Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet

The project Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia aims at generating an anthropological account of Islamic religiosities in contemporary Indonesia as it is embedded in the everyday uses of social media and communication technologies. Focusing on the largest Muslim majority country, the project is designed to contribute to the emerging anthropological literature on social media, contemporary religiosities, and developments within Indonesian Islam. The project attempts to explore new ground in these three fields by linking Islamic everyday piousness and regular religious gatherings to social media usage (such as Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp). Following the latest anthropological literature, the project understands the internet as a collection of interfaces among which social networking sites feature prominently, not least because they become increasingly integrated into peoples everyday lives. This is particularly true for Indonesian uses of social networking sites. These interfaces, as the name of the most popular site, i.e. Facebook, suggests, provide ample opportunities to exhibit visual and textual material, including peoples religious expressions. In the Indonesian context in particular, social networking interfaces have become sites where the countrys many Islamic faces are displayed and it is these emerging forms of conveying and expressing Islam as well as the socialities that are generated in these intersecting online/offline realms this project attempts to study. The project has a particular focus on the first generation of Indonesians that discovered the internet, i.e. when they were students in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as on Islamic preachers that are often part of this media-savvy generation. An investigation of their online and offline Islamic practices, their emerging socialities and forms of piety demands carrying out fieldwork in the major cities on Java which show a strong presence of users, such as Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung and Surabaya. By following their networks and their Islamic preachers the project extends to cities outside Java as well, such as Makassar and Manado as well as Palu and Ambon. Together with the major cities on Java they form one space of emerging socialities displaying particular expressions of Islamic piety in interlinked online/offline realms. These realms are explored in a joint effort of Austrian and Indonesian researchers by deploying a combination of offline and online qualitative methods.

The project Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia studied the emerging socialities of Muslim social media users and the forms of conveying and expressing Islam in Indonesian online/offline realms. Having conducted offline research in major Indonesian cities on the island of Java and more peripheral places, the project explored the most prominent social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, as well as the messaging apps WhatsApp, LINE, Telegram, BlackBerry Messenger and Facebook Messenger. The project particularly studied already existing forms of Islamic sociality, such as Islamic prayer groups (majelis taklim) that have developed significant online extensions, and new forms of Islamic sociality that came into being due to the rise of social media. In this regard, the project could reveal that Islamic online/offline socialities in Indonesia today are characterized by more dialogic constructions of Islamic authority being particularly attentive to the personal concerns of Indonesian middle-class Muslim women. Lower-class Muslims, on the contrary, who cannot afford to engage in the new practices of online/offline life due to lack of access and financial means, are left behind with regard to these new forms of Islamic online sociality, pointing at how the digital divide became an Islamic digital divide. The project also revealed how social media affect the experience and understandings of personal commitment and social engagement that define contemporary Muslim subjectivities in Indonesia, including self-discipline as a central value of contemporary Islamic online practices. Moreover, Indonesian Muslims have developed strategies how to deal with the anxieties that some online practices generate, especially to avoid accusations of showing off ones piety (riya`). The project could also observe the popularity of online donations among Indonesian middle-class Muslims. The Islamic charities are concerned with accelerating their aid and its mediation, emphasising immediacy through the use of social media, in order to be appealing to donors that are not only demanding a quick, unbureaucratic conversion of their donations into concrete help, but who also hold the belief that their charitable investment will generate immediate material and spiritual returns.