Dis/Connection: The Co-evolution of Sociocultural and Material Infrastructures of the Internet in Indonesia

The internet was made available commercially to the Indonesian public in the mid-1990s. By 2015, in Jakarta and other cities, such as Bandung and Surabaya, urbanites experienced near-seamless online–offline sociality by logging in and out of social-media accounts on their mobile phones and via free wireless-network access at school, work, cafés and restaurants (warung), and even convenience stores. This article tells the story of the Indonesian internet by looking at the historical development of its infrastructure, especially the internet’s access points. To trace the coevolution of the infrastructure of Indonesia’s internet access points, the author relied on a longitudinal study involving repeated observations spanning a period of sixteen years, from 1999 to 2015. The fieldwork took place in Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya.