Living in two different worlds at the same time

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?"