T

he habit of tweeting or clicking away at every invitation to your Facebook page might be leading somewhere — the success of local, small scale movements.

“Click activism” has become a way to amplify efforts to overcome local problems such as mobilizing aid to certain villages in post-disaster situations, said researcher Merlyna Lim on the last day of the Indonesian Update talks at the Australian National University on Saturday.

Support for heritage buildings in Surakarta, Central Java, 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 efforts have not really changed policies, she said. Prita was brought to court again and found guilty although 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. People were often simply clicking on forwarded messages from friends, or friends of friends.

Many Indonesians have 1,000 Facebook friends while Americans have on average 200, said Merlyna, based at the Arizona State University in the US.

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 Susilio Bambang Yudhoyono includes curhat or pouring out of the heart in a personal, popular way to gain sympathy, which is “overdone”, Merlyna said.

Mobilization of support for movements on social media has so far been more successful in causes which are relatively simple to understand, she added.

Efforts to mobilize a “coin movement” for Lapindo and support for the Ahmadiyah Islamic sect, whose members were 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.