{"id":1474,"date":"2017-01-06T21:23:30","date_gmt":"2017-01-06T21:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aiccusa.org\/?p=1474"},"modified":"2018-02-22T20:41:33","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T20:41:33","slug":"honking-in-the-free-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/?p=1474","title":{"rendered":"Honking in the Free World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Wayne Forrest<\/em><\/p>\n

Their signs read\u00a0 \u201cOm Telolet Om\u201d.\u00a0 It simply means, \u201csir, honk your horn, sir\u201d.\u00a0 Young girls and boys, especially in Jakarta, hold them up for passing bus drivers, hoping to prompt them to play their musical\"om-telolet\" horns as they drive by.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fun, clean game with instant rewards, especially given the variety of sounds the horns can create.<\/p>\n

The horns consist of up to six compressed air, trumpet like horns attached electronically, each tuned to a different pitch.\u00a0 The driver has a rheostat that can play them individually or as groups, composing little melodies in an endless variety.\u00a0 They can also be outfitted in cars.\u00a0\u00a0 As somehow who has ridden buses in Indonesia, I can attest to the drivers as purveyors of gossip, wisdom, and entertainment.\u00a0 It makes total sense they are taking advantage of a new tool to assert their outsized personalities.<\/p>\n

The Minister of Transportation worries about the safety of the game, but its likely it will continue for some time and even if it is curtailed, he and other officials are certainly proud of an Indonesian export that has brought a good deal of positive attention from the world at large. Thanks to bloggers whose posts contain online videos of the kids flagging the buses, and DJ\u2019s who have mixed the horn sounds to create sonic pastiches that are ever more popular, the kids\u2019 fun has gone around the world.\u00a0 Since late December \u201com telolet om\u201d\u00a0 has been appearing in the online comments of many celebrities, the result of dedicated Indonesians gaining attention for the phenomenon. It has been \u201ctwittered, facebooked, and youtubed\u201d millions of times.\u00a0 Type the phrase in a search engine and you too can join in the fun. Or click here.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

After American journalist Jon Emont (who I met with before he headed to Indonesia) wrote about this on December 23 for US News and World Report, the story was picked up by NPR, the Jakarta Post, and countless other media.\u00a0\u00a0 Billboard now predicts the horn sounds will be heard in more and more of the world\u2019s electronic dance music.<\/p>\n

Of all the things from Indonesia that might go viral one would not have predicted it would be bus horns.\u00a0 Yet, amid all the challenges regarding the flow of information and its effect on politics and how we live, it\u2019s a bunch of Indonesian kids who have successfully injected their essential truth into the online realm of lies, half-truths, deception and misinformation, shaping it to their reality and giving a tense world some joy as we move into the new year.<\/p>\n

I am often asked how to get more positive stories from Indonesia into the media and public opinion.\u00a0 It would seem one answer is the simple creativity of Indonesian kids and their bus driver friends.<\/p>\n

(These views are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the American Indonesian Chamber of Commerce or its members)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Wayne Forrest Their signs read\u00a0 \u201cOm Telolet Om\u201d.\u00a0 It simply means, \u201csir, honk your horn, sir\u201d.\u00a0 Young girls and boys, especially in Jakarta, hold them up for passing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,7,11,6,25,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aicc","category-american-indonesian-chamber-of-commerce","category-indonesia","category-jokowi","category-outlook-indonesia","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1474"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1498,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions\/1498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}