)

 

This was certainly the case in Indonesia where the Suharto regime deliberately aggravated racial and religious differences for its own purposes of controlling civil society. While the Internet played a pivotal role in opening a new realm of access to information independent of the state and thus the end of the Suharto regime, it has also subsequently become part of the identity shift toward communal strife.

 

Interaction between Global and Local Forces of Change

 

Just as democratization drives centering on the overthrow of Suharto can be said to be immersed in a global trend toward democratization (UNDP, 2002), so is the rise of violent religious communes (Barber, 1996). Specifically, the collapse of the Suharto regime with the 1997 finance crisis coincided with a decade long economic and social crisis in a number of Islamic countries that provided a basis for widespread social discontent and the rise of well-funded communes of resistance in several of those countries. New identities forming around messianic visions of a perfect Islamic world rising in the aftermath of the defeat of the U.S., Israel and the West did not emerge only or even principally from within Indonesia, but were linked to these formations centered in other countries through media, including the Internet.

 

Thus while the pattern follows a generalized one of the rise of communes in the aftermath of the collapse of a despotic regime (Castells, 1997; Crawford, 1998), the specific forms and manifestations of the rise of these communes were outcomes of events both internal to state-civil society relations in Indonesia and external to Indonesia with the rise of Jihad movements in the Middle East. Human agency in the form of key individuals and sites of resistance is also revealed in the process. These individuals and particular Internet sites that were “able to develop or carry plausible “stories” of how and why particular social conditions have come to pass” (Crawford, 1998, p. 553) and linkages to them became critical sources of identity formation, shifts and scaling up.

 

Communes and the State

 

While much of the truth seeking and rhetoric of communal resistance focus on heavenly matters, the principal agenda in using violence against other people and governments is to create heaven on earth by either capturing or creating a new religious/ethnic state. To restate this: the projects arising from radical identity formations are directed toward seizing control of the state apparatus.

The importance of this point cannot be overstated, for it returns the discussion to the question of state-civil society relations and democracy. What is at issue is not just the violence of one ethnic or religious group against another, although this is certainly of high concern. Rather, the larger issue is the idea of the nation-state as a territorially defined entity within which civil society in all its diversity can thrive at arms distance from government. Without such a territorial formation, democracy as understood as government by, for and of the people cannot prevail. This is the issue facing Indonesia and many other societies of the world as authoritarian regimes yield to democratizing forces only to see these forces disintegrate into communal struggles to create exclusively religious or racial state structures.

A central feature of most concepts of civil society is that in order for it to actively participate in the public sphere, it must have autonomy from the state (Friedmann, 1998). A prerequisite for this to occur is, of course, the existence of a state itself, which sets in motion histories of legitimization, resistance and projects to capture the state for new regimes to take power in the name of certain identities. Where the state is unable to gain legitimacy, the danger to civil society and democracy is that it will either succumb to chronic instability or be captured by sectarian interest to the exclusion of other segments of civil society. How the state can be strengthened in a manner that also ensures widening spaces for civil society to carry out its daily practices and political involvements remains an outstanding question. The record shows that the Internet can potentially provide such spaces for political reform and democratization. It also shows that through its technological capacities to revolutionize the scope and scale of identity formation and filtering, it can be the source of violence and communal conflict that perpetuates social and political instability.

Acknowledgments:

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Euricom Colloquium: Electronic Networks and Democracy, Nijmegen, 9-12 October 2002. The research for this article was funded by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (NWO/WOTRO).

Endnotes

[1] Here I am trying to move into the post-modern understanding that truth is not absolute, but is negotiable. In “un-negotiated truth” there is no negotiating truth, but rather “imagined” truths emerge, created on the Internet and filtered through to real world identities to create divisive rather than inclusive social identities.

[2] Megawati Sukarno is since 2001 president of Republic Indonesia and formerly was the chair of Democratic People of Indonesia Party (PDI), in opposition to Suharto’s party, Golkar, for more than a decade.

 

[3] Original texts (Indonesian): kalau aku pandang lukisan nyata kejadian hari ini / aku tidak bisa mengatakan itu adalah film Hollywood / karena ada air mata nyata disana // kalau aku baca berita nyata kejadian hari ini / aku tidak bisa mengatakan itu adalah film Hollywood / karena ada dendam nyata disana // kalau aku pandang sekali lagi pandang kejadian hari ini / aku tidak bisa mengatakan itu adalah film Hollywood / karena ada fitnah yang nyata disana (posting on 12 September 2001, daarut-tauhiid@yahoogroups.com).

 

[4] Original title (Indonesian): Anti-AS dan Yahudi, Otak Tragedi WTC.

 

[5] Original title (Indonesian): Amerika dan Zionis Bersatu akan Perangi Islam.

 

[6] Original title (Indonesian):  Israel Dalang Tragedi WTC.

 

[7] Jihad Troopers officially stated in its press conference that Osama bin Laden did not finance their jihad movement in Mollucas (Laskar Jihad, 2001b).

 

[8] See www.palestina-info-melayu.net, www.alislam.or.id, www.hidayatullah.com, www.alhikmah.com, www.janganbeli.net.

 

[9] Other companies/brands that were also listed: Danone, Delta Galil, Disney, Estee, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly, Lewis, Limited, Nestle, Nokia, Revlon, Sara Lee, KFC, Arby, McBurger, Pizza Hut, Chilies, Hardees, Paridies, Pizza Little Sitzer, Jack in the Box, A&W, Kantez, Baskin Robbins, Wimpy, Dominos Pizza, Texas, Stezer.

 

[10] See www.janganbeli.net.

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