Social media platforms have been pivotal in redefining the conduct of contemporary society. Amid the proliferation of a range of new and ubiquitous online platforms, YouTube, a video-based platform, ...remains a key driver in the democratisation of creative, playful, vernacular, intimate, as well as political expressions. As a critical node of contemporary communication and digital cultures, its steady uptake and appropriation in a social media-savvy nation such as the Philippines requires a critical examination of its role in the continued reconstruction of identities, communities, and broader social institutions. This book closely analyses the diverse content and practices of amateur Filipino YouTubers, exposing and problematising the dynamics of brokering the contested aspirational logics of beauty and selfhood, interracial relationships, world-class labour, and progressive governance in a digital sphere. Ultimately, Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube offers a fresh, compelling, and nuanced account of YouTube as an important site for the mediation of culture, economy, and politics in Philippine postcolonial modernity amid rapid economic globalisation and digitalisation.
This article examines and theorises the relationships across three distinct forms of labour brokerage emerging in the digital platform labour economy: platform intermediation, 'skillmaking', and ...'re-outsourcing'. Drawing from a 4-year digital ethnography on online freelancing and platform labour in the Philippines, one of the largest labour supplying countries globally, I pay special attention to how platform labour control emerges as a process that is constituted in the brokerage relationships at multiple scales between global capital, local capital, community, and family units, and emerging organised networks of workers and influencers on social media. The article examines the materiality of platform labour and the local informal economy that give rise to these forms of brokerage. I also describe how brokerage processes set norms and standards in this largely unregulated sector, thereby playing a role in how labour mobility or precarity are made possible and organised. The article seeks to contribute to the knowledge about the digital work system involving a significant number of Filipinos by capturing the situated dialectical power relations of the global spread of platform-mediated labour management.
This article interrogates political brokerage on YouTube by examining the platform’s role in the construction of political discourses and in configuring the action of a new genre of political actors ...advancing a political agenda through historical revisionism. Using assemblage theory and drawing from technography, we propose the concept of “networked political brokerage” to characterize the mutually affirming relationship of YouTube’s governance mechanisms and alternative political influencers’ microcelebrity practices in building, complementing, and magnifying historical revisionist narratives through and within a network of algorithmically sanctioned videos. We illustrate how this interplay of platform logics and ‘cultures of use' privileges and legitimizes political content into knowledge without accountability. We argue for the importance of examining YouTube as a socio-technical driver of this political brokerage process in curating political information in this contemporary political scene.
The article examines the role of social media groups for online freelance workers in the Philippines—digital workers obtaining “gigs” from online labor platforms such as Upwork and Onlinejobs.ph—for ...social facilitation and collective organizing. The article first problematizes labor marginality in the context of online freelance platform workers situated in the middle of competing narratives of precarity and opportunity. We then examine unique forms of solidarity emerging from social media groups formed by these geographically spread digital workers. Drawing from participant observation in online freelance Facebook groups, as well as interviews and focus groups with 31 online freelance workers located in the cities of Manila, Cebu, and Davao, we found that online Filipino freelancers maintain active social interaction and exchange that can be construed as “entrepreneurial solidarities.” These solidarities are characterized by competing discourses of ambiguity, precarity, opportunity, and adaptation that are articulated and visualized through ambient socialities. While we argue that these entrepreneurial solidarities do not reflect a passive and simplistic acceptance of neoliberal discourses about digital labor by digital workers, the solidarities forged in these groups also work to undermine their resistive potential such that these tend to reinforce rather than impose pressure toward critical structural changes that can improve the viability of digital labor conditions.
Social media platforms have been pivotal in redefining the conduct of contemporary society. Amid the proliferation of a range of new and ubiquitous online platforms, YouTube, a video-based platform, ...remains a key driver in the democratisation of creative, playful, vernacular, intimate, as well as political expressions. As a critical node of contemporary communication and digital cultures, its steady uptake and appropriation in a social media-savvy nation such as the Philippines requires a critical examination of its role in the continued reconstruction of identities, communities, and broader social institutions. This book closely analyses the diverse content and practices of amateur Filipino YouTubers, exposing and problematising the dynamics of brokering the contested aspirational logics of beauty and selfhood, interracial relationships, world-class labour, and progressive governance in a digital sphere. Ultimately, Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube offers a fresh, compelling, and nuanced account of YouTube as an important site for the mediation of culture, economy, and politics in Philippine postcolonial modernity amid rapid economic globalisation and digitalisation.
