Module 16. Case study: Social media in the Philippines

No other invention from the past hundred years has changed the face of media more radically than the Internet, the World Wide Web, and mobile communication. Social media refers to aspect of these three technologies that allows people to work collaboratively, communicate without being physically located in the same place, build relationships from a distance, and share information with each other.

Relationships over social media

Social media has created new ways for people to relate to each other. The relationships that people form through social media are not necessarily inferior to those formed in physical reality, as evidenced by the strong reactions that people have upon being "unfriended" on Facebook, for example (Waldman, 2014).

Social media and information sharing

Social media has made information sharing quick and seamless. Have you recently read an article online that was so interesting that you decide to post the link to it on your Facebook wall? If so, you would know what I mean. Or consider what happened with typhoon Ondoy that hit the Philippines in 2009. Microblogging tools like Twitter and Plurk were used to create short updates which alerted rescue units to individuals and families in distress (Calonzo, 2009).

Politics and social media

At the same time, the spread of false information (Reuell, 2018) and increasingly polarized political discussions on social media poses a threat to democracy (The Economist, 2017). This is particularly true in the Philippines (Putzel, 2018), which consistently tops rankings of social media use (Gonzales, 2019), and where “divided politics feed – and feed on – a divided web” (Mendoza, 2018). When you pursue your MMS 200 project, perhaps you may find it interesting to examine how social media contributes to political conflict in the Philippines. Or perhaps you might wish to explore how technology-mediated communication could be reimagined/redesigned to facilitate more empathetic and effective political discourse (Johnson et al., 2019; Derzsy, 2019).