I miss Indonesian people. Real Indonesians who are low-key, down to earth, discreet, and prudent.
Facebook has successfully turn the majority, if not the whole world into Americans. Here's why.
Every time I watch a movie made by the US film industry, one thing very obvious to me is that each time a problem occurs to a character, life then revolves around this problem and any other things are put on hold. Of course, movies are made to capture this one single most important dilemma in one moment in time in the life of the protagonists, but one same thing about American movies is how the leading man/woman view the difficult situation, which, I must say, arguably self-centered.
I know that egotism is misinterpreted a lot today. I don't think it's a bad thing. What I mean here is that American egotism displayed on movies. It is too much of a cliche and highly unjust to say that Americans are very egocentric. After all, humans are all egotists. However, it is also a general knowledge that Americans are considered more assertive (or sometimes even aggressive) in defending their own interests and advancement, compared to, let's say, Asians. I think their education system somehow contributes to this higher degree of self-importance. In the US, children are encouraged to give opinion, to express disagreement, and to form their own thoughts. In my country, children learn to cultivate conformity since young age.
Uniformity is Indonesia's middle name. All kids who go to private and public schools, from kindergarten to high schools, must wear uniform. That's how the mentality is developed. My teacher once told me that uniform makes you equal. Later I learn that even in uniform, people can still see who are the haves and the have-nots. In high school especially, kids do wear uniform, but you can tell from the bags they wear, the shoes they put, and the car they drive, that mankinds are only equal before God, and thus, only God can see it. Anyway, other than this effort to create an overall sameness in looks, teachers are trying to pursue homogeneity in thoughts.
Of course, thanks to globalization, part of it Americanization, there's now a revolutionary movement in our education system, in which children are allowed to be different. This is mostly notable in private schools which adopt a western method or curriculum. And those who dream to be a libertarian gets to use another powerful tool call Facebook.
At the beginning of Facebook creation, I believe that Zuckerberg, Saverin, Moskovitz, and Hughes didn't really intend to develop a tool for Americanization. Being Americans, they simply do what they do in the real world, only this time they decide to do it in cyber space. And what they do is concentrating on their lives and getting people interested in their lives. Little did they know that the whole nation could thank them for spreading the Americanistic egotism around the globe, including in my country.
Facebook certainly supplies what is lacking in Indonesian social and educational system: individualism. Through Facebook, (Indonesian) people get to publish their ups and downs, telling the whole universe that they have a great thing going on in their awesome, fabulous lives, OR the opposite, that life sucks big time and they haven't got laid in 3 months. So what? So people know. And why? Because their life is important, too. Even a common lot with mixed blessings, like other millions of hoi polloi crowding earth, wants to be noted. And in Facebook, it's legal, vital, and essential.
Traditional Indonesian like my mum thinks that Facebook is a horrid thing which causes mass madness. Apart from the fact that browsing people's profiles is big time-waster and hardly profitable, my mum can never understand why the modern Indonesians nowadays seem to be very happy to share their life's stories with others, or to write unscrupulous things about themselves. The public insanity even allows people to get away with murder.
For me, Facebook is an electric field charged with too many negative particles. It really drains my positive energy, especially after reading people's profiles. An example of how the negativity influences me:
Today Japan is shaken by earthquake and, consequently, tsunami. When I enter my Facebook's home, lots of people wrote things like "pray for Japan" and blah-blah. Now. If you want to pray, you go down on your knees and pray. If you want to tell people to pray, well, you can't do it on public space. In real life, it's basically the same as going to a shopping mall and shout to people that they should pray for Japan. If you do that, sooner or later, either a security guard or medical workers will want to take you to a safe place. If you want to show support, go to help-japan-dot-com or whatever and start donating money. It seems to me that whenever bad things happen, or whenever they have some philanthropic mission in mind, the first thing people do is update their status on Facebook. That's highly hype, rather sickening, and suspect.
I can list one hundred reasons why my life will be much better without Facebook. On top of everything, I know I will have more time to do things which are more useful and I will save so much energy by detaching myself from people's life. After all, I don't need to be connected to 1027 friends I have on my social network. And moreover, I don't want to. The most important people in my life, perhaps not more than 50 of them, are within my reach, and that's enough. By and large, I refuse to be turned into megalomaniac. I refuse to be a creature who is very much engrossed in itself. And the way I see it, this is how it's coming.
But lastly, isn't it ironic? In order to escape uniformity, Indonesians are sucked into this machine that plunges them into another uniformity. Or is it actually a part of their uniform mentality which unconsciously push them to be the same with others?
