The rural/urban divide, mobile phones, and Indonesian dating

Rural versus urban; mobile phones and Indonesian dating

I was watching an interview with the Indian actress Mallika Sherawat this weekend, and in the course of the interview, she mentioned the divide in India of rural versus urban. I got some sense of that during my four-year stay in Pakistan when I traveled to Amritsar for weekends. And, when I was out in the rural areas of Pakistan with my students, I could see the large divide between the folks in the countryside and the Lahoris.

Actually, it’s not often that I think of this in regards to Indonesia, even though I see evidence of it everyday on TV when I catch a glimpse of what my children and wife are watching. Of course, the sinetron – Indonesian soap operas which, like the old American prime time soap, Dallas, show the lives of the rich and warped.

I’m aware of the divide in Indonesia, but my life in this country over the past 18 years has been so non-uban that I have no idea how normal folks in Jakarta or Surabaya actually live. My experience is really here in a small village and in Singaraja, Bali, which is fairly small – I can walk through downtown in ten minutes. And the kids’ lives, up to now anyway, have been lived within the protective confines of the kampung in Singaraja or the village in Sekongkang.

I wrote the three paragraphs above over the weekend. Today I came in to work and checked on my Yahoo email and found an academic paper on Modernity and the Mobile Phone by Lee Humphreys and Thomas Barker. The article is about the role of the mobile phone in the evolution of dating in Indonesia, and the development of the production and distribution of pornography in Indonesia. It was noted that the proliferation of mobile phones, while increasing, is still limited to a defined sector of the population – wealthier, young and urban based. They suggest that as coverage increases and price decreases, mobile technology will spread to rural areas. Rural experience in Sumbawa, suggests, that the authors are correct in their assumptions about the spread to rural areas of mobile technology, but miss the already widespread use in some rural areas. Additionally, I would suggest that the use of mobile technology is a status marker for young people in rural areas as they mimic what they see on sinetrons which they judge to be sophisticated urban behavior.

More on the rural/urban divide later.