Digitalizing orality: Cultural memory and identity negotiation among the Using community of Banyuwangi, Indonesia

This article examines the transformation of orality within the Using (Osing) community of Banyuwangi, Indonesia, in the context of digital media expansion. Rather than signalling the decline of oral tradition, the digitalization of orality is understood as a process of cultural reconfiguration mediated by contemporary technologies. Drawing on ethnographic and digital–anthropolinguistic approaches, this study analyzes how rituals, mantras, myths, narratives, and collective memories are rearticulated through audio-visual formats and platform-based communication. The findings demonstrate that digital orality extends, rather than replaces, the performative, situational, and relational characteristics of traditional orality. Ritual performances and embodied practices remain central as living media of cultural memory, while digital platforms function as new layers of mediation that amplify circulation, visibility, and reinterpretation. At the same time, this process generates arenas of negotiation in which symbolic authority, trauma, myth, and identity are contested within platformed spaces shaped by media logic. Theoretically, this article contributes to three interrelated discussions: the concept of digital orality as a continuation of oral culture, the notion of mediated cultural memory as a dynamic and collective practice, and the negotiation of indigenous identity under conditions of platformization. Empirically, the Using community is positioned as a theoretical case that illuminates broader global patterns of indigenous communities negotiating digital modernity without abandoning local cosmologies and historical frameworks. By situating Using digital practices within global debates on media, memory, and heritage, this study advances the concept of global indigenous digitalities and underscores the importance of culturally grounded perspectives in understanding the relationship between digital media, tradition, and cultural sustainability.