T

he habit of retweeting and accepting every invitation received on Facebook might be leading somewhere — the success of local, small- scale movements.

“Click activism” helped mobilize aid to 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 on Saturday.

Support for heritage buildings in Surakarta (Solo), Central Java, which gained about 5,000 members on Facebook, was another example, she said.

However, the celebrated success of the million-user Facebook movement backing Prita Mulyasari — the woman sued by a hospital for defamation — and the online support given to anticorruption campaigns have not really changed policies, she said.

Prita was brought to court again on charges of defamation but did not have to serve her sentence.

Hundreds of thousands of supporters for a social media movement, Merlyna said, did not indicate substantial activism, as people were just clicking on forwarded messages from friends or friends of friends.

Many Indonesians had 1,000 Facebook friends while Americans typically had about 200, Merlyna, a researcher at the US’ Arizona State University, said.

Current use of social media was “mostly social, not political”, Merlyna said, though political interests were trying to use social media to communicate.

One “overdone” measure adopted by political leaders such as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was to curhat, or pour out the heart in a personal and popular way to gain sympathy, Merlyna said.

The mobilization of support for movements on social media has so far been more successful for more easily understood causes, 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.

Another example was a Facebook campaign for “disappeared persons” during the witch-hunt of suspected communists.

The “reality of transformation” does not lie in cyberspace alone but in face-to-face meetings, Merlyna said.

Two Indonesians in the audience said they had first linked up through the Internet and were currently collaborating to research multicultural children.

The pair, Sydney-based lawyer Santi Dharmaputra, author of Anak Multibahasa, and Canberra demography lecturer Ariane Utomo, are teaching Indonesian to preschool children.