Beyond Cultural Representation: A Commentary on Global South Media Theory from the Indonesian Digital Public Sphere

This commentary responds to Tomaselli and Xiao’s (2023) article “Cultural Studies in Interhemispherical Perspective: China, Africa, Asia and Australasia” by extending its South–North and East–West conversation to the Indonesian digital public sphere. While their article valuably reopens the question of how cultural studies travels across unequal intellectual geographies, I argue that Global South media theory must move beyond the language of cultural representation alone. Indonesia shows that culture is not merely represented online; it is sorted, intensified, moralised, monetised and sometimes wounded through platform infrastructures. Drawing on empirical indicators of Indonesian internet use, social media news consumption, digital rights pressures and scholarship on Indonesian digital politics, this commentary proposes “platformed moral publics” as a modest conceptual extension. The term names the affective publics through which citizens negotiate religion, nationalism, gender, class and civic belonging under algorithmic visibility. The point is not to exceptionalise Indonesia, but to insist that theory from the South begins from lived contradiction.