Social media, in the current modern era, have played a major role into human civilisation. People around the world have been using it for many purposes, such as to connect human with each other, to gain information, and to get news. However, the usage of social media does not stop there, many agencies, not just individuals, are now using social media as a part of their services. The improvement use of social media has then taken an application by the government in many countries, seeing that social media are regards as true to have the ability to accommodate people in observing of what is happening all over the world. After years of testing and observation, the government has now planned to take a more advanced level in using social media, which is by arranging several innovations on civil services’ internal performances and their interaction with the public beyond the governmental structure. Thus, social media have the ability to accommodate people in observing the happenings around the globe, especially in monitoring the governmental system.
The use of social media in the governance has become a major trend, for instance, the Electronic Government (e-Government) application that the majority of countries worldwide utilise. The existence of social media utilisation is changing the outlook of governmental services all over the world. It is just recently that the government in many countries is using the social media as a part of their scheme to increase their quality of work, which is to serve the people. In order to do so, the government continues to do research to improve their ability on using the social media, so that they can link the idea of social networking together with the facilitation of the work of the governmental services. Regarding the definition of social media in government, there is no particular meaning. However, the government use of social media can be defined as a “group of technologies that allow public agencies and bureaucracies to encourage participation with the citizens and other organisations using the philosophy of Web 2.0 technologies. The Web 2.0 refers to a collection of social media through which individuals are active participants in creating, organising, editing, combining, sharing, commenting, and rating Web content as well as forming a social network through interacting and linking to each other” (Chun et al., 2010:2). This description then leads to the concept of collaborative, traceable, searchable, linkable, and open as the core characteristics of social media, which then inspire the government to utilise it in public administration (Criado, Sandoval-Almazan, and Gil-Garcia, 2013). In addition, McAfee (2006) considers social media to have the ability to cope within the complex organisation structure, such as the governmental system. Chun and Luna-Reyes (2012) add that the SLATE abilities (search, link, authoring, tags, extensions, and signal) may help to ease the government's work by helping to organise the administrative businesses, build connections for the employees and the customers, share content and allocate knowledge, and tagging to manage effective sharing and filtering. The use of social media in the public sector was at first applied due to its massive amount of resources that are coming from the interaction with citizens, organisation, and other public administration, which can be beneficial. Nonetheless, social media has a more influential approach where the government can use it as a method to gain co-production of services and policies and as a device for democracy for public opinion sourcing of solutions to the social and political issues (Mergel 2012). Hence, the spreading use of social media in the government includes analytical critics for the future of public services.
One of the countries in the world that are taking steps on the usage of social media as a part of its means of communication with the citizens is Indonesia. The government in Indonesia, especially in the Jakarta City, has the initiative on using social media to improve its public services. It has used a broad range of social media, from Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube. These three social media have shown a different success. According to a data in 2012, that was taken from the number of subscribers and/or likes on the government’s social media page by Tarmizi (2016), YouTube appears to have the most users with more than 9.5 million subscribers, whereas Facebook comes in second with 5,613 and Twitter comes last with 3.370. We can see from the results that the government’s YouTube channel subscribers outnumbered the followers on Twitter and Facebook. Tarmizi (2016) states that users seek for a source that can give them information and where they can engage with the information itself. The number of subscribers on the YouTube channel has shown that the account has been able to get the most viewers and it is effective to create interactions with the viewers by the engagement in the comment section, which fulfil the criteria that the public want. However, the major number on the channel does not come solely from YouTube subscribers, many of the viewers are directed from the links that are posted on Facebook and Twitter too. This reflects that the three common social media, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are working in harmony. As an illustration, the Indonesian government started to use social media was firstly by creating accounts at the behest of public services; for a starter, Facebook pages, followed with increasing number of Twitter accounts that include public administrative and political elites accounts that run privately or by a spokesperson, which accounts representing the mayors, ministers, and legislative. The most current innovation is on YouTube application. The recent President, Ir. Joko Widodo, created a YouTube account on the behalf of his self. The feed videos that he makes are a part of his journey in his presidency, which then created a concept of what the people nowadays know as ‘Vlogging’. President Jokowi shows many occurrences that feature in his YouTube videos. For example, he includes his lunch meeting with the Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on his visit to Indonesia and many other ‘vlogs’ about his activity, which section has a hashtag #JKWVLOG to filter. The president also has Questions and Answers (Q&A) videos, which are under the playlist Jokowi Menjawab. This concept of ‘Vlogging’, or Video Blogging, is a clever way of creating a governance that is more transparent, because, from this advantageous position, people get to see what is happening in the life of a president, what happens in a diplomacy, and how does a work looks like through the president’s lens. The new method to reach the citizen does not stop there, a newly renowned social media, Instagram, has caught the government’s attention due to its large number of users. A little bit different from Facebook and Twitter where the two are mostly used as a media to share thoughts, events, and online photo albums, on Instagram, people share pictures with a caption followed with each post and also ‘Insta-Story’, which is a similar idea to ‘vlog’, but it will be on the profile for 24 hours before it vanishes. The features in Instagram are then used by the Indonesian government as another venue to connect with the public, with an expectation that it will have the same great impacts as YouTube, Facebook, and as well Twitter has created.
