https://jurnal.ugm.ac.id/jurnal-humaniora HUMANIORA Vol. 34, No. 2 (2022) https://doi.org/10.22146/jh.72605 page 149—158 Online Learning During the Pandemic in Indonesia: A Case Study on Digital Divide and Sociality Among Students Sita Hidayah Department of Anthropology, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia Email: sita.fb@ugm.ac.id ABSTRACT This paper discusses the social world of online education in Indonesia. Drawing on a qualitative study held in July to September 2021, this paper describes how students used digital technologies for both education and social connection purposes during the COVID-19 restriction policy. In contrast to the widely assumed uniformity of online education and ubiquity of information technologies, this study identifes various digital divides ranging from unequal access to and control over digital devices and the internet to the varying degrees of students’ technological skills and participation. Sociality is used as a conceptual framework to understand students’ social interactions and networks. Data was collected from online interviews and partial participant observations with high school and university students from Jakarta, Denpasar (Bali), Magelang (Central Java), Pekanbaru (Riau), and Yogyakarta. The study concludes that the digital divide in online education exacerbates existing social inequalities. Simultaneously, online education enables the construction of new forms of stratifcation and relationships. Keywords: digital divide; online education; sociality INTRODUCTION This paper describes the online education for Indonesian students’ social world based on a study conducted on remote, fully online learning during the 2021 COVID-19 lockdowns. The focus of the study were digital natives– or people who live “digitally by default”. The term digital natives refers to a generation that grew up in and surrounded by digital technologies (Vodanovic, et. al., 2010: 711) and those who were born between 1995-2010. It is important to note that almost all digital natives experienced a fully online education, at some point, between 2020 and 2021. Over sixty-eight million students in Indonesia were absent from school as of the beginning of May 2020 (Indonesian Ministry of Education Survey 2020). The rise of online learning in which teaching was done online and on digital platforms has been studied all over the world (Nadeak 2020; Baber 2022; Engzel, Frey &Verhagen 2021; Meinks, Fraillon & Strietholth (Eds.) 2022). These studies look at how school closure afected students in Indonesia, the Netherlands, India, and several other Asian and African countries. A notable study investigated the efectiveness of online learning and learning loss during school closures using surveys. Engzel, Frey, & Verhagen (2021) claimed that according to a survey of 300.000 students in the Netherlands, Dutch students made little or no progress while learning from home, and losses are even greater in countries with weaker infrastructure or longer school closures such as in Indonesia. In contrast to the assumed uniformity of online education and the pervasiveness of information technologies, this study discovered digital divides in students’ social worlds of online education. This study