Kontestasi Narasi Ilmiah dan Supranatural pada Kolom Komentar Siniar Malaka Project: Analisis Wacana Bermediasi Komputer

Abstract

This study examines how scientific and supranatural narratives contest one another in the YouTube comment section of the Indonesian podcast Malaka Project, in the episode "Buta karena Santet? Ada Penjelasan Ilmiahnya" (Blind Because of Black Magic? There Is a Scientific Explanation). Using a critical qualitative approach, the study analyzes 25 purposively sampled comments drawn from a corpus of 993 comments through Susan Herring's Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA), examining the structure, meaning, interaction, and social levels of discourse, framed by Michel Foucault's power/knowledge theory and Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Findings show that contestation begins at the structural level, where a flowchart format is appropriated to frame supranatural belief as illogical. At the meaning level, six legitimation and delegitimation strategies compete, with formal scientific evidence proving a weaker predictor of audience resonance than message brevity and register fit. At the interaction level, challenge-defense threads and a dominant pattern of generational silencing reveal that power operates partly through silence rather than argument alone. At the social level, religious authority functions as a counter-hegemonic resource, while healthcare-system limitations help explain the persistence of supranatural belief. The study concludes that scientific narratives dominate this digital public sphere, but not without ongoing contestation, and recommends that science-education content creators attend to message form and structural context, not only propositional validity.