Digital Literacy has been mentioned a lot of times here and there. We have also discussed what is digital literacy and what are the skills needed in our previous posts (check them out if you haven’t!). But, why does it matter especially in our beloved country, Indonesia?
If you check the statistic of Digital Civility Index by Microsoft, you’ll see and found out that out of 32 countries surveyed, Indonesia is ranked 29th. Although it’s true Indonesia has earned 8 more points, from 67 to 76 in 2020, we are still ranked the lowest and the most rude netizens in the Southeast Asia.
It’s not hard to find the examples as of why we are ‘crowned’ as the most rude netizens. Our netizens are easily triggered by simple occurence in the internet that most of the times has offended Indonesian national pride. When the Indonesian badminton team was forced to withdraw from the All England 2021 Championship, this sparks Indonesian netizens’ frustrations thus leading them to ‘attack’ the Badminton World Federation (BWF)’s social media accounts with dozens of comments. This ‘attack’ is a way for the netizens to show their nationalism or to defend their country.
Although in a sense this is not wrong (defending their country), but the methods and the way they do it unfortunately is not appropriate. Indonesian netizens are still very vulnerable & easy to be swayed. They are prone to hoaxes, scams and digital bullying (they don’t even realize that they are doing this!).
Due to this, digital literacy is very important and need to be addressed as soon as possible as actually there are many opportunities available. As one of the examples, if it’s channeled and trained for good purposes, indonesian netizens actually could have a significant impact on business, market policy, digital activity, and many other areas.
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