This special issue brings together six research articles that speak to the dynamics of digital communication in the Philippines, a country firmly located in the global geography of the digital ...economy and an early adopter and innovator in mobile communication. Increasingly, the rise of digital platforms is spurring on new business models and applications that find a wide range of appropriations in a developing economy with a high level of communication skills and a high level of inequality. These dynamics have, in turn, fuelled the popularity of social media and the populism that has gained international attention and, more critically, taken the country into uncharted political terrain. We introduce this Special Issue by taking stock of the legacies and potentials of digital communication in the country and highlighting how the articles sustain and extend past conversations. Drawing from the articles that cover a range of topics (entertainment, intimacy, labour, journalism and politics, scandals and pornography), we identify three overlapping themes that capture the socio-technical dynamics of digital communication in the Philippines: (1) how digital communication is emplaced in material, social and structural conditions; (2) the potentials of networked publics and communication; and (3) the convertibility of capitals and emergence of new competencies. These dynamics and potentials point to the contradictions, continuities and changes that relate to Philippine modernity in the context of global digital capitalism.
The open science (OS) movement has advocated for increased transparency in certain aspects of research. Communication is taking its first steps toward OS as some journals have adopted OS guidelines ...codified by another discipline. We find this pursuit troubling as OS prioritizes openness while insufficiently addressing essential ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Some recommended open science practices increase the potential for harm for marginalized participants, communities, and researchers. We elaborate how OS can serve a marginalizing force within academia and the research community, as it overlooks the needs of marginalized scholars and excludes some forms of scholarship. We challenge the current instantiation of OS and propose a divergent agenda for the future of Communication research centered on ethical, inclusive research practices.
This article analyzes the transmedia strategies of three ethnic minority activist organizations in the Philippines: Cordillera Peoples Alliance, Tebtebba, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The ...fieldwork entailed interviews with leaders of these organizations and their media teams, scholars who study these movements, and social commentators. The analysis shows the complexities of identity construction in the age of spreadable media and the importance of transmedia literacy for activists who have to navigate these complexities to effectively advance their cause.
This article examines the use of Let’s Play (LP) in Manila, Philippines. LP is an emerging genre in which players record, narrate, and broadcast video game play online. While in Western contexts LP ...is predominantly viewed in domestic settings, our focus is on the distinct manner in which LP is viewed in the Philippines, resulting in unique social architectures of play that coalesce public and private practices. In particular, the arcade-style vending machine, pisonet (a conflation between the Filipino piso currency + internet), plays a key role in shaping net cultures within everyday life. Through the pisonet, unique forms of performative play happen in and around the watching play of LP. These types of performativity around LP see intergenerational and public forms of play, spectatorship, and surveillance entangle. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Metropolitan Manila, this study aims to conceptualize how public spaces, screens, and play—through the LP on pisonets—bring about unique modes of sociality and surveillance of care. In doing so, this paper complicates established viewership models of LP, exploring how their manifestation in Manila gives rise to a particular type of Filipino sense of play.
This article interrogates platform governance and accountability amid the growing role of influencers in constructing political discourses, and particularly, in the intermediation of anti‐media ...ideological frames through their embeddedness in networked assemblages. We deploy the concept of “networked political brokerage” to examine the sociotechnical relations among influencers, the platform, and its users, and how this dynamic assemblage engages in the intermediation of anti‐media populism. The study draws from a critical examination of the network and discursive tactics deployed by Filipino YouTube influencers who advance partisan political commentary and deceptive narratives to delegitimize mainstream media institutions through issue network analysis concerning the franchise denial and eventual shutdown of the Philippines' oldest media network, ABS‐CBN. We problematize how influencers engage platform affordances and cultures of use to enable, amplify, and fortify the brokering of their political agenda within a larger network of political actors, while eliding accountability. Through the mutually affirming relationship of content creators and the platform, networked hyperpoliticized contents gain visibility and galvanize anti‐media rhetoric. Ultimately, the article raises concerns on the social consequences of networked political brokerage and offers a framework for how governance and policy discussions can treat the functioning of such networked political influence.
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