1 Victims, volunteers and voices of the digital age: personifying digital issues in contemporary Indonesia Draft chapter to the volume Digital Indonesia. Singapore: ISEAS. eds. Jurriens and Tapsell forthcoming 2017 John Postill (RMIT Melbourne) Kurniawan Saputro (ISI Yogyakarta) 23 November 2016 Abstract In this chapter we draw from recent ethnographic and archival research in Indonesia to explore how digital activists in that country translate or 'modulate' (Kelty 2008) key digital issues – which are sometimes highly technical and abstract – to reach diverse publics, often with remarkable success. We argue that Indonesia's digital activists have developed an effective pedagogical folksonomy in which three particular digital personas stand out, namely victims (korban), volunteers (relawan) and voices (suara) of the digital age. Each of these complexly mediated personas is endowed with unique attributes and located within a specific corner of Indonesia’s digital activism space, and each is integral to efforts to educate diverse publics about the digital issues at stake. These three ‘digital keywords’ (Peters 2016) may seem both familiar and mundane, but we suggest that the work of personification that they enable has significant consequences for the framing of ongoing civil society struggles in post- Suharto Indonesia. We conclude that whether a certain individual or group is labelled a digital ‘victim’, ‘voice’ or ‘volunteer’ makes a difference to the evolution and eventual outcome of a given techno-political contention. Keywords digital issues, digital activism, digital politics, media advocacy, digital rights, human rights, volunteers, voices, victims, Indonesia ****** In 2015 the British comedian John Oliver travelled to Moscow to interview the exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for a TV show. In the interview, which soon ‘went viral’, Oliver reacted to Snowden's laborious attempts at explaining the privacy implications of the US government’s mass surveillance programmes by exclaiming: “This is the whole problem. I glaze over. It’s like the IT guy comes into your office and you go, ‘Oh shit — don’t teach me anything. I don’t want to learn. You smell like canned soup!”. The comedian then proceeded to ask Snowden a series of questions about the hypothetical fate of shared pictures of his – Oliver's – penis under the NSA's digital surveillance regime. By using his own private parts to explain privacy, his aim was to bring to life Snowden’s dry discourse (whilst extracting comedic value). This hilarious exchange raises three intriguing questions. First, John Oliver correctly identifies a fundamental problem at the heart of today’s increasingly digitised power struggles: digital activism ‘nerds’ such as Snowden are often not the best translators of key technical issues for a general public. For this reason, they frequently rely on intermediaries