Audience Responses on Indonesian Idol Talent Show Nadia Seassi Roesdiono Diah Ariani Arimbi English Department, Universitas Airlangga
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Audience Responses on Indonesian Idol Talent Show Nadia Seassi Roesdiono Diah Ariani Arimbi English Department, Universitas Airlangga Abstract Indonesian Idol singing competition has been one of the most popular television programs in Indonesia for more than ten years. Its existence in Indonesia is a phenomenon and it started the trend of talent show in Indonesian television. This research aims to learn how the audiences respond to Indonesian Idol talent show in television and the meaning of the responses as it represents audience attitude toward this program. This research applied Ien Ang’s method of data collection in her work Watching Dallas (1985) to Universitas Airlangga Surabaya students and their parents as the respondents. On September 27, 2014 an announcement was posted in several social media to collect the data. 19 responses were collected and analyzed with the approach also used by Ien Ang, namely ‘symptomatic reading’ approach by Louis Althusser and coding to help classify the data. The result shows that most of the audience gave negative responses to Indonesian Idol. The analysis shows that high commercialization is the cause of audience resistance. From the result and analysis it is concluded that Indonesian Idol has become a product of culture industry where capitalism operates: the society become the passive audience and media owners become the ones taking control of the society. Keywords: audience study, culture industry, Indonesian Idol, symptomatic reading Introduction Indonesian people like to watch television. When people turn their television on, there are plenty of programs to watch and they choose their favorite one or the programs that they need to watch. Still from Nielsen Television Measurement, in 2012 the two most-watched television programs in Indonesia are TV serial and talent show (Aria). If we look at the history, talent show program is considered as new kind of popular television program in Indonesia. The first talent shows broadcasted in Indonesian television are Popstars and Audisi Pelawak TPI (API) in 2003. As the new kind of television program in Indonesia, talent shows have significant developments in terms of viewers. It can be seen in the emergence of Akademi Fantasi Indosiar (AFI) in the late 2003 which was successful in gaining much attention from the viewers. People who first only had TV serials as entertainment were then given a new option: talent show. Some popular talent shows in Indonesia are AFI, KDI (Kontes Dangdut Indonesia), X Factor Indonesia, Master Chef Indonesia and Indonesian Idol which are broadcasted by leading television channels in Indonesia. Among the talent shows, singing competition has been a phenomenon in Indonesia with its atmosphere of competition, audition, skill-showing, the music show, and also the euphoria of all those aspects. Looking at the output, i.e. the successful singers produced by a talent show, Indonesian Idol has produced most of those successful singers and some of them even work in other field in TV entertainment. This information shows that Indonesian Idol has given important contribution to Indonesian entertainment industry. The trend of talent show in Indonesia Indonesian Idol is a singing competition broadcasted by RCTI, an adaptation of Pop Idol originally created by Simon Fuller and produced by Fremantle Media. Since its first season in 2004, Indonesian Idol singing competition has been successful in gaining most people’s attention. This singing competition has finished eight seasons in ten years (2004-2014). Indonesian Idol itself has been a phenomenon in each season. The popularity is high and people always wait for the next show every week. Indonesian Idol’s 1 Allusion Volume 05 Number 01 (February 2016) | Nadia Seassi Roesdiono; Diah Ariani Arimbi popularity gives fundamental contribution to the phenomenon of talent shows in Indonesian television. After Indonesian Idol there were plenty of other talent shows emerging in various television channels such as Kontes Dangdut TPI (dangdut competition), MasterChef Indonesia (cooking competition), The Master (magic show competition), and several other singing competitions. Audiences’ views and opinions about the phenomenon of talent show, especially singing competition are needed in order to see this phenomenon from the point of view that has not been given much attention. If we only see it from television, we will only have one point of view, but if we look through the audience’s experiences we will have more various views since every individual has their own opinions and experiences. Through the various points of view we can see this phenomenon in a more comprehensive way. That is the grand purpose of this paper and that is why the writer chooses Indonesian Idol to reach the goal. Audiences’ opinion of Indonesian Idol talent show then can be the answer to the grand purpose. Therefore, the researcher