The Personal and the Political: Social Networking in Manila

Abstract

In 2001, during the Second People Power Revolution, Philippine activists used the mobile phone to help disseminate messages and coordinate actions leading to the ouster of President Joseph Estrada. At the time, the affordances of the mobile short message service (SMS) in particular made for a politically effective communications media. In the weeks that followed the death of ex-President Corazon Aquino in 2009, social networking sites (SNS) became important affective media for the expression of personal grief. When Typhoon Ketsana (called Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines) struck in 2009, both social media and SMS were appropriated for effective and affective purposes. Although the deployment of SNS extends earlier modes of civic engagement and media, it departs from older media by providing various forms of visual and aural communication with greater affective personalization. Moreover, within the highly networked and personalized worlds of SNS, the capacity for politics and its relationship to the personal take on new forms. In this article, we ask how a media designed and promoted for the conduct of interpersonal relations is deployed in the local expression of national politics and civic action and in the global politics of exported labor. In the areas of national party politics and global labor politics, can we think of the personal as political in the context of SNS and the Philippines? In turn, how would adopting such a perspective affect our understanding of communications culture?