The area essay statement

This is what I handed in:

Filipinos and the Internet:
Blogs, Diaspora, and Identity

On October 12, 2005, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) issued a directive to its members to create their own weblogs (also known as blogs) in order to expand their reach. The CBCP did this in hopes of making Filipino bishops more accessible, especially to Philippine youth, and in order to better disseminate Church thinking on various issues, as well as conduct evangelization in a new medium.

This anecdote illustrates the greater prominence of the Internet in everyday life, as well as the greater value given to the Internet as a medium of communication relative to traditional media. It shows how prevalent Internet use and blog interaction are among certain sectors of Philippine society, such that the CBCP saw blogs as a necessary gap to fill in its mission of evangelization. Finally, it shows the possibility for transnationalism and globalized communication that the Internet enables, for surely a large proportion of visitors to and participants in the bishops’ blogs will be Filipinos overseas.

This is what I hope to focus on in my research – the use of the Internet, specifically blogs, by the world’s Filipino diaspora to create and maintain networks of mostly Filipinos. I will not focus on the Internet per se, but rather on the people who use the Internet. I wish to investigate online interaction as relating to Filipinos and ideas of Filipino identity. How is Filipino identity constructed online? I also wish to examine who Filipino bloggers are in terms of their composition according to the traditional categories of gender, age, class, and nationality, as well as physical location. I also wish to see how proficiency with Filipino languages enters into the blog interactions of these Filipinos, and how Filipino languages are used on the blogs overall.

However, to understand the Filipino diaspora, I must first understand why the diaspora exists and how it exists. This is why I will use a framework of globalization theory in my research, though I will guard against reification of the global-local divide. My subjects are inherently global in scope, though, so I must take a translocal and global perspective, especially with the analysis of flows and processes.

Of course, since I will be studying the Filipino diaspora, I must also use diaspora and migration studies as a theoretical framework. Though the Filipino dispersal is not a diaspora in the classic sense in that it has no myth of return, it is certainly diasporic, and comparing it to other diasporic groups should be productive, especially in explicating the political and economic reasons behind modern diasporas.

Tied to diaspora will be issues of identity and the discourse around it. Thus, identity and discourse studies will enter into my research. How is Filipino identity constructed in the diaspora, and how is it constructed online? What is the discourse of Filipino-ness, and how is “Filipino” defined? Comparing the Filipino diaspora to other diasporic groups should be helpful in uncovering these discourses of identity.

Finally, I will use the perspective of Internet studies in my research. Since I wish to investigate the use of blogging to create social networks, I can hardly avoid Internet studies; however, I will mostly focus on empirically-grounded research that investigates Internet users offline as well as online. Much research has already been done on how social networks are organized online, and how offline and online communities interact and are constructed, as well as how location and geography enter into Internet use, and this will all contribute to my own project.