The habit of retweeting n clicking away on every invitation to your Facebook might be leading somewhere -- the success of local, small scale movements.
"Click activism" helped to mobilize aid to certain villages in post disaster situations, among hundreds of attempts to amplify efforts to overcome local problems, said researcher Merlyna Lim on the last day of the Indonesian Update talks at the Australian National University Saturday.
Support for heritage buildings in Solo, gaining 5,000 members on Facebook, was another example, she said.
The celebrated "success" of the one million-strong Facebook movement for Prita Mulyasari, a woman sued by a hospital for defamation, and the support movement for anti corruption movement have not really changed policies, she said.
Prita was brought to court again after the Supreme Court favored an appeal filed by the prosecutor, but she did not have to serve her sentence.
Hundreds of thousands of supporters for any movement on social media, Merlyna said, does not indicate substantial activism, as people were just clicking on forwarded messages from friends or friends of friends.
Many Indonesians have 1,000 Facebook friends while Americans have 200, said Merlyna, based at the Arizona State University in the USA.
Current use of social media "is mostly social, not political", Merlyna said, though political interests are trying to use social media habits of communicating.
A main feature taken up by political leaders such as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono includes "curhat" or pouring out the heart in a personal, popular way to gain sympathy which is "overdone", Merlyna said.
Mobilization of support for movements on social media have so far been more successful in relatively simpler understood causes, she added.
Efforts to mobilize a "coin movement" for Lapindo and support for the Ahmadiyah Islamic sect whose members who mobbed and killed in February, have not yielded large numbers, she said. A recent lonesome-looking effort is the Facebook campaign for "Vanishing persons" in the witch-hunt period against suspected communists.
"Reality of transformation" does not lie in cyberspace alone but also together with face-to-face meetings, Merlyna said.
Two Indonesians in the audience said they had first linked up through cyberspace and now are seeking to work closer on the issue of multicultural children. These are Sydney-based lawyer Santi Dharmaputra, author of Anak Multibahasa, and demography lecturer Ariane Utomo in Canberra, who with a few others are teaching Indonesian to preschool children. (anr)