here intends to examine how people respond to Indonesian Idol talent show on television and the meaning of those responses. This study concerns on how people see Indonesian Idol as a popular television program in Indonesia, how they like or dislike or both and why, and tries to find the meaning of such responses related to Indonesian culture. This study uses the approach proposed by Ien Ang in examining Dallas television serial in Netherlands. Ang tried to reveal the social and cultural meaning of Dallas and from which ideological context it comes from (11). She believes that a certain ideology in the society influences the making of social and cultural meaning of the text by the audience. Ien Ang analyzed the text (letters from respondents) through ‘symptomatic reading’ as she believes that the ideas written by her respondents are structured in a certain socio-cultural manner. ‘Symptomatic reading’ itself is a theory proposed by Louis Althusser, which is more about unwrapping the wrapped things in a text (13). It then believes that a text can give information about under what situation it was written, and also under what situation it was read by the readers. Analyzing a text through symptomatic reading means we regard meaning as cultural instead of natural, self-evident, and limited to the author’s intention only. It is interested in the way culture constructs and ‘determines a reader’s reading of a text … rather than describe what it means’. Symptomatic reading tries to use the text to reveal the discourses that constructs the text and where the discourse takes place in the larger social and cultural system (Estevez). Methodology This study used the integration of qualitative and quantitative method. Quantitative is used to identify the proportion of audience’s responses through coding method. This approach is used only for the surface of the analysis since it is used only for the first step of analysis. Meanwhile, qualitative approach is used for the deeper analysis, namely to learn audience’s responses and reveal the issues that exist. This study adapted Ien Ang’s approach in her work entitled Watching Dallas (1985). Ang’s approach is the best for this study because of the major similarities such as the text, the object of the study, and also the point of view. Watching Dallas itself has been a very influential work in cultural studies and also a breakthrough of audience research (Hermes 7). Population and sampling The number of Indonesian Idol’s audience in season 8 is more than 18,9 million (Nielsen Company). The data populations are the people with the age range of 16-65 years old, because that is the age range decided by Indonesian Idol for those who want to join the audition, and also the adult people given the SU (Semua Umur) category of Indonesian Idol. This study will use similar method with Ang’s but the writer considers that the target sample will be audience in Surabaya, especially Universitas Airlangga students and their parents. It is a potential location to collect data from because not only it is the second largest city in Indonesia where popular culture grows fast, but also the number of people auditioning for Indonesian Idol in Surabaya is considered high. From Surabaya, the writer narrows down the sample into the students of Universitas Airlangga based on the consideration that the age range of college students would represent the range of Indonesian Idol’s age requirement. Another consideration of choosing Universitas Airlangga is that the university is located in the center of Surabaya where most people live with urban style of life in which popular culture is created and developed. 2 Audience Responses on Indonesian Idol Talent Show In order to adjust to the advanced technology and people’s current interest, the writer did some adjusting in adapting Ang’s data collection. The writer here published an announcement in popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path, and LINE. The writer asked for the respondents to share their opinions and feelings of Indonesian Idol’s promotional advertisements on television by sending their writing through one of several ways: sending an e-mail, sending a text (SMS), sending message to the writer’s LINE account, and Facebook chat. With such ways, the writer believes that the data collecting will be easier and faster. The analysis is done with Ien Ang’s approach on examining Dallas television serial with the help of coding method. Discussion There are a total of 19 respondents of this study, who are students of Universitas Airlangga Surabaya. Unfortunately, there are no respondents from the adult category since there are no parents of Unair’s students participated. The data was collected from September 27, 2014 to November 26, 2014 from LINE chat (16 respondents), Facebook private message (2 respondents), and e-mail (1 respondent). The codes were created through the process of categorization and data reading. In qualitative research, a code is usually a word or short phrases that represent the most significant content of a textual data (Saldaña 3).