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Recently, many of us hunched grimly over our computers and cellphones to watch the macabre video of the anti-Ahmadiyah brutality.

A few months before that, we saw Papuan men being tortured. And before that, we giggled at those intimate bedroom scenes of Ariel and his lovers.

We’ve been watching a lot of these small, low-resolution clips lately. Reactions to them have been varied.

Many found it difficult to watch the Ahmadi murders, where it seemed that each dull thud on the skull of the dying Ahmadi men was a crack on the most basic of democratic and humane ideals.

The Ariel videos were different in that they were widely entertaining, but they also sparked a nationwide dialogue on the ethics of personal freedoms.

The Papuan torture videos too prompted pressure on the country’s legal system to bring the perpetrators to justice, though the outcome has left many disappointed.

And these are not the only videos in recent memory that have been made available. Remember the training videos from the terrorist camps in Aceh? And the video of the Bali bombers’ pre-suicide farewell rituals?

The making of short, non-narrative, episode-based films is not new to Indonesia. It has been almost exactly a century since the first “documentary” films started being made here.

In 1912, the first of several Dutch camera operators began lugging heavy motion picture equipment and crisscrossing the Indonesian archipelago to film scenes from everyday life. These were amply funded, well-planned projects with clear intent: to establish a visual record that demonstrated a compelling need for the continuation of Dutch colonial rule. These ethnographic exercises eventually cumulated in an astonishing archive of millions of feet of high-quality 35mm film.

The Japanese filmed Sukarno in the buildup to World War II delivering stirring lectures about the importance of collaborating with them to liberate Indonesia. The New Order had its own productions of politically motivated films. All of these efforts had some agenda, some need to show the world at large a certain point of view on politics and events.

So why are today’s political film clips so popular?

First, these clips have seen distribution like no genre of film ever before because of modern social networking technology. Even a Bollywood (or Hollywood) blockbuster does not have 20 million distributors.

Second, these clips are often extremely intimate as they are the holy grail of what documentary practitioners have been aspiring to for decades — a way of recording that almost touches the human experience, a camera that has become truly bionic.

Third, they are created by individuals and not by the state or any other large agency. This reduces suspicion of propaganda and political motives. In fact, because it is the viewer, more often than the maker, who controls the dissemination of these clips via the Internet, people often feel that they individually have a hand in boosting the films’ popularity.

In addition, one cannot overlook the combined efforts of all those influential outlets that have displayed these images widely. Veteran journalist Andreas Harsono uploaded the Ahmadi murder clip promptly on YouTube, Indonesian television stations are to be applauded for their wide exposure of these films within broadcast regulations and Al-Jazeera correspondent Step Vaessen produced a series of important segments utilizing these clips for audiences around and beyond Indonesia.

But despite the videos’ popularity, many viewers have been left deeply disappointed with the treatment of the footage by the legal system. There is deep frustration over the unbalanced verdicts — such as the torturers of the Papuan man receiving a light sentence while Ariel had the book thrown at him. But the difference is that this time around, it is no longer just the evidence of a limited number of dubious witnesses.

Rather, a large number of people are shouting with unprecedented legal indignation that they actually saw what happened. One can hope that in the face of such blunt evidence and public outcry the courts will have to start meting out justice in a more responsible manner.

There may be another reason for the popularity of these videos. Can it be traced to an ethno-nationalist yearning among Indonesians? In an astoundingly multi-ethnic nation where it is difficult to chart solidarity based on more typical markers like race or ethnicity, perhaps by creating and forwarding these videos individuals are finding ways of expressing that they belong to “a group,” that they have a stake in civil society and that they aspire for an improved democratic system? Could forwarding links be akin to signing a document demanding justice for all Indonesians?

In 1983, American political scientist and Indonesia expert Benedict Anderson posited that reading the same newspaper articles all over a large country brought together the physically remote peoples of a nation because of a shared sense of activity and knowledge.

We may be seeing a resurgence of this idea in Indonesia today. The very act of watching these clips of Ariel’s intimate moments, the Papuan activist’s plea for mercy, the Bali bombers’ final rituals and the sickening assault on Ahmadis perhaps bind Indonesians together as they huddle over computers and peer at their cellphones.

With pixels proliferating at the touch of a button, the adage that the personal is political has never been truer.

These are troubling times for a nation that had made a remarkable effort in transitioning from a quasi-dictatorship at the turn of the last century. The events of the past few months have stunned people who had bought into the much-touted notion that Indonesia is a robust and tolerant democracy.

The country now waits for the result of the brutal Ahmadi murders. What will happen to the perpetrators? No judge or lawmaker with an iota of conscience, operating within a modicum of the law, should be able to disregard the evidence. A few million people have seen what happened second by gory second.

Sandeep Ray is a documentary filmmaker and a graduate of the University of Michigan. He can be reached at ray.sandeep@gmail.com.