Books by Jason Vincent Cabanes
Trends in Southeast Asia, 2023
• Many current counter-disinformation initiatives focus on addressing the production or “supply s... more • Many current counter-disinformation initiatives focus on addressing the production or “supply side” of digital disinformation. Less attention tends to be paid to the consumption or the intended audiences of disinformation campaigns.
• A central concept in understanding people’s consumption of and vulnerability to digital disinformation is its imaginative dimension as a communication act. Key to the power of disinformation campaigns is their ability to connect to people’s shared imaginaries. Consequently, counter-disinformation initiatives also need to attend to these imaginaries.
• This report examines why the precarious middle class in the Philippines has been particularly susceptible to digital disinformation. It focuses on two key imaginaries that disinformation producers weaponized in the year leading up to the 2022 national elections. The first was a long-simmering anti- Chinese resentment, which racist social media campaigns about Philippines-China relations targeted. The other was a yearning for a “strong leader”, which history-distorting campaigns about the country’s Martial Law era amplified.
• Ironically, some practices adopted by members of the public to protect themselves from the toxicity and vitriol of online spaces increased their vulnerability to digital disinformation. The cumulative impact of these was for people to dig deeper into their existing imaginaries, something that disinformation producers targeted and exploited.
• We offer two suggestions for future counter-disinformation initiatives. The first has to do with addressing people’s vulnerability to the weaponization of their shared imaginaries. Counter- disinformation initiatives can move past divisive imaginaries by infusing creativity in imparting information. Collaborating with well-intentioned professionals in the media and creative industries would be key to these kinds of initiatives.
• The second has to do with addressing people’s media consumption practices. These practices tend to open them up to sustained and long-term digital disinformation campaigns, which provide them with problematic imaginaries to dig into. To establish a similarly robust common ground of reality, counter-disinformation initiatives should themselves be programmatic, not ad hoc.
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This edited volume brings together cutting-edge studies from emerging scholars of East/Southeast ... more This edited volume brings together cutting-edge studies from emerging scholars of East/Southeast Asia who explore the role of mobile media in the contemporary transformation of the region’s social intimacies, from the romantic to the familial to the communal. By providing a regional and transnational overview of such studies, it affords new insights into how these mobile technologies have contributed to the rise of ‘glocal intimacies’. This pertains to the normalisation and intensification of how people’s relationships of closeness are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. In providing case studies of mobile media and glocal intimacies, the chapters in the volume attend to a broad range of countries that include China, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. This illustrates the differing ways in which mobile media might be embedded in the region’s divergent articulations of social intimacies, which reflect the ongoing tensions between Western and Asian imaginaries of modernity. The chapters also discuss a wide array of mobile media that people use, from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to messaging apps like KakaoTalk and WhatsApp, to dating apps like Tinder and Blued. This allows for a mapping out of the different levels of impact that mobile media might have on social intimacies in a region that contains some of the most technologically advanced as well as the most technologically behind societies in the world. In summary, this book allows readers to take a comparative approach to understanding the complexity of the glocal intimacies that are emerging from the ways people in Asia use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. This volume will benefit students, academics, and researchers who are keen in media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and Asian studies.
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Journal Articles by Jason Vincent Cabanes
Mobile Media & Communication, 2022
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Communication, Culture and Critique, 2022
This article develops the concept of "glocal intimacies," capturing the role of mobile media in h... more This article develops the concept of "glocal intimacies," capturing the role of mobile media in how people enact and reconfigure their increasingly global experiences of social relationships. It establishes the two foundational assumptions of this concept: the interplay of local and global cultures and the transformative role of mobile media. It then identifies the three key dimensions that characterize glocal intimacies: digital access, contextual localities, and sociotechnical dynamics. To provide empirical flesh to how these dimensions intersect, it comparatively discusses two ethnographic projects on privileged Filipinos and their mediated familial and romantic relationships.
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International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022
This article uses the concept of the 'imaginative dimension of digital disinformation' to explore... more This article uses the concept of the 'imaginative dimension of digital disinformation' to explore how inter-Asian racism in a postcolonial city matters to the way people engage with racially tinged Covid-19 digital disinformation. It pays attention to two key socialities that fake news and political trolling online seek to weaponise: people's existing social narratives as well as their relationally embedded practices of media consumption. Drawing on 15 life story interviews with locals from the Philippines capital of Manila, this article characterises their interpretations of online dis-information campaigns that aim to amplify their shared social narrative of resentment towards China and bank on their communicative practices surrounding this. It also aims to show the value of empirical research that possesses a transnational sensibility in assessing the interpretive and social dynamics surrounding such racist Covid-19 digital disinformation.
