Terorist Attack and Identity Reproduction

Terorist attack in Sarinah building is responded by public with various expression. The most documented respons are in social media. Public wrote coment, analysis and meme to express their feeling.

This acticle examinate, how citizen produced discourse at social media to respond terorist attack? And, why public produce the discourse? To analyze, writer use speech act theory by John Searle anda cultural production theory by Pierre Bourdieu.

Based on observation, there are four steps of publics respond. In first step, public try to confirm news about terorist attack. This action is done by publics because they hear terorist attack’s news but not sure about that.

Second, public ensure others that terorist attack is happened. To make others sure, they share news from several online publishers. In this step, public try to persuade theirselves their friends.

Third, public produce condolence speech. This speech expressed with various way. Example: i hope bomb victim rest in peace. In other way, public produce hastag in social media, example ‪#‎PrayForJakarta‬ and ‪#‎KamiTidakTakut‬. Second hashtag is most populer in last two days.

In fourth step, public make deepest and serious comments in their social media. Part of them produce serious speech, but others make this tragedy as a joke. Meme is part of second category I mention.

Speech as an Action
To analyze a speech, we can use speech act theory by John Searle. He assumed, when someone produce a speech, he/she not only produce sentence but also make action with certain aims.

Based on this argument, Searle clasify three action speeches, those are locution, ilocution, and perlocution. In first type of action speech, someone produce a speech to declarate an information. In second type of speech act, someone produce a speech to drive audience to do something explicitly. In last type, a speaker produce a speech to drive audience make a nonlinguistic respons.

Searle’s theory very useful to understand netizen’s respons for terorist attact. This theory useful to understand why Indonesian netizen very chatty for this issue.

When they ask a terorist attack news, they want valid information. So, they do ilocution speech. When they make hastag, they want other make respon. So, they do perlocution speech.

Self Identity
Different with Searle, Bourdieu analyze that speech is knowledge reproduction. This analysis assume that knowledge reproduction used by agents to accumulate power. When people ask and get a valid data, they try to accumulate power. And when they show their knwoledge in social media, they want people acknowledge them.

When someone make comment or analysis in public space, he/she wants other know that he/she know about the object or issue. If public know, he/she got recognition. If he/she got recognition, he/she have power to influence other.

In this process, someone do cultural strategy to make his/her speech trusted. The target can be obtained if he/she have some identity to make other trust. Example, someone must make coment rapidly to convince others.

Based on this analyze, i conclude, comment or analysis about terorist attack is not relevant with people awareness. Person who talkative commenting about terorist attack just accumulate identity as an aware person. They just care with their own identity, but not care about the tragedy. And also this analysis.

Rahmat Petuguran