I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries

Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).

It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).

Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.

You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.

I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.

Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.

I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.

They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.

They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.

I think it's just because there aren't large immigrant communities in Western countries besides Australia and the Netherlands.

Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].

1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...

I also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.