How do mobile media technologies shape identities? Identity – what it is to be and have a self, and to belong to social and cultural groups – is always mediated. People understand themselves, others and their world in terms of the media they know and use. According to philosopher Paul Ricoeur, narrative is the privileged medium for self-understanding and social/cultural identifications. The quick and widespread adoption of mobile media technologies prompts us to revisit this claim. In this window I look at the context of Jakarta, Indonesia, to show how urban mobile media practices shape identities in playful ways.

The mobile phone – or handphone – has rapidly gained popularity in Indonesia. The number mobile phone subscribers, predominantly prepaid, increased from 3.67 million in 2000 to 159.25 million in 2009 (on a population of 229.96 million). Reasons include the lagging state of fixed telephony at home, its affordability (even for poor people), and the omnipresent branding that induces an acute sense of “must have”. Most importantly, mobile phones offer Indonesians rich new opportunities for identity construction and expression. Mobile media hook into existing identity practices that are specific to life in the capital city. Jakarta is both a city-world and a world-city. As “Indonesia in small”, Jakarta reflects the nation's ethnic, religious and cultural diversity. However, Jakarta's urban culture and identity transcends this mosaic. Unlike most other Indonesian cities, shared symbols, interactions in public and modes of self-presentation are not based on the rules of one traditional regional culture. Young people in particular base their identities on shared (though contested) ideas about what it means to live “modern life” in the capital city. Two defining practices are gengsi (the display of prestige) and bergaul (the art of modern socializing). Mobile media technologies have quickly become part of this dynamic urban culture, and help to define what it means to be a “modern Indonesian”.

Gengsi, which means “prestige” or “status display”, originally connoted family standing and class. With Soeharto's New Order (1966-1998) economic boom, the notion has shifted from an interior “innate” property to an image achieved by outward appearances. Appearing prestigious involves the possession and display of material goods that symbolically convey progress and cosmopolitanism. The notion regularly recurs in descriptions of Indonesian consumer society in general. And it recurs in analyses of Indonesian technological culture, in particular.