The whole improvements on the use of social media are a great success. We can see that there are plenty of public involvement on the posts that the government has published, whether it is a diary like the ‘vlogs’ or even news and information about a social or political issue that is happening within the country or within a relationship between countries, such as in a bilateral and/or multilateral relation. The people are aware and therefore they take parts in giving out their opinions towards the issues by leaving comments in the comment segment in each post. This public involvement can help the government to find a solution to an issue, especially if these judgments are being critical, investigative, and come from the experts; yet, there are many comments that are considered foolish and are inappropriate to be furthermore taken into consideration. However, the decision is still in the government’s hands whether any of the suggestions that the public gives should make it into a resolution to any of the issues or not. The public’s role in this circumstance is only as the observers of the issues and the happenings; they can still give critiques, which then the government accepts as the “public reason” (Quong 2013). This strategy of governance is what reflects on democracy, where the citizens are welcome to speak up their minds and where the government is there to contemplate on the citizen’s views. According to Scienceoflaw.org, 2017, in a democratic country like Indonesia, the government is aiming to optimally serve the purpose of democracy for the people, by upholding the value of transparency, creating open spaces for the public to let out their opinions, which will be improving the quality of the openness of the governmental services. Although the progressive development that thus far the government has achieved, this agenda, however, has not completed yet; in order to provide better assistance for the citizens, there are still some flaws that need further improvements. Some scholars say that in Indonesia, to use social media is not that convenient; it has limitations. Simplified narratives, larger media systems, and dominant meta-narratives, such as nationalism and strong religious belief in Indonesia, are what cause the imperfection. The phenomena include what is described as ‘many clicks, little sticks’, which means that it only creates such a small impacts from the many clicking on social media that Indonesians do to even make such a ubiquitous activism. Scholars argue that not only the government has used social media, but extreme activists also use it to engage in radical democracy (Pickard 2006). It is dangerous, to some extent that these extremists are taking advantages of the freedom use of social media, which is widely used, trying to build such a complex organisation that is built upon ‘the network of networks’. This networking might threaten the safety and the unity of the nation due to the radical movements that they are trying to construct, which oppose the fundamental being of democracy in Indonesia. These extreme groups will interrupt the ongoing democratisation process in the nation through social media utilisation.
In summary, the governmental services in social media have been widely used; not only in developed countries but also in developing countries like Indonesia. The social media application in the government is to create transparent governance where the citizens can engage more with the government and be aware of the issues that are happening within the country’s affair, which display the democracy of the country. In order to do that, the Indonesian government involves in using social media by creating accounts for public services and political elites, where they can interact better with the public via comments. The plan has been showing a great success; however, the government must be cautious due to the limitations that might lead to the conduct of radical movements by extremist activists that are trying to exploit on the growing freedom of democracy that social media promotes to build “the network of networks” and “the movements of movements”.