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The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Nuria Astagini, whose focus is on the preservation of Indonesian cultural heritage in traditional dance through social media. Traditional dance is part of the country’s recognised cultural heritage, and offered as an extracurricular activity at school; this paper focusses on a dance studio in Depok, Ayodya Pala, that has been established for over 40 years and has developed a considerable social media presence.

The studio has a presence on facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and uses this for the promotion of traditional dance (rather than for commercial purposes). The research examined …

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Benazir Bona Pratamawaty, who is presenting a long-term overview of digital activism in Indonesia. But digital activism remains a liquid, unsettled term: it describes social and political campaigning practices that draw on digital network infrastructure, often extending beyond standard representational politics.

Karatzogianni has identified four waves of digital activism: Web 1.0 activism since 1994; social-political mobilisation after 9/11 and other contemporary events in the early 2000s; the activism surrounding Obama’s election and the Green movement in Iran since 2007; and the activism of WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement …

The next session at COMNEWS 2023 that I’m attending is on social media and activism, and starts with Pierre Mauritz Sundah, whose focus is on independent women in social media. Traditionally, women in Indonesia and elsewhere have often been depicted in stereotypical roles representing household and child-rearing activities, and have therefore not been expected to have high levels of education. Many societal stigmata remain, as a result of the country’s patriarchal culture.

This paper focusses on a community of women weavers in rural Indonesia, who have been empowered by their participation in Du Anyam, a social enterprise aiming to empower …

And the final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Setio Budi H. Hutomo, whose interest is in the digitisation of local television in Indonesia, and its impact on democratic processes. This system was affected by the 2002 broadcasting bill, which introduced private, community, and subscription broadcasting in addition to public service media. This has an impact especially also on local media, including local television.

There is a limited number of major media groups in Indonesia, which also dominate the TV advertising market. Local TV does not capture much of this spending, and the more than 300 local television stations …

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Ivan Taufiq, whose interest is in political branding on social media. Political uses of social media involve the display of personal identity, reputation management, branding, and perception control; this creates a hyperreality in the Baudrillardian sense, and means that political social media activities are simulacra that may or may not represent the actual personalities of the politicians involved.

This paper focusses on political branding ahead of the 2024 presidential election in Indonesia, focussing on the presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo; a hashtag related to him, #ganjarpresiden2024, has emerged as the most prominent …

After a brief press conference involving us two keynote speakers, I’ve now joined the next session at COMNEWS 2023, which continues with a paper by Ika Rizki Yustisia, whose interest is in political discussion on social media in Indonesia. Her work attempts to assess the popularity of political leaders on social media – and social media here means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but now also TikTok and other new platforms. These require different approaches to symbolic communication, depending on platform affordances.

Different political figures have very divergent approaches to communication even on the same platforms; this paper focusses on …

The second keynote speaker at COMNEWS 2023 this morning is Claes de Vreese, whose focus is on AI; he notes that Artificial Intelligence has been a theme of discussion for many years, but has really been turbocharged in recent years by the emergence of new technologies. But these are normal developments in an emerging field, and we should not conclude from this that we are in the midst of a major AI revolution. There is also a great deal of self-serving rhetoric about AI from AI companies themselves, of course.

AI itself remains underdefined, too. Definitions being used in the …

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies. Such legal frameworks also often lack a concrete commitment to normative goals. And, of course, the platforms are also able to exercise …

We’ve reached the final session of AoIR 2023, which I’ll moderate – and the first of its two papers is by Azza El-Masri. Her focus is especially on the experience of Lebanese women and queer journalists on WhatsApp. The background to this is the national secular protest movement against the proposal for a tax on WhatsApp – which is a platform of major importance in the country, and a key infrastructure of sociality in a country that has struggled in recent years with major political and economic challenges.

WhatsApp has also been beset with mis- and disinformation originating especially …