Communal Consumption of VCD/DVD and Social Change in the Urban Kampung Community Indonesia

Abstract

This study looks at the consumption of video disc among the viewers in such urban middle-lower class community settlement in Surabaya, Indonesia. The entertainment consumers in urban Indonesia have been spoiled with cheap of abundance piracy productions of foreign and national films, TV soaps, dramas, and other audio visual materials in the form of VCD and/or DVD in the market. Apart from this feature, the consumption of sexual scenes and pornographic materials has become the so-called ‘common secret’ among those social class communities in their everyday of media consumption. They do not just buy the discs, but also rent and swap each other within the kampung neighbourhood environment. Applying an ethnography method, this study observes the discourse of cultural consumption of the middle-lower class community toward the audio-visual productions of VCD and/or DVD in such neighbourhood alley and the practice of communal consumption. The result shows how those kampung communal viewers have experienced as spectators of a “dish of entertainment” in their particular class context, as well as practicing the mode of communal imaginative experience in the contemporary cultural liberalisation in Indonesia post-authoritarian era.

Keywords: urban kampung community, cultural consumption, communal consumption, spectatorship