Organizer: Sydney Southeast Asia Centre

Description:

All over the world, including Indonesia, social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and devices such as smartphones have increasingly played an instrumental role in facilitating and mobilizing collective actions and activism. The same technologies have also simultaneously been utilized by states and public authorities for their own benefits, including to control public opinions and repress dissents. Moving away from assessing the presumed (un)democratic potentials of social media, Merlyna Lim explores complex and contradictory relationships between social media and politics and offers an in-depth understanding of how state and society relations, power, and politics are contested and exercised on, with, and through social media. Drawing on empirical snapshots from the country, Merlyna specifically analyzes how social media platforms, and their algorithms, were utilized and appropriated by activists and ordinary people on the grassroots level, both in the pursuit of a counter-hegemonic project as well as in support of the status quo.

The Sydney Southeast Asia Centre invites you to join Associate Professor Merlyna Lim, in conversation with Ms. Irene Poetranto to explore the complex and contradictory relationships between social media and politics. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. David Kloos.

Click here to register for the event.