Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Why is Entertainment Television in Indonesia Important?

2006; Routledge; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01292980601012352

1742-0911

Mark Hobart,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

This special edition about contemporary entertainment media in Indonesia consists of four articles. 1Each focuses on different popular genres of entertainment on television and their associated commentaries, primarily in the print media.The authors examine different aspects of television production which has burgeoned since the economic crisis of the late 1990s.The topics range from popular Indonesian music programmes, through imported genres like talent quests, real life crime and supernatural reality TV, to travel programmes which represent Indonesia to Indonesians through foreign eyes.The articles all give a sense of the energy, vitality and openness of mass television broadcasting formats, although these are usually portrayed in the mass communications and media studies' literature as either effectively determined by multinational corporations or else conventional to the point of sterility.As a collection, these pieces, with their stress on television as complex sets of situated practices, offer new ways of approaching one of Asia's major media industries.First though, why devote a whole special issue of the Asian Journal of Communication to Indonesian popular entertainment television?Of the main Asian countries, Indonesia is among the least represented in English-language publications.Major collections claiming to offer coherent coverage of non-Western or Asian media routinely not only exclude Indonesia, the third most populous Asian country, but fail even to remark on the absence (for example Curran & Park; Erni & Chua respectively).The reasons are several.Part pertains to academic fashion, which in turn often rides on the coattails of political and economic priorities.So Asia easily becomes reducible to high-profile countries, usually India, China, Japan or possibly Korea.Part is to do with how many Asian scholars from different countries have received training in the West and so command the codes for acceptance by international English-language publications.Part is also due to the relative paucity, until recently, of western scholars working on Indonesian media. 2 Specific historical and cultural considerations also come into play.Indonesia's often rumbustious political history and repressive attitude to intellectuals has not always been clement to research and publication.Perhaps this is why Singapore, the home of the Asian Journal of Communication, has long felt uneasy about its vast neighbour and so has often pretended it did not really exist.In any event, I hope that this collection will help stimulate interest among scholars of Asian media.There are more positive reasons for discussing contemporary Indonesian mass media.Television has been inseparable from the project of national development ever since Indonesia was one of the first countries to launch a civilian satellite, Palapa, in 1976 and to place a television set (car-battery-powered where necessary) in every village.The aim was to reach out across the vast and sprawling archipelago and to address -interpellate in Althusserian terms (1984) -the population, first as the