Living in two different worlds at the same time

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): "If I can use this program, anybody can," said Werner Sutanto. He must have been trying to sound humble. As Intel's country manager for Indonesia, this amicable man is more computer-proficient than the vast majority of us.

We were sitting in a conference room in the plush Ritz Carlton, Jimbaran, Bali. Also there were Intel's country managers for Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, along with a group of local journalists from Bali.

We sat there, feeling so comfortable, so safe, so protected and so remote from Sambas, Kalimantan, where the killings had been going on for several weeks.

Werner was giving a short presentation on InterMerchant, a software program that would enable small entrepreneurs to make their presence on the Web. No, this did not mean that the chip giant had decided to enter the software industry. It just got itself involved in developing tools that would take the use of computer technology and the Internet a step further and higher. Of course, as more and more people use the Internet and PCs, Intel Corp. will be able to churn out more processors.

Intel, as Werner explained at the informal media meeting, is in the process of providing the software to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in a pilot project that it is executing in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Surabaya and Bali. The project is aimed at helping local small businesses get their feet wet in the e- commerce water. "Several universities have expressed their interest in providing the necessary training for the small-scale entrepreneurs," added Werner.

Once the program becomes available on the ISPs' servers, small entrepreneurs can start utilizing them to create their own storefronts on the Web. They can start offering their goods -- batik shirts, handicrafts, durian and any other exotic products -- and have a potentially global audience.

It's that easy, and Werner was not bluffing.

In fact, the number of small businesses with presence on the Web is increasing very rapidly. The low cost involved, and the promise of worldwide exposure are getting harder and harder to resist.

Take www.iklanbaris.co.id, for example. The page I captured for this article contains announcements of small business opportunities. You can place your ad in the site, and suddenly you are ready for business. In the beginning, the number of visitors to your site may be limited, but over time it will grow -- depending, of course, on what you offer and how often you refresh your pages.

Indeed, it would be difficult to deny claims made by Oracle, Cisco and others that "Internet has changed our lives". In my own case, I could lo longer imagine my life without access to Internet and e-mail. Just last week, for example, before I left for Denmark, I e-mailed a Danish friend who is now living in Augsburg, Germany. I asked him what kind of clothes I should take with me for the trip, and in just two hours I got his very useful advice. It never costs me much to get in touch with him, or with so many other friends and colleagues all over the world thanks to the Internet and e-mail.

That is the glorious picture of the digital life. It's borderless, it's so fast and so egalitarian. On the Net, the sky is the limit. Unfortunately, there also is a different kind of picture that you can find being forwarded from one Internet user's inbox to another. One is the picture of a young man holding the severed head of another man by the hair. Sadly, both the young man in the JPG image file and the man whose head he was carrying were also my countrymen.

So while some of us have already moved into the exciting world of digital communications and are continuously talking about efficiency, productivity, global reach, collaborative works and the future, many of our fellow Indonesians are still living in the era of the savages, the barbaric, the cannibals. Could there ever be more disparate worlds than these? Keep in mind that both of us live in the same homeland.

And then, think about why we were all forced to avoid the Semanggi and Senayan areas in Jakarta on April 1? It was not because it was April Fools Day. It was because a bunch of our countrymen were stoning passing cars as they walked toward the Senayan Sport Complex to watch the Indonesian Soccer League matches. It was easy to see that these soccer supporters and their victims did not know each other, but it was extremely difficult to understand why the former did what they did to the latter. Except, perhaps, by labeling the action a manifestation of social jealousy.

Think also about the guy in the Senen railway station who, live in front of a TV camera, threatened to destroy everything around him if he and his gang were not given the money they needed to go back to Central and East Java. As his friends cheered, we were stunned. What right did they have to demand money from us? Can we fight back and defend ourselves?

Here in Indonesia, we are currently experiencing two contrasting realities at the same time. Inside the office building, or the conference rooms of five-star hotels, or the guarded houses in upscale real estates, we feel safe and we can go on-line where everybody ignores differences in race, religion and skin color. Once we get on the street, however, it is once again the issue of survival in its most basic sense.

The question now, folks, is: "How long can we go on living these two extremely divergent worlds without eventually becoming schizophrenic?"