Blogger Indonesia of the Week (41): Martin Manurung
Indonesia Political-Economy Blog
Indonesia blogs are growing. And grow fast. One thing that doesn’t grow, or grows so slowly is ’serious’ content, especially when we talk about English-speaking Indonesian blogger. When I talk about serious topic, it means politics and economy. Two most important components as far as a country or a nation goes, apart from culture.
There are of course many Indonesia blogs which discuss those two serious topics all of which unfortunately in Bahasa Indonesia a language that can be understood only by limited audience in a few neighboring countries like Malaysia, Brunei, southern part of Thailand and small part of Malay-Singaporean.There are at least two reasons behind the reluctant tendency on the part of our economist and political scientist to blog in their expertise and in English. First, the lack of appreciation or support from their Indonesian (blogger) counterparts. Second, the Indonesian bloggers’ reluctance to visit and/or make a comment to their posting.
Or, should I say we, Indonesians, are not so interested to read a serious yet very important topics like economics and politics and tend to read blog just for fun or for a kind of faithfulness within a particular community? Or should the economist and political scientist blogger be blamed for not making their content easily digested and understood by the common people? Should they learn the art from Stephen Hawking’s bestseller A Brief History of Time to make their posting easily and enjoyably read? However slow the growth of such quality blogs, we should be grateful to those who want to blog in such aforementioned topics such as Martin Manurung. We need many more bloggers like him who has concern on Indonesia’s development in socio-cultural as well as in political-economy to blog in English and blog actively. Lack of interest on the part of readerships, if any, should never bother him or anyone else with similar topics. Intellectual duty is to educate people’s mindset and set the trend. And let history appreciate what we are doing and trying to achieve.
In the meantime, common bloggers are better off trying to be more ’serious’ by reading those kind of blogs that will benefit our horizon of thinking which is not necessarily of our liking. Coming in flock to yellow-page blogs are humane. But, spending most of our precious online time for reading those junky blogs are certainly not a smart and progressive move to say the least.