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Media International Australia, 2021
This piece teases out the links between this special issue's key themes regarding performance and... more This piece teases out the links between this special issue's key themes regarding performance and citizenship and the distinct realities of transitional democracies. This article looks at mobile media access in the Philippines and the kind of social intimacies that have emerged from it. To frame our discussion, we use the concept of 'glocal intimacies'. This pertains to how mobile technologies have normalised and intensified the entanglement of people's relationships of closeness with the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. We show that the uneven access that Filipinos have has led to equally uneven ways in which they imagine and enact intimate relationships. Drawing on case studies emblematic of the country's key income clusters, we point out the emergence of a contradictory situation, wherein those with relatively high-quality access are those who are least dependent on mobile media for their glocal intimacies. Meanwhile, those with relatively low-quality access are those who are actually most dependent on mobile-mediated communication for such intimacies.
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Social Media + Society, 2020
The article examines the role of social media groups for online freelance workers in the Philippi... more 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.
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Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 2020
To nuance current understandings of the proliferation of digital disinformation, this article see... more To nuance current understandings of the proliferation of digital disinformation, this article seeks to develop an approach that emphasizes the imaginative dimension of this communication phenomenon. Anchored on ideas about the sociality of communication, this piece conceptualizes how fake news and political trolling online work in relation to particular shared understandings people have of their sociopolitical landscape. It offers the possibility of expanding the information-oriented approach to communication taken by many journalistic interventions against digital disinformation. It particularly opens up alternatives to the problematic strategy of challenging social media manipulation solely by doubling down on objectivity and facts.
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International Journal of Communication, 2019
The field of disinformation studies remains relatively silent about questions of identity, motiva... more The field of disinformation studies remains relatively silent about questions of identity, motivation, labor, and morality. Drawing from a one-year ethnographic study of disinformation producers employed in digital black ops campaigns in the Philippines, this article proposes that approaches from production studies can address gaps in disinformation research. We argue that approaching disinformation as a culture of production opens inquiry into the social conditions that entice people to this work and the creative industry practices that normalize fake news as a side gig. This article critically reflects on the methodological risks and opportunities of ethnographic research that subverts expectations of the exceptionally villainous troll and instead uses narratives of creative workers’ complicity and collusion to advance holistic social critique and local-level disinformation interventions.
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International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
This piece teases out the links between this special issue's key themes regarding performance and... more This piece teases out the links between this special issue's key themes regarding performance and citizenship and the distinct realities of transitional democracies. To contribute to generating insights into other countries currently in the grip of populist political regimes, it looks at the case of the Philippines. In this context, it matters to think about the diversity of productions that can enable performances of citizenship. This is because contemporary media and communication research in the country has understandably but narrowly prioritised the toxicity of online political discourse brought about by the rise of populist political performances and political trolling. It also matters in the Philippines to think about the role of those involved in productions about performances of citizenship. This is because of the problems posed by how 'authenticity' has been hijacked by populism and has been weaponised against those who seek to critique the current political dispensation.
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Popular Communication, 2019
This article explores popular media as resources for judgment in how settled migrants in Europe i... more This article explores popular media as resources for judgment in how settled migrants in Europe imagine solidarities toward newer arrivals seeking entry into the region. It discusses the news and entertainment consumption of Filipino nurses in London and how this figures in their imaginary of social and political bonds with refugees. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, I argue that these Filipino migrants can only articulate a compromised solidarity: one fractured between empathy with refugees and concern about what these newer arrivals might mean for settled migrants in the city. I then explain how the media contribute to this fracturing. One way is that the xenophobia in popular media content on social media leads the Filipinos to assert their difference with other migrants, including refugees. A second is that the Filipinos deploy popular media content , especially on British television, to assert that they belong to UK society more than other migrants, again including refugees.
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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2019
This article examines how South–South migrants use information and communication technologies (IC... more This article examines how South–South migrants use information and communication technologies (ICTs) in negotiating their encounters with traditional cultural imaginaries of intimacy. It focuses on second-generation Punjabi Indian youth in the Philippine capital of Manila. Through an ethnographic approach, it unpacks how these migrants harness technologies to steer through two particular ideals about the end-goal of intimate relationships: the Punjabi notion of arranged marriage and the Filipino notion of love marriage. I characterise how the young Punjabis use ICTs to enact what I call a 'temporarily resolution' to their migrant double consciousness about intimacy. I also describe how this temporary resolution continues to be entwined with the wider dynamics of multicultural relations in the Philippines. Ultimately, I aim to better understand the role of ICTs in migrant intimacies, especially within the realities of multiculturalism in a postcolonial city in the Global South.
