110-140 Mass Media in Indonesia

This subject focuses on the transforming power of communicative technology in social history, with specific empirical reference to modern Indonesia. The technological media that will gain most attention throughout the semester is not any fancy and state-of-the-art electronic multimedia technology that dominates today's public imagination of the term 'information technology'. Rather, students will closely examine the profound social transformation brought about by literacy and mass print - one of the most important information technologies in human history - in largely illiterate communities at a time of global invasion of electronic high technology. Nationalism, democratisation, propaganda, censorship and the middle classes will be some of the key issues in the subject.