KARYA#4 Karya Tulis Mahasiswa FISIP UPN Veteran Jakarta
Penulis: Faiz Akmal Rafif dan Fabian Nathaniel Putra Adya
Program Studi Ilmu Politik Angkatan 2022
Introduction
Nowadays especially in this globalization era, social media has become a primary need for every person. Social media has a lot of functions such as communication, spreading information, etc. All aspects of life that connects to technology uses social media as a platform to do various kinds of activities. Social media has become attached to our daily lives and the growth of technology will push us more to use social media. Internet users in indonesia is dominated by some users in the age group of 19 to 34 years old with 49.52%, age 13 to 18 with 16,68%, and the rest are users in the age group of 35 and above (Katadata, 2018). This explains that the majority of Indonesia's citizens, especially the milennials uses social media.
One of the fastest emerging social media platforms on the app store right now is Instagram. Instagram is an application that gives the opportunity for users to share their series of pictures about their moments (Bergstrom and Backman, 2013). Over the past ten years, Instagram has gained millions of users for its addicting, interactive features that allows us to socialize in a unique, creative way. Instagram has also became the perfect platform for artists to showcase their talent and works of art and gain huge popularity from it. Instagram has been the game changer
for the social media industry because its addicting and its simple to use. With every development of times, media platforms like Instagram are constantly changing. These changes include new filters, features like Insights, Stories and archives, new ways for advertising to use media, also changing the capacity of the camera on mobile phones, and more. All of this influences the subject matter and aesthetics of any shared images. With the growth in the number of Instagram users from 30 million in 2012 to 300 million at the end of 2014, Instagram has become a valuable advertising and marketing medium. The number of advertisers on Instagram has increased from 200,000 in 2/2016 to one million in 3/2017. As time has progressed, strategies for creating and running a successful Instagram account have been identified and described in endless articles, blog posts, and videos (Maranovich, 2017)
Globalization is happening right now and many of us send messages through all these social media platforms and the technologies we are offered. With social media, we gain access to uncountable informations spread across various platforms. The informations we often found have a variety of topic from social-politics, education, health, entertainment, etc. These informations not only circled around local/national field, but also the international world. In this case, when
we look at Instagram as our daily social media platform, not only that we discovered our friends' updates, but also numerous news and information from various subjects.
In order to be an educated citizen, we may have to stay in touch by participating politics. Politics is an activity where people create, protect, and amend general policies in which they live under and it can't be detached from conflict and cooperation (Heywood, 2013). When we look up Instagram, we may have experienced numerous moments where we discovered an Instagram post that contained a picture and a caption about political message and we've been in a place where we wanted to take part in the following issue by posting our comments and stands about it. This is called political participation. Political participation can be defined as the activity of someone or a group of people to participate in politics actively such as choosing state leadership and directly or indirectly, influence the outcome of public policy (Budiardjo, 2008).
Participating in politics is not only by creating or criticizing public policies, but also developing political literacy. Political literacy can be defined as someone who owns political information, knows the process of politics such as elections, political contributions, and responsible as a citizen (Denver and Hands, 2013; Krosnick, 1990). Developing political literacy is