•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

Setting up online groups to gather support for a particular social or political cause will not be successful unless more traditional forms of media are running similar campaigns, a blogger says.

The success of Facebook groups created to support housewife Prita Mulyasari in her legal battle with a local hospital and Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) deputies Bibit Samad Riyanto and Chandra Hamzah during their own legal woes has prompted people to mount similar campaigns for other causes, but with disappointing results.

Noted blogger Enda Nasution said during a seminar on new media on Wednesday that only a handful of the causes on Facebook and Twitter made it into the mainstream, thanks to print and broadcast media.

“The enormous support from traditional media validates these social media movements, and the exposure helps spread the word because both types of media are working for the same cause,” he said at the seminar, held as part of celebrations for the 16th anniversary of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI).

However, Enda stressed that so-called click activism had the potential to effect lasting changes, particularly given the 1,500 percent rise in the number of Indonesians joining Facebook in 2009.

He said the number of Internet users in the country was growing by 49 percent annually, with 70 percent of users below the age of 35, giving rise to a “digital-native generation on fertile ground.”

However, several members in the audience at Wednesday’s discussion played down the potential of online social movements, saying they only touched on issues pertinent to the country’s middle class, and overlooked the less privileged.

Enda argued that it was the mainstream media’s task to bring the grievances of the poor to the nation’s attention, at which point new media would pick up on it and help spread the word.

Click activism through new media, he said, has turned “social media into the fifth estate in Indonesia’s democracy.” He defined the role of social media as supporting mainstream media in spreading the message for causes or interests pertinent to the public through its viral nature.

Another panelist, Cherian George, the head of journalism and publication at Singapore’s Nanyang Technology University, said that despite the enormous influence the Internet was capable of wielding, “we have to be careful in evaluating the Internet because even the clever people have been proven wrong about it very often.”

“New media is not a powerful and magical technology that can do everything, but it simply rearranges and selectively amplifies the old structures. It will never fully replace traditional media,” he said.

George also said there was no such thing as a spontaneous online movement because it was so easy “to mobilize people on the Internet and there is always a leader and interest behind it.”

“Mainstream media journalists have to investigate that and put the movement in a larger context,” he added.

Enda said the lessons learned from the rise of new media were that bloggers and social media activists could wield more influence in society if they “stick consistently to whatever cause they’re promoting.”

This, he said, means using all the resources available — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, text messages and multimedia ­— to provide updates on a movement with simple yet powerful messages to capture the public’s imagination.

George said one of the virtues of new media as opposed to print and broadcast media was that it was truly democratic and not concentrated in the hands of a few business groups.

Panel moderator and Yahoo Indonesia manager Budi Putra concluded that despite the rapid growth of new media, “people will still look to the mainstream media for exclusive news because they have the infrastructure, such as access to high-ranking officials.”