Budaya Digital dan Perubahan Konsumsi Media Masyarakat

The development of digital technology, which started to flourish in the 1990s has impacted the media production and consumption significantly. Some people see this development as having potentials to open new windows for media democracy and creativity. This positive view is supported by the distinctive features of digital technology that allow greater flexibility of media convergence, content distribution, users’ participation, and users’ control. However, not everyone feels optimistic about the changes brought by digitisation. Contradictory to the previous statement, critics argue that it is a utopia to believe that digital media, such as the Internet, will give everyone freedom of expression and information since digital media content as provided by the Internet is still more or less shaped by certain social forces. Nonetheless, digital technologies has changed the way audiences interact with the media and media content. Although the nature of every media text is arguably open to different interpretations thus enabling different users to have a variety of media experience, but the consumption of the old forms of media – books and video cassettes to name a few – users are bound to unfold these media texts in similar sequences. On the other hand, with the materials flexibility enabled by digital technology, not only that users can easily transmit and exchange media texts with each other, but they can also make changes to the texts and vary their modes of consumption. This increased flexibility of texts materials across different media platforms has been argued as the key characteristic of the digital culture, which is often referred as the culture of “unfinished” texts. Using a case study of kaskus.com, one of the most popular online media in Indonesia, this paper discusses how media digitisation alter the way Indonesian audiences consuming media while showing the limitations of these new technologies