Year

2013

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication

Abstract

All around the world, women are still facing gender digital divide due to their absence in the internet infrastructure establishment. The Web 2.0 technology helps women to catch up with men in adopting the internet. After the introduction of free blog providers in 2000, a significant number of Indonesian women embrace digital communication through blogging practice. Having a resemblance with women bloggers in general, Indonesian women bloggers tend to use blogging to document personal experiences. However, my thesis refuses to see Indonesian women as single entities, thus I take up de Certeau’s idea in ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ (1984) to explain that within the circulation of power in media discourse (Couldry, 2004) Indonesian women bloggers apply contextual tactics to reclaim their sense of agency in the Indonesian male-dominated public sphere.

Employing multidisciplinary approaches, my study aim to answer the questions“what kind of things people do in relation to media”? and also “how is the complexity of users’s engagement with media embedded in everyday life cultures”? (Takahashi, 2010; Couldry, 2005; Bird, 2003) within Indonesian women’s context. My study shows that blogging is not a universal practice, nor simple, limited or fixed. That is, in their engagement with blogging, Indonesian women make out by ‘poaching’ blogging in their own contexts and reconstruct blogging for their own social, economic, political and cultural benefit. Thus within Indonesian women’s context that were subjected to national ideology of state ibuism, a blog can be understood as a medium of negotiation for Indonesian women not only for joining public sphere, but also to create their sense of agency.

FoR codes (2008)

2001 COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA STUDIES, 200102 Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies, 200202 Asian Cultural Studies

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.