User:Tash/grad thesis outline1

04.10.2018 Thesis Outline Draft 1

Format:

2) An analytical essay exploring related artistic, theoretical, historical and critical issues and practices that inform your practice, without necessarily referring to your work directly.

• plus annotations written from a personal point of view, to situate the research within my own context and practice

Key topics:

• Social & networked media as democratic or emancipatory tools
• Freedom of speech / freedom of connection / freedom of religion
• The rise of alternative media / pop culture and its role in contemporary nation-building
• (Self-)censorship, cultural regulation and revisionism (“New media, Old wounds”)
• Meme culture as a mode of civic engagement, a way of imaging dissent
• Archiving as an active political practice (and post-colonial tool?)
• Alternative ways of sharing knowledge, and their social aspects (“We publish to find comrades!”)
• Weaponization of the internet, propaganda wars in the comments section

Thesis statements

• In Indonesia today, social media is used to both facilitate and hinder the democratic process. Activism (in the forms of propaganda, trolling, editing, moderating) is needed to turn these spaces of reaction into meaningful opportunities for civic engagement.
• Memetic dialogues have become an important form of alternative political discourse in Indonesia, offering new avenues of connection for young people in the nation’s urban centres.
• For a country whose mainstream media is becoming more and more sensitive to dissent, meme culture – with its polyvocal and participatory quality – represents a valuable space for political debate and commentary.