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Journalism Studies, 2019
Combining a content analysis of 760 tweets and a survey of journalists who tweeted them, this stu... more Combining a content analysis of 760 tweets and a survey of journalists who tweeted them, this study revisits the questioned assumption that journalists' conception of their roles manifests in their journalistic outputs. Studies that have tested this assumption instead found a gap between role orientation and performance, possibly explained by how journalistic outputs are organizational products. Thus, this study focused on role performance as observed in journalists' individual posts on Twitter, a social media platform that has been normalized and now embedded in news routines. If tweets are personal outputs, they should bear the imprint of the journalists who posted them. The findings of this study lend support to this claim.
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International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2018
This article examines how photographic practices in collaborative research might mediate migrant ... more This article examines how photographic practices in collaborative research might mediate migrant voices. It looks at the case of Shutter Stories, a collaborative photography project featuring images by Indian and Korean migrants in Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on life-story interviews and participant observation data, I identify two ways that the photographic selection practices in the project mediated the migrants’ photo essays. One is how subject selection practices led the participants to use both strategic and ‘medium’ essentialism in choosing their topics. The second is how technique selection practices enabled the participants to express vernacular creativity in crafting their images. I argue that the mediation instantiated by Shutter Stories fostered the participants’ ability to use photo essays to articulate voices that simultaneously conveyed their personal stories and engaged the viewing public. However, I also identify the limits of this mediation, indicating how future projects can better enable migrant voices.
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Visual Studies, 2017
This article examines how the properties of photography might mediate voice, defined as the capac... more This article examines how the properties of photography might mediate voice, defined as the capacity to speak and to be heard speaking about one’s life and the social conditions in which one’s life is embedded. It focuses on the affordances that the image provides for migrant cultural minorities to articulate such a voice within the context of collaborative research. I look at the case of Shutter Stories, a collaborative photography exhibition featuring the photo stories of Indian and Korean migrants from Manila, The Philippines. Using participant observation data, I show that it was photography’s ability to be all at once indexical, iconic, and symbolic that became important in voice as ‘speaking’. It allowed migrants to tell rich, multimodal narratives about their lives, albeit with some key limitations. I also show that it was photography’s inability to fix meanings with finality that mattered in voice as ‘being heard’. Although the locals who visited the exhibition engaged with the photo stories in an overwhelmingly positive manner, they often did not completely grasp the migrants’ complex narratives. All these data indicate that collaborative photography exhibition projects should not just be about how migrants speak and are heard. They should also be about how migrants can listen, so that they can adjust what they say to how they are being heard. This is a valuable reminder that in conceptualising photography and migrant cultural minority voices, we also need to take into account the broader process of multicultural dialogue.
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Media, Culture and Society, 2014
In this article, I examine the mediation of multiculturalism in the developing world city of Mani... more In this article, I examine the mediation of multiculturalism in the developing world city of Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on both a thematic analysis of the Manila-centric Philippine entertainment media and six focus group discussions with the city’s local Filipinos, I reveal that this instance of mediation is entangled with the broader discourses of the Philippine postcolonial nationalist project. For one, the mediation of multiculturalism in Manila tends to symbolically marginalize the city’s Indians and Koreans and, in so doing, reinforces existing negative discourses about them. I contend that this is linked to the locals’ preoccupation with establishing a unifying cultural identity that tends to make them elide the issue of their own internal cultural diversity, as well as of the increasing diasporic population of the city. Second, the said mediation also tends to valorize the lighter-skinned Koreans over the darker-skinned Indians. I posit that this is related to how the locals’ discourse of cultural homogeneity has resulted in their continued reluctance to publicly discuss the persistence of their unspoken skin-tone-based racial hierarchy not only of themselves, but also of their cultural others.
