Menjadi Nahdliyin di Media Sosial: Vernakularisasi Identitas dalam @Nugarislucu

Abstract

Social media have expanded the production of religious identity beyond institutional communication into representational practices undertaken by informal actors. This study aims to analyse how the humour account @NUgarislucu vernacularises Nahdliyin identity through conversational language, the social world of pesantren, communal rituals, village life, and humour. The study employs qualitative content analysis of an initial corpus of 1,040 posts published by @NUgarislucu on the X platform, with coding focused on everyday language, the social world of pesantren, and Nahdliyin habitus. A limited multimodal analysis is also applied to posts whose meanings depend on images or videos. The findings identify three main mechanisms. First, Javanese, informal Indonesian, code-switching, familiar forms of address, and wordplay translate NU identity into the register of everyday communication. Second, representations of kiai, gus, santri, pondok, sarongs, kopiah, tahlilan, berkat, and village life situate Nahdliyin identity within recognisable social, material, and ritual settings. Third, representations of simplicity, gratitude, togetherness, courtesy, and humour construct a particular Nahdliyin habitus as portrayed by the account. These findings demonstrate that digital religious identity can be formed and sustained through lived cultural experience, rather than solely through the reproduction of doctrine, formal affiliation, and organisational communication. The originality of this study lies in its use of a vernacularisation perspective to explain how Nahdliyin identity is selected, repackaged, and circulated by an informal humour account through everyday language, symbols, practices, and affect. In this study, @NUgarislucu is understood as a producer of digital representations rather than as the official voice of PBNU or of Nahdliyin as a whole.