A lot can be done in 140 characters. Earlier this year, when Indonesian minister Salim Segaf Al-Jufrie was spotted driving in a bus lane in Jakarta, he was photographed by an angry, and likely traffic-bound, resident. The picture was posted on Twitter, instantly attracting thousands of comments, many calling for his resignation. But the minister responded quickly. "Thanks for all the response and input on today's incident," he tweeted. "It's a valuable lesson for me and my staff." The next day, he reported his own law-breaking to police and was fined 500,000 Rupiah (£35).
There is no doubting Twitter's popularity across Indonesia, a country of more than 235 million people spread across 17,000 islands. A study by internet analysts ComScore has found that Indonesians are the most prolific users of Twitter on the planet: 20.8% of internet users aged over 15 tweet (Brazil ranks second with 20.5%). In the US, where the largest number of tweets still originate, the figure is just 11.9%.
Twitter suits Indonesia for a number of reasons. For a start, mobile phones are cheap. There is already a strong sense of community. And English is widely spoken, particularly on the nation's most populous and tech-savvy island, Java. Even for those who prefer to tweet in their native tongue, Bahasa Indonesia and other regional languages use an internet-friendly Roman script. But Indonesia is diverse and varied: while President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono may be a steady, if not prolific, tweeter, millions of people living on islands distant from the capital's digital epicentre have never even used a computer.
Where it is popular, Twitter is driven by celebrity and a growing love of new technologies. "Indonesians like to be with others, and above all, they like trends," Arifin Putra, an Indonesian actor active on Twitter, told the Jakarta Post. "If someone says this is the next cool thing to do, then everybody is going to follow".
The Guardian