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New Media and Society, 2012
This article examines how the mobile phone might matter in the exercise of conjugal power relatio... more This article examines how the mobile phone might matter in the exercise of conjugal power relations between left-behind fathers and migrant mothers in transnational Filipino families. Drawing on in-depth interviews of ten pairs of fathers and children from mother-away families, it reveals that the mobile phone provides parents avenues to both expand and hold on to their traditionally gender-differentiated roles. This means that while the technology mitigates some of the effects of migration, it also complicates the already complex relationships between these fathers and mothers. Unfortunately, this situation tends to amplify the tremendous difficulties of having to deal with two opposing forces: the changed realities in a transnational Filipino family and the traditional expectations of Philippine society. So while the mobile phone can lead to increasing cooperation between left-behind fathers and migrant mothers, it has mostly resulted in exacerbating the already tremendous chasms that divide them.
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Southeast Asia Research, 2011
While most of the literature highlights the social, economic and cultural aspects of Filipino mig... more While most of the literature highlights the social, economic and cultural aspects of Filipino migration, this study explores its political dimension by focusing on the public connection of Filipino elite migrants in London. Unlike other types of Filipino migrants, such as Americanized balikbayans and ‘low-skilled’ labour migrants, elite migrants are expected to return physically to the homeland as part of their nationalistic duty to ‘lead the nation’. From their interviews and participant observation, the authors discover that overseas scholars indeed maintain a strong interest in homeland political issues through heavy news consumption on the Internet. However, this has also fostered an ambiguous kind of public connection. On the one hand, elite migrants remain engaged with issues that they hope to address on their eventual return, but on the other hand they are not immersed with ‘other’ Filipino people in the diaspora. Their political engagement involves talk and mediated conversations with limited face-to-face collaborations with other migrants. This kind of public connection lends itself to long- distance particularistic communication and a great volume of discussion, but limited and short-term forms of public activity. The authors argue that elite migrants’ practices of political engagement are inscribed in continuing socio-historical – and fundamentally classed – divides in Philippine society. Further, rather than enabling cross-class communications and connections, the media are frequently used by elite migrants to maintain political, economic, social and cultural divides.
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Book Chapters by Jason Vincent Cabanes
Oxford Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Communication, 2023
A nuanced understanding of how media matter in the diverse articulations of multiculturalism acro... more A nuanced understanding of how media matter in the diverse articulations of multiculturalism across the globe requires one to have a transnational sensibility. This is a scholarly disposition that entails being attuned to the role that different media platforms and genres play not only in how racial hierarchies of different societies are articulated, but also in how these hierarchies get entangled with each other. Although the literature about media and multiculturalism is already well established, it is often situated in the context of the West. These works understandably tend to be concerned with the mediation of multicultural issues that are most relevant to their situation, such as the legacies of empire and of settler colonialism. A transnational sensibility consequently necessitates an expansion of current discussions about media and multiculturalism beyond the West. Doing so can allow for a better understanding of how media get entwined with the distinct issues of cultural diversity that have emerged from a wider range of contexts. It also opens up an important vista from which to explore how the mediation of multicultural issues in different parts of the world might be linked to each other, and sometimes intimately so.
A productive site to think through such a transnational sensibility to media and cultural diversity is the global cities of the Southeast Asian region. These places are exemplary of postcolonial multiculturalisms that are distinct from the kind of multiculturalism that can be found in the global cities of West. This article consequently juxtaposes two urban contexts that represent divergent approaches toward the mediation of colonially rooted cultural diversity. One is the city-state of Singapore, where there are overt public policies about managing plurality. The second is the Philippines capital of Metropolitan Manila (henceforth, Manila), where there is a general elision of public talk about plurality. The article takes a comparative lens to these two cities, assessing how their different mediations of postcolonial multiculturalism are entangled with broader global dynamics, including with each other.
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The Routledge international handbook of new critical race and whiteness studies, 2023
The chapter discusses dating in a Global South post-colonial city. Specifically, it looks at the ... more The chapter discusses dating in a Global South post-colonial city. Specifically, it looks at the lives of middle-and upper-class women who date foreigners, providing insights into the ways that performances of cosmopolitanism are entwined with colonial ideas about white and non-white bodies. It focuses on the case of Metropolitan (Metro) Manila, the Philippine capital that has served as a key site for the country's long colonial history of racial tensions between Filipinos and Westerners. Of particular interest is how these tensions have been expressed around intimate and marital relationships between Filipino women and foreign men. Scholars have long problematised the concept of the Filipino women as the post-colonial other through their studies on women participating as 'mail-order brides', participants in sex tourism, and in marriage migration. But in rapidly globalising Metro Manila middle-and upper-class Filipino women engage in intimate relationships with foreigners in ways that can subvert the racial and sexual stereotypes often ascribed to them. They fashion themselves as the exception, precisely because their elite education, career-orientation, worldliness and feelings of sexual empowerment allow them to participate in and perform upper-class and cosmopolitan lifestyles even while problematic dynamics and tensions around race and class differences persist.
