[The Internet in Indonesia's New Democracy. David T. Hill & Krishna Sen Routledge, 2005, 204 pp.]

Ignatius Haryanto, Jakarta – Over the past few years, Australian researchers David Hill and Krishna Sen have garnered acclaim for their work on Indonesian media.

Hill's interest in this subject area, mainly in print media, and in Indonesian literature began while he was completing his doctorate thesis on Mochtar Lubis – a writer and Magsaysay award-winning journalist. Meanwhile, Sen's interest was rooted in Indonesian cinema.

Their collaboration is so perfect that between the two of them, Hill and Sen can cover the history of Indonesia's media development – from the golden era of the newsprint industry of the 1970s to 1990s, to the high technology and concentrated capital in the broadcasting industry.

Their earlier collaborative work culminated in Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia; their collaboration continues today, with renewed focus on a new kind of media technology – the Internet – in The Internet in Indonesia's New Democracy.

As they started their research on the Internet in the latter half of the Suharto era, we can see how they place the Internet as an alternative media or alternative tool for the public to get information. Differing from other traditional media, like newspapers, magazines, radio or television stations; this "new technology" can generate a larger readership than the available audience in a specific region. In addition, people outside Indonesia can obtain day-to-day news and information by accessing local Internet news services provided by institution like Detik.com or Tempo Interaktif and many others.

Ironically, the two sites mentioned above – Detik.com and Tempo Interaktif – were created as a transformation of Detik and Tempo, two of three weeklies that had been banned during Suharto's New Order era.

Under the skies or a relatively more open era, the government's tendency to control the flow of information became outdated, and as the wind flows across the sky, information can now be accessed by anyone, anywhere and at any time. The authors claim The Internet in Indonesia's New Democracy "charts the growth and specific political uses of the Internet across the Indonesian archipelago since the early 1990s... (and) at its broadest it is about the relation between democratization and new computer-mediated communication systems". (p.1) This is the initial perspective Hill and Sen take on Internet development in Indonesia from the early 1990s; another is a view on the challenges Internet media face from regulatory bodies.

In the Suharto era, the tendency toward media technology development was more restrictive, but it was loosened when it came to the transition era in mid-1998, and after that strict control over Internet media was implemented.

Hill and Sen use descriptive and factual information about the locus of the Internet industry in Indonesia – its origins, its development and examples of individuals or organizations involved in nurturing the growth of this new media technology. They record Internet growth in Indonesia, which shows an increasing number of users, providers and institutions linked to Internet facilities. These basic data are very important and well recorded.

For instance, according to the Association of Indonesian Internet Service Providers (APJII), in 1996 only 31,000 people subscribed to Internet providers while approximately 110,000 people used the Internet. Within eight years, the number of Internet subscribers increased 40 times to 1.3 million while the number of Internet users rose by 120 times – about 12 million.

In this sense, Indonesia is truly a potential market for the Internet, although the increasing figures are not necessarily related to the issue of information equality, since the majority of Internet users and subscribers are concentrated only in big cities, and those mostly on Java.

It is clear that Hill and Sen sympathize with democratization and the use of new communication technologies. Referring to the 1999 General Elections, they note that, although it was not conducted online, the election was "the first occasion when Indonesian voters were able to confirm, through a search of an independent publicly accessible Internet site, the calculation of the poll statistics, from tens of thousands of individual polling stations, through all levels of government from district (kabupaten) to the final centralized national tally". (p.77)

Following the success of digital democratization in the 1999 election, several regional governments set up their own websites, forming regional e-governments. In the spirit of the Regional Autonomy Law passed in 2001, some local governments also took the initiative to provide basic information about their regions and other related activities. Most of these sites were intended to attract economic investment to their respective regions.

The writers then turn their focus on the question as to what the Internet meant to Indonesia's nascent democracy and – sadly – how the Internet also became a propaganda tool for those parties involved in socio-political conflicts that erupted in the mid-1990s. Using the cases of East Timor and Maluku, they try to show alternative objectives of Internet usage. The parties involved claimed to offer reliable information about the conflicts, but the information was one-sided and, most of the time, wielded as no more than mere propaganda tools, providing biased information to their audience.

East Timor is presented as an example of how the independence struggle there adjusted to new strategic possibilities of the Internet, and how these technological possibilities could have contributed to exerting international political leverage. (p.98) The independence movement in East Timor has traditionally used the media as part of its campaign, from the Indonesian invasion in 1975 to the Dili massacres in 1991, and before and after the 1999 referendum.

In the case of Maluku, the Internet was used by several groups and organizations "on the ground" to extend their activities through cyberspace. (p.117) Hill and Sen cite researcher Birgit Brauchler's work of the Internet's role in the Maluku conflict, that the Internet offered an ideal playground for the construction of individual as well as group identities, the latter providing a means for the creation of "virtual communities" – shared-interest groups that evolved through the online exchange of information, views and debate.

In reality, however, several sites and mailing lists related to the Maluku conflict provided one-sided, propaganda-type stories that heightened tensions, specifically in the cyberspace.

Although we can say that the Internet is a chaotic media, in that anyone can contribute anything to or post anything on it, we should now ask the serious question as to whether the Internet can be used to decrease the economic gap for a country like Indonesia – which has as severe gap between development in central areas like Java and in other parts of the country.

We might say that the Internet alone cannot contribute so much, since it is only a vehicle or a medium that can be used for anyone's intentions. Then the question arises as to how serious the government and other organizations are in their positions to narrow the gap between developed and developing regions.

The Internet has its own function of facilitating communication exchange, so again, it is up to the user for what purpose they are using the Internet: killing time, reaching out to their communities, business purposes, or catching up on the latest trends – including showing off their technological skills and gadgetry.

[The reviewer is a media researcher at Lembaga Studi Pers dan Pembangunan/LSPP (Institute for Press and Development Studies), Jakarta.]