The Spatiality of the Social Media Crowd in Okky Madasari ’ s

Okky Madasari ’ s Kerumunan Terakhir (2016) explores the complicated interaction between its male protagonist and the disruptive context of modern Indonesia following the triumph of communication technology. Her narrative illustrates the influences of feminine authority as embodied by the characters of the grandmother, mother, and girlfriend to the development of the protagonist ’ s subjectivity to adapt to the dynamics of space between tradition and modernity. Drawing loosely from three theoretical apparatuses by Lefebvre, Foucault, and Soja, this article attempts to explain the embodiment of spatial conflicts and the individual aspiration of future uncertainties. In his refusal to accept the unexpected trialectics of home, the protagonist seeks refuge by embracing the virtual world ’ s fluidity and lack of boundaries. Haunted by the influence of the three important women in his life and frustrated by his inability to define himself, he adjusts to living in the ambivalence of social media crowds, which offers him heterotopia and creates a thirdspace. This article discusses Okky Madasari ’ s pessimistic voice to individual vulnerability to the loudness of the virtual world, which created a disruptive space.


Introduction
Okky Madasari won the Khatulistiwa Literary Award in 2012 for her novel Maryam (2012), which was then translated into English as The Outcast (2013).Entrok (2010), which was later translated into The Years of the Voiceless (2015), "86" (2011), Pasung Jiwa (2013) which was translated into Bound (2015), and Kerumunan Terakhir (2016) are among her other works.Okky Madasari's works have received a considerable number of critical appraisals.Her narrative works are regarded as social criticism, as she speaks up against the erosion of traditional cultural values and the growth of intolerance emanating from political culture, ethnocentrism, religious bigotry, and other social issues (Akun and Budiman; Satriati and Hapsarani; Khasanah and Wiyatmi; Sipayung; Wiyatmi, et al.).She acknowledges raises questions about the intersubjective notion of cyberspace in which the interactions in the virtual world in turn, form their extended identity in reality.The novel highlights the powerlessness of individuals in social media crowds through the dominant narratives of the agony and suffering of cyberbullying victims.However, the novel provides an ending "bukan akhir dunia, it's not the end of the world," that suggests the possibilities of choices to use and behave in the virtual world.The question always remains how we should make sense of ourselves.
In literary studies, the background against which these acts took place was frequently referred to as space.Space can be perceived as a category and a material reality.The 19 th -century writers treated space just as a stage in which character development unfolded.Time was considered more important since it influences narrative developments.Once the space was constructed, it stayed in the same state.Space was like an empty container and regarded as "the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile" (Wegner 179).Until the ground-breaking theory of Foucault's heteropologies and Lefebvre's critique of the construction of space, it received little attention from literary academics.Only after Soja coined the spatial turn, the notion of space is redefined, not just as a material reality but also as a category with correlating effects on aspects of personal life, social realities, and representation.Space is made dynamic by the subjects that reside within them, resulting in a reciprocal relationship between people and spaces.Spaces become both the drive and force of human actions.They are both real and imagined at all times .With the advent of postmodernism, the concept of space has become increasingly contested.Since no single form of knowledge and metalanguage is privileged, subjectivity becomes dominant.The highlighted notion of reality is all socially constructed.The universal truth which may position individuals under the objectivity of space is under question; however, in social reproduction processes, subjectivity continues to operate inside the objective truth .With regard to literary studies, the spatial turn enriches viewpoints in structuring arguments to include the spatial angle while extending contextualization approaches drawn from geographical imagining.
Many people believe that literary works are a representation of life, but only in scattered ways.Protagonist, action, and space are the three most important elements in literary works.Because the protagonist's activities take place in/on space, the spatial component is vital, whether it takes the shape of a fictional setting or a recognisable location.Cultural differences, historical memory, and societal organisation are embodied in space (Gupta and Ferguson 7).The portrayal of space in literary works, as a representation of reality, follows the spatial structures with all of the spatial interactions and oppositions within social, religious, political, and moral ideals.Breaks, ruptures, and disjunction of spatial structures are materials for depicting pictures that spatial structures create, such as issues of displacement, community, and identity.The dialectical link of the local to broader spatial arenas results in social and cultural transformation, an issue taken to voice the author's perspective and stance.
The paper focuses on the issue of space and spatiality, particularly the advent of communication technology and its impact on spatial structure transformation.It discusses the literary map, as narrated by the male protagonist in the novel Kerumunan Terakhir, that calls into question the problematics of the spatiality of the Internet world.To grasp the author's perspective on spatial structures, it loosely incorporates some ideas of space coined by theorists such as Lefebvre, Foucault, Soja, and Jameson in exploring and analysing the production of space and the production of the individual through space in the novel.Accordingly, the discussion requires understanding the conceptualisation of space to interpret the author's voice on the trialectics of the virtual world.

Spatiality of social media and transformation of space
Scholars of literary and cultural studies have used spatiality to map out social spaces in literature and literary theory.The ways critics explore the fictional mapping of the worlds vary from one to another.Some critics employ semiotic ideas to explore the textual modelling of cultural space by categorising relations of representations of intra-textual space and extra-textual references in geospace.Some German literary geographers centre on correlating the elements of geography to creative works to find out the contribution of the textual world of literature to the regional identities of readers.Others limit their focus on "mapping and interpreting of places where famous writers lived, or of geospaces represented in their texts" .However, they share one common theme, such as "the relationship between geospaces and cultural construct," and focus on the spatial, topological, and topographical turns that have yet to be determined in scope and association (Winkler et al. 253).
Most spatiality studies concentrate on "the current representational challenge frequently mentioned by globalisation or postmodernity theories" and "the ancient and well-known link between cartographic and narrative discourse" (Tally 4).The perplexing new spatiality as a result of the postmodern situation is the impetus for discussing spatial issues with a narrative as a means of mapping the interconnection between "real-and-imagined" spaces (Soja) and how readers can understand their own social spaces through literary cartography constructed in narratives (Tally 6).This article, on the other hand, makes no attempt to cover all aspects of the novel's spatiality.In line with Bertrand Westphal's argument that literary texts are a source of information for describing the imaginary dimension of geographical space (6), it merely attempts to investigate the selective narrative of space, concentrating on the author's perspective on the spatiality of social media culture and the ubiquity that comes with it.
Space can be confining, personal, and intimate, or large and open, engaging and communicative, or even generative and free.As a result of the locus of thought, creativity, and personal claim, the nature of space opens up a world of possibilities (Piehler 7).Individuals might build their own impression of space because of its intricacy.According to Foucault, space is heterogeneous.He has coined the term 'heterotopia' to describe how individuals' behaviour that contradicts the prescribed area is 'disciplined, controlled, and punished' (see .It is nearly impossible for members of society to perceive it naturally.People develop social anticipation gradually into ways of ordering through likeness and similitude.Meanwhile, heterotopia is strongly related to similitude.Social expectations are still confirmed by resemblance.Similitude on the other hand, provides an alternative ordering site.Heterotopia can occur during the transition to maturity.Individuals can affect the social space by challenging it, resisting it, and altering it (Raj; Foucault).
Influenced by Foucault, Lefebvre develops a three-part dialectic between perceptions and everyday practices, representation and the imaginary of time.Within the trialectics of spatiality, he differentiates between objective, conceived, and lived space.As "space is the ultimate locus and medium of struggle," (Elden 107) it could not isolate the concept of space from the politics of space.Every culture creates its own space; thus, space is also social.Modernity and technology have changed the idea of producing things in space into producing space itself.The mode of producing space, however, is still historical and temporal.For Lefebvre, "space and time appear and manifest themselves as different yet inseparable" (Elden 109).This concept leads to a need to understand how space is created as a social and mental construct.
Meanwhile, Soja believes that in the third space of creative production, spatiality is twisted and filled into multi-dimensional hybridity with history and sociality.The mapping and categorising of a geographical location are the first space, and the conceptualisation of the first space is the second space.When the first and second spaces are combined, the third space emerges, where various viewpoints surround imagination, dreams, and cognition.When opposing concerns can be treated concurrently without prerogative and reformed through a creative process, third space allows essential interchange and exceptional openness (Soja 5).
With capitalism's overall development that pervades all elements of life, Jameson focuses his argument on the impact of late capitalism on society's spatial logic, which is classed geometrically.He claims that the crisis of foundationalism and the resulting implications of truth relativisation produce a scepticism-driven metanarrative experience.The manifestation of such scepticism result to a shift away from time and a sense of loss of connection to history, and a focus on space as the supreme mode of structuring cultural experience.Jameson uses the term 'valence' to describe his dissatisfaction with dialectical thought's emphasis on historical reversal.He claims that altering 'valence' from negative to positive, or vice versa, implies a shift in value and function in different contexts.A society with complicated modes of social organisation could be transformed into new forms of social life with its ambivalence of social spaces by applying the notion of the politics of the multitude (Jameson).Even though their key terms differ, Foucault, Soja, and Jameson have all articulated the notions of break, rupture, and disjuncture of spaces and provided arguments for discontinuous and fragmented spaces through their theorising of contact, conflict, and contradiction between culture and societies.
Exploring the spatiality of the novel, the author presents dunia pertama, the first world as the embodiment of the intimate space and as a reservoir of memory for safety and protection of the protagonist when everything is still orderly (see Bachelard 8).The second world, dunia kedua highlights the heterogenous contestation of public space of social media, "the space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us" (Foucault 23).The encompassing worlds, dua dunia bermuara, substantiate the author's opinion of the possible world to challenge spaces of representation that can be interpreted as postmodern space.The last chapter is bukan akhir dunia, it is not the end of the world, to convey ideas about how truth is relative and how it can lead to scepticism of spatial structures.
Each of the three worlds embodies the distinctive values acquired by the protagonist.Each is heterotopic because every world contains specific discourse and ideology, which control individual behaviour.It serves as a panopticon, which causes a unique social formation and mental construction for individuals, leading to conflicts or resistance between people who grow up in various environments.The protagonist's quest in the three realms for his subjectivity leads to a comprehension of how an individual maps, categorises, conceptualises, and finally constructs subjective position, whether it is to submit, negotiate, or resist.The last world is where the protagonist reflects after a series of conflicts that have left him powerless.It allows him to critically rebuild the mapping and categorisation of the first and second worlds through a creative process of refusal, acceptance, and bargaining.The encompassing world is the final realm, as he returns to Jayanegara.
The first world serves as the basis of the protagonist's turmoil in the second world.The first world is mostly the narration of the traditional setting in which people's connections are bound by harmony, custom, and religion, borrowing Tuan's notion of space as "a calm centre of established values" (Tuan 54).Home and nature, where feminine authority is still dominant, are the first spaces where the protagonist learns the ideal values: "Ibuku adalah semesta pertamaku.Ia orang pertama yang mengajariku berpura-pura.Ia membetulkan kata-kata yang aku ucapkan dan memintaku untuk menggantinya dengan kata-kata lain yang lebih pantas" [My mother is my first universe.She was the one who initially taught me to pretend.She corrected the words I said and asked me to replace them with other more appropriate words] (Madasari 18).Reciprocal social control could be used to prevent deviant behaviour.Subjectivity in the traditional realm is manifested in the ability to conform to spatial values.Their connection to other community members hampers individual and social development.As a result, traditional life is distinguished by the stability of its spatial organisation.
Feminine authority provides a starting point for developing subjectivity through various contestation processes.The spatiality acquired from home supplements the act of categorising and mapping spatial values in the online world.From the mother who administers penalties to control child behaviour, the protagonist learns to discipline himself to conform to social milieus.Despite the fact that he is not the subject of the surrounding area in certain aspects, he does not question or rebel because of his mother's nurturing.Nevertheless, he learns to respect his mother's authority.
Nature also provides the basis for an ideal spatial imagination for the protagonist.His grandmother lives in a small community in a distant mountainous area where people still believe in spirits that will assist them through life.The protagonist's grandmother represents a generation in which nature still reigns supreme and life's sole purpose is to satisfy bodily desires: to drink, eat, and reproduce.Her connection to her socioeconomic origins is still strong, and she continues to revere some sacred sites.
In contrast, the father is not shown as the type of person who believes in the same truth as the grandmother and the community, despite growing up in a village.Because of his education and exposure to modern ideas, he has been estranged from his social origins and social surroundings.He is described as a self-centred character who is solely interested in his own survival, development, and enjoyment.Even his kinship to the protagonist, his son, is low.When he is still in third grade, his father separates him from his mother and sends him to live with his grandmother while he is pursuing his higher degrees in another country.The author's stance is reflected in the father's decision on the necessity of education to map and configure spatial structures in ways that are separate from their surroundings.Through the process of synchronous separateness from his culture of origin, education initiates a change from heterotopia of crisis to heterotopia of deviation.When he moves to the city, he has "a sort of absolute break" with his traditional time, or heterochrony (Foucault 26).
In the development of the protagonist's manner of understanding his grandmother's hallowed space, the notion that "history can make an existing heterotopia work in a totally different fashion" is employed (Foucault 25).Rather than isolating himself from the hallowed area, the protagonist decides to embrace it for a new purpose.In contrast to his father, who seeks modern identity, the protagonist believes that modernity causes alienation from those around him, and views tradition as a means of regaining a sense of family togetherness.The physical patterns of modern city life, enacted via everyday life regulation to educate him as a flawless individual, provide a chaotic sense of acceptance and resistance.He recognises the importance of regulation in achieving emotive human perfection, but he believes that modern city living simply leads to the collapse and disappearance of his individuality and subjectivity.When all of the extreme poles' spaces clash, it may result in "creating a space of illusion that exposes every genuine space, all the sites within which human life is partitioned" (Foucault 26).The protagonist's first space, in which tradition continues to function is in a completely different context.Although the grandmother and father live in a similar place, the grandmother continues to glorify the embedded values as the sacred space.Meanwhile, the father considers these values as the dark space that he wants to leave behind.For the protagonist, it becomes the other space, which brings together all irreconcilable locations of tradition and modernity.
As the protagonist is introduced to the actual world through the novel's storyline, it emphasises the important position of his grandmother and mother in the protagonist life.His attachment to his mother and grandmother encourages his growth as a spatial subject.Jayanegara feels lost when he is separated from his mother and home, but he finds consolation in forging connections with his grandmother.His mother places a different priority on spatial organisation than his grandmother.His mother is described as a pious Muslim woman with a long veil covering her hair and body.Meanwhile, his grandmother is a spiritual woman who believes in nature's power and lives in harmony: Tak ada perempuan yang bisa menjadi juru kunci.Itu tugas berat.Tugas mulia.Juru kunci bisa diibaratkan sebagai penjaga, juga pemangku.Tak akan sanggup perempuan seperti ia mengembannya.Tapi kematian juru kunci itu membuat Simbah tak bisa mempertanyakan apalagi membantah pesan yang diterimanya.(Madasari 24) No woman is capable of being a caretaker of the grave.That's a tough task.A noble task.The caretaker can be likened to a guard, as well as a holder.A woman like her would not be able to carry it.But the caretaker's death made grandmother unable to question or deny the message she had received.She simply did what she was capable of doing.Climbing to the top of the hill to sweep and clean up trash, twigs, or dry leaves, keeping Suroloyo clean and sacred.Jayanegara's closeness to his mother and grandmother embodies a heterotopia of crisis.However, his ethical-cognitive base is still in the stage of bodily desire.The difference in values on spatial structure between his mother and grandmother does not create a disruptive sense.Instead, they give the protagonist the power to juxtapose opposing places, which he can use to create a space of illusion and compensation to make amends for his sense of loss following his separation from his mother and grandmother.
When Jayanegara returns to live with his family in his teens, he becomes more aware of his spatial surroundings.His desire is no longer physical, and he might use past experiences and occurrences as a basis for determining his purpose.The gendered spatiality of home occupies his mind when he learns that a power structure exists between his mother and his father.His father is the family's head, a prosperous academician and a good and powerful father who nevertheless finds time to accompany his children to their evening classes.His mother is a stay-at-home woman.He begins to perceive his life's mapping and geographical space, and he starts to think of the relatable spatial structure of between the first space and the second space.He tries to accept his father's dominance over him in the same way that his grandmother takes all of her misfortunes without question.However, he could not accept his father's infidelity.In his teen years, he does, however, experience a heterotopia of deviation in his notion of home.
Tradition is always pitted against capitalism.The principles of communalism that most Indonesians highly glorify are diametrically opposed to capitalism.Capitalism has made people's lives more individualistic and pragmatic for those who stand for tradition.People's personal choices are becoming more varied and mobile, which unfortunately causes them to become increasingly detached from their families and communities.People are pushed by modernity and the spirit of capitalism to focus on their own survival, development, and enjoyment .In this novel, the spatial shift is caused by temporary migration to a Western country represented by the father.The second world embodies the transition from enclosed and humanised space into heterotopia.The protagonist, Jayanegara moves back from the village to the city, from his intimate connection to nature to heterogeneous space with its erosion and disruption of values brought by his father to this home.In the second world, the protagonist realises that the Firstspace and Secondspace, borrowing Soja's terms, are not always interlinked.With this awareness, the protagonist acquaints with the virtual world and joins the social media crowds in search of justification for the refusal to accept the disruption.He creates a virtual name: Matajaya.
The 20th century has witnessed the spatial turn characterised by "a refutation and challenge against tradition neglecting space" (Shi and Zhu 224).Urban phenomenon and urban space are not just projections of social connections, but also a terrain on which various strategies classify (Lefebvre).The second world is created to show the emergence of new spatiality, which creates anxieties.It follows the spatial scholars' notion that space is always in the process of constant change, development, and intensification in the protagonist's development, he begins to recognise that home and a family are social spaces with specific values.He fantasises home as a mental and ideational site and a conceived space where social harmony is maintained.Meanwhile, the city and the online world share similar spatial structures as "fully lived space, a simultaneously realand-imagine, actual-and virtual" (Soja 4).When he immigrates to Jakarta, he brings his agitation about the spatial disruption of home and he can set aside his disappointment and find out the new meaning of life.In Jakarta, he lives with his girlfriend, Maera who introduces him to the world of the Internet.
The second world mainly focuses on the protagonist's exploration of the Internet as a tool of cyberspatial communications and information technology.However, the Internet's information and communication spaces are both virtual and metaphorical in nature.Through its capacity to interact anonymously and in egalitarian ways, it gives the Internet spatial aspects with a unique social environment (Kellerman).With its distinct spatial structure, the Internet provides users with communities.As supplied via the Internet, the concept of community is defined by comparable shared interests and beliefs.However, proximity still exists in many communities in the actual world, providing a sense of belonging and connection to the people who live there.People use the Internet to form groups to discuss a variety of issues, play games, share information, and collaborate on group projects, which is similar to the concept of community.When experts examine how urban expansion has the unintended consequence of severing individuals' connection to their communities, the Internet appears to offer a way to revitalise community through connecting to a larger social environment (Walmsley) The second world tells the story of how the Internet has given people a new perspective on space, allowing them to grow their subjectivity through their use of the Internet.In the actual world, with its constrained social milieus, the protagonist has to cope with the values he refuses to accept.On the other hand, the virtual world provides him with a means of rebelling, suffering no consequences.He is impotent in the actual world because of his father's imposition as the family man, which turns the protagonist into a mute subaltern.He might, however, create a new virtual persona in the new realm and rebel against his overbearing and controlling father.The protagonist develops his subjectivity through blogging, going demotivated to conscientious and motivated.He reads one blog after another, learns, and then writes to participate in the conversations.In actuality, he is still helpless because of his joblessness due to his college dropout status.To get rid of his feelings of worthlessness, he creates havoc by writing about his father's evil side, which includes abusing people's sensitivities to issues of corruption and sexual affairs.He expects to establish an alternative universe with new spatial patterns.Through such action, he deconstructs the ideals and standards that render him powerless.
Madasari uses the word 'dewa-dewa,' which literally means gods, to express her thoughts on blogging in the second world.Gere argues that blogging as an activity creates angelism philosophy to demonstrate a series of "imagined dialogue" and "the idea of angels as a metaphor for contemporary communication systems" (Gere 3).However, Madasari prefers to use the word 'dewa,' which has a similar meaning to angel, to express her opinion on the rise of a community with many messengers without revealing the senders of the messages.Madasari, like Gere, introduces the concept of blogging as a medium that allows "individual and multiple" to participate and discuss a variety of issues (Gere 4).As people can freely join and leave, their identity is between "visible and invisible" (Gere 4).Blogging is like "messengers that both appear and disappear" (Gere 4).Individuals can create as many virtual identities as they like; and they are only visible in the virtual world.Because of its virtual existence, which provides signifiers without signified, blogging as a medium of "constructive of messages and message-bearing systems" opens the possibility of collapsing the separation between "spirit and body; spiritual and physical; of two sexes and of none; natural and manufactured; collective and social" (Gere 4).Because a significant lack of worldly grounding marks the virtual, the outcomes could be "both orderly and disorderly" (Gere 4).Madasari appears to share Derrida's view of writing in Western metaphysics as a game of language that emphasises compounded distinctions, "hopelessly confounding the idea of univocal meaning" (Gere 5).
In the novel, Matajaya, who engages in online activities and forms new relationships with strangers, begins to consider strangers as his family and surroundings, and the Internet acts as a conduit for digital contact with strangers: Aku juga mulai berani masuk ke satu kerumunan, pindah ke kerumunan lainnya.Aku mulai banyak mendengar apa yang dibicarakan orang-orang.Aku terpukau dengan begitu banyaknya orang-orang istimewa di sekitarku.Orang-orang yang tahu tentang segala hal, pandai berkata-kata, fasih berbahasa asing, orang-orang yang tampak begitu canggih dan modern, tanpa peduli siapa mereka dan asal-usul mereka.(Madasari 93) I also began to venture into one crowd, moving into another.I started to hear a lot of what people were talking about.I was blown away by so many special people around me.People who knew everything, were articulate, fluent in foreign languages, people who seemed so sophisticated and modern, regardless of who they were and where they came from.The second world is described as a site with many people who want to join and engage.The concept of kerumunan, or 'crowd,' can be positively construed as a 'virtual community,' with the assumption of a unique type of social space in its use and application.It can also be interpreted as a constructed environment that provides both information and communication, while also including some social ideals in how it is used by individuals (see Walmsley 6).However, in the possibility to be anonymous in virtual environment interaction, a crowd can create deindividuation.The conscious personality of the individual fades, and the unconscious personality of the group takes over.According to Le Bon, the crowd is a single collective guided by a mental unity and a collective soul that causes people to feel, think, and act differently than they would if they were acting alone.Feelings and thoughts can swiftly become behaviours with the help of suggestion and contagion mechanisms.Individuals that engage in automatic activity are more likely to engage in violent behaviour (Le Bon 3-4).These notions are evoked in mainly the second world.
When Jayanegara first started using the Internet, he saw all crowds as a resource and a production force, just like he did when he was first introduced to actual space and its social milieus.He studied the crowds one by one, surfed from one to the next, and found parallels with nature, which provided him with numerous texts and symbols through individual and institutional users' activities.
The Internet also provides him with two social spaces: real and virtual.However, in real space, a human cannot escape the real to enter into the virtual because his fantasy is always over once he returns to the real space, leaving him with a bitter feeling that he wishes to escape.On the other hand, the Internet collapses the distinction between the real and the virtual through its inclusiveness, interactivity, and real-time interaction.As a result, the protagonist enjoys regular and routine surfing activities as if he were commuting from one crowd to another: Inilah dunia yang aku cari itu.Dunia yang memberi semua orang kesempatan yang sama tak peduli apakah mereka lulusan S3 atau hanya lulusan SMA.Dunia yang tak melihat bagaimana rupa orang dan baju yang dikenakan.Dunia yang tak mengharuskanku menghormat pada yang lebih tua dan membungkuk pada mereka yang punya wibawa.(94) This is the world I have been searching for.A world that gives everyone equal opportunities no matter if they are doctoral graduates or just high school graduates.A world where people and their clothing are invisible.A world that does not require me to respect elders and bow to those with authority.In the actual world, activities could only be carried out within the local sphere with its social milieus, and mobility is limited by terrain, distance, and time.However, the Internet could connect, link, and network all crowds, creating venues for individuals to accept or refuse.It gives birth to the many public actors who arm themselves with ubiquitous resource.
Apart from subjectivity which can be achieved behind a fake face, another key feature of the spatiality of online activities is recreational qualities, which is unsatisfactorily similar to both the factual and the virtual.The author also presents Matajaya's engagement with online sexual activity, in which the pleasure and gratification are real, despite the fact that all activities are virtual.Through such narratives, Madasari acknowledges various issues concerning online behaviours, although they are still disturbing.The trialectics of Spatiality, Historicality, and Sociality collapses in the virtual world.It is followed by "combining the real and the imagined, things and thought on equal terms" (see Soja 11).To sum up, the transformative course of the protagonist's experiences and perspectives, how Matajaya experiences complex interactions with individuals with different cognitive ideations bringing about different satisfaction, embodies the author's opinion of how social practices, technologies, and ideologies interplay and (re)produce the spatiality of our life.
Madasari responds to the never-ending battle between the physical and virtual worlds by creating the encompassing world to symbolise her optimistic outlook on the Internet's popularity among the younger generation.The encompassing world can only be created if the individual understands the real world's spatial elements.The story ends with a chapter titled "bukan akhir dunia" (it is not the end of the world), highlighting the continuation and glorification of the virtual world with crowds and deindividuation.However, the choice of the protagonist to live in the village with his grandmother and leave behind all communication technology sends the author's message that everything is a matter of choice and that the world will continue to be as it is.Thus, the novel illustrates the spatiality of the online world that is not just a techno-space.Rather, it represents the real world with all concepts and lived experiences as well as cognitive, emotional, and behavioural effects.

Conclusion
Kerumunan Terakhir has shed light on spatial issues of the virtual world.Okky Madasari questions the liberating effects of cyberspace through the narrative of the male protagonist's subjectivity development.The subjectivity of the protagonist to the spatiality of home and the virtual world embodies the perspective of the author on the unexpected impact of cyberspace.In this novel, the author provides her thoughts on feminine power as the guardian of knowledge through the narration of the three important female figures in the male protagonist's life.She creates three worlds that signify both the transformation of space from the traditional to the postmodernity of the virtual world, which leads to women's spatial loss.All the three female figures cannot reclaim their feminine authority; however, their thought and vision are deeply rooted in the protagonist's mind.As a result, ambiguity shadows the protagonist's behaviour in the factual life and the online world.
Following issues concerning the adverse liberating effects of the online world, the narrative development is mainly about the mechanisms of deindividuation with all possible behaviours.In this manner, it illustrates the ambivalence and the ambiguity of social media crowds.The last crowd, the novel's title, suggests the open possibilities to behave in the online world where everything is a matter of choice.In correlation to the emergence of the spatial turn in literary studies, this article acknowledges Okky Madasari's contribution to dialectic triad of spatial practices and transformative spatiality as her creative source to enrich her discussion on the loss of feminine authority.