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Books by Jason Vincent Cabanes
• A central concept in understanding people’s consumption of and vulnerability to digital disinformation is its imaginative dimension as a communication act. Key to the power of disinformation campaigns is their ability to connect to people’s shared imaginaries. Consequently, counter-disinformation initiatives also need to attend to these imaginaries.
• This report examines why the precarious middle class in the Philippines has been particularly susceptible to digital disinformation. It focuses on two key imaginaries that disinformation producers weaponized in the year leading up to the 2022 national elections. The first was a long-simmering anti- Chinese resentment, which racist social media campaigns about Philippines-China relations targeted. The other was a yearning for a “strong leader”, which history-distorting campaigns about the country’s Martial Law era amplified.
• Ironically, some practices adopted by members of the public to protect themselves from the toxicity and vitriol of online spaces increased their vulnerability to digital disinformation. The cumulative impact of these was for people to dig deeper into their existing imaginaries, something that disinformation producers targeted and exploited.
• We offer two suggestions for future counter-disinformation initiatives. The first has to do with addressing people’s vulnerability to the weaponization of their shared imaginaries. Counter- disinformation initiatives can move past divisive imaginaries by infusing creativity in imparting information. Collaborating with well-intentioned professionals in the media and creative industries would be key to these kinds of initiatives.
• The second has to do with addressing people’s media consumption practices. These practices tend to open them up to sustained and long-term digital disinformation campaigns, which provide them with problematic imaginaries to dig into. To establish a similarly robust common ground of reality, counter-disinformation initiatives should themselves be programmatic, not ad hoc.
Journal Articles by Jason Vincent Cabanes
Book Chapters by Jason Vincent Cabanes
A productive site to think through such a transnational sensibility to media and cultural diversity is the global cities of the Southeast Asian region. These places are exemplary of postcolonial multiculturalisms that are distinct from the kind of multiculturalism that can be found in the global cities of West. This article consequently juxtaposes two urban contexts that represent divergent approaches toward the mediation of colonially rooted cultural diversity. One is the city-state of Singapore, where there are overt public policies about managing plurality. The second is the Philippines capital of Metropolitan Manila (henceforth, Manila), where there is a general elision of public talk about plurality. The article takes a comparative lens to these two cities, assessing how their different mediations of postcolonial multiculturalism are entangled with broader global dynamics, including with each other.
• A central concept in understanding people’s consumption of and vulnerability to digital disinformation is its imaginative dimension as a communication act. Key to the power of disinformation campaigns is their ability to connect to people’s shared imaginaries. Consequently, counter-disinformation initiatives also need to attend to these imaginaries.
• This report examines why the precarious middle class in the Philippines has been particularly susceptible to digital disinformation. It focuses on two key imaginaries that disinformation producers weaponized in the year leading up to the 2022 national elections. The first was a long-simmering anti- Chinese resentment, which racist social media campaigns about Philippines-China relations targeted. The other was a yearning for a “strong leader”, which history-distorting campaigns about the country’s Martial Law era amplified.
• Ironically, some practices adopted by members of the public to protect themselves from the toxicity and vitriol of online spaces increased their vulnerability to digital disinformation. The cumulative impact of these was for people to dig deeper into their existing imaginaries, something that disinformation producers targeted and exploited.
• We offer two suggestions for future counter-disinformation initiatives. The first has to do with addressing people’s vulnerability to the weaponization of their shared imaginaries. Counter- disinformation initiatives can move past divisive imaginaries by infusing creativity in imparting information. Collaborating with well-intentioned professionals in the media and creative industries would be key to these kinds of initiatives.
• The second has to do with addressing people’s media consumption practices. These practices tend to open them up to sustained and long-term digital disinformation campaigns, which provide them with problematic imaginaries to dig into. To establish a similarly robust common ground of reality, counter-disinformation initiatives should themselves be programmatic, not ad hoc.
A productive site to think through such a transnational sensibility to media and cultural diversity is the global cities of the Southeast Asian region. These places are exemplary of postcolonial multiculturalisms that are distinct from the kind of multiculturalism that can be found in the global cities of West. This article consequently juxtaposes two urban contexts that represent divergent approaches toward the mediation of colