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EDITORIAL

SYNCRONIZING COMMUNICATION, MEDIA, AND CULTURE
Lily El Ferawati Rofil

lily.ef@uny.ac.id
Editor of Jurnal Informasi

Information exchanges keep communication and media alive. In the context of 
communication and media studies, information can be considered as content which serves as 
an economic, social, and cultural currency. Media corporations provide content in exchange of 
audience viewerships and readerships which lead to financial gain from advertising revenue. 
Among audience, media content can act as one of anticipated subjects of conversations in 
their social circles. More importantly, communication and media content has become a new 
weapon to invade a society with unanticipated culture through what we all are aware as cultural 
colonialization. 

Content is still powerful despite the presence of active audience. The popularity of American 
pop culture which successfully spreads across the globe via Hollywood movies and series and 
ubiquitously immerses into our everyday lives proves that diverse societies are not averse to 
foreign content exposure. Regardless of world political tension and economic recession, 
Hollywood movies are always anticipated by movie-goers in at least half of the world. Entering 
the new millennium till recently, the world is crazy about Korean popular culture which comes 
in the package of K-Pop. The emergence of K-pop is seen as a contra-flow of globalization which 
has for long been dominated by Western powers. K-pop has successfully dispersed into and 
influenced local productions in many countries across America, Latin America, Europe and 
most importantly, Asia. The successful invasion of Western and Korean culture through media 
products throughout the world indicates that media content has significant effects in shaping 
today’s cultural consumption.                    

Nowadays, audience are no longer content users only. They are now both cultural consumers 
and producers. The preeminence of social media allows people to exchange information as 
well as to produce content on their own for the purpose of self-expression and social criticism. 
This exercise represents what is called as participatory culture which replaces consumer 
culture. In recent years, we often see an ordinary individual becomes a celebrity in his/her own 
Instagram, Twitter, or Youtube channel. They self-produce entertaining videos, short stories, 
and advertisements in the form of endorsements and paid reviews. Self-creation of media 

INF RMASI
KAJIAN ILMU KOMUNIKASI

Volume . Nomor . 201848 1  Juni ISSN (p) 0126-0650; ISSN (e) 2502-3837



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content appears to be a new business model adopted by millennial generations to contribute to 
the growth of creative economy. And this is a good thing to be celebrated. 

While we rejoice our young generation’s creative uses of information and communication 
technology (ICT), we also need to worry about the negative impacts of abusive uses of social 
media and other sources of information. Abusive uses of media technology in any form 
can jeopardize the health of social system. Abusive media uses include production and 
dissemination of hate speech and fake news. Today, the spread of fake news and hate speech 
on the Internet has grown into an alarming and inevitable issue. Fake news and hate speech 
are used by radical groups to attack and frame government in negative ways. Dissemination 
of hoax and speech intended to offend particular people or groups of people certainly creates 
unhealthy communication atmosphere and threatens public peace. To tackle this issue, many 
countries including Indonesia have to pass a bill to prevent the practice of producing and 
disseminating fake news and hate speech from becoming an uncured social illness.  

Another problem with negative uses of ICT is media illiteracy.  While media literacy refers 
to the ability to apply critical thinking skill to using communication media, be it in the form of 
print or electronic media (Baran and Baran, 2014), media illiteracy can be defined as unjustifiable 
uses of any kind of media and content of media for a certain purpose. In this digital age, media 
literacy includes engagement with the Internet data and communities. Basically, media literacy 
suggests people to employ their skills for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating media 
content and power.  Many people claim that they can access media and create creative content 
for communication and self-expression, but few are ignorant of negative impacts they are 
exposed to or unhealthy environment they create from their communication activities using 
the media. Worse if they just follow current trends and want to feel the hype of the presence of 
a new social media platform without self-accountability. 

Following a trend in using new social media is not a bad thing but it can be hazardous 
when the media users disregard cultural values and norms in their exercise. Recently, Indonesia 
was shaken with what began as simply a practice of self-expression through social media 
which eventually ended up as a public issue that raised national concern. It was a story about 
a 13-year-old schoolboy named Bowo who was a famous content creator of Tik Tok, a video 
maker application for smartphones. Bowo created many lip-sync videos, attracting kids of his 
age with his good-looking face and flirty expressions. His popularity in Tik Tok inspired an 
agency to set up a paid “meet and greet” for him and his fans and surprisingly many turned up 
in the event. It was just a normal gathering except that Bowo is not a broadcasting celebrity, 
but his fans were very crazy of him that some of them wrote on social media about him in a 
worshiping tone. This incident invited huge attention from the whole nation especially people 
of older generations which found that unfiltered content production in Tik Tok potentially 
influenced kids to exercise excessive self-expression which challenges authenticity of local 
norms. Eventually, the government interfere came at the end by blocking the application and 
demanding the developer to apply content filtering before the blockage was terminated.

We should realize now that social changes derived from the development and innovation 
of ICT are not myths. Such changes range from conversion of media divergence into media 
convergence, shifting between consumer culture and participatory culture, identity 
constructions in media-driven society, to the rise of awareness for media education and 
literacy. Scholars in the field of communication sciences must shift their focus from studying 
communication strategies and media effects to investigating communication and communities 
in media culture to see communication phenomena from a wider perspective. 

As such, INFORMASI journal now takes a turning point to receive more articles with a 
wide range of topics beyond communication and media studies. Beginning from this issue, 
the journal starts to accept any scholarly writings from multi-disciplines which discuss 



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Communication Research and Theories, Public Relations and Advertising, Media and Cultural 
Studies, Audience Research, Media and Identity, Media Anthropology, Media and Audience 
Ethnography, Youth Media, and other related topics. The journal also expands to a wider and 
larger readership by welcoming international authors to contribute in the journal. This year’s 
first issue contains ten articles with two articles authored by Malaysian and Nigerian scholars 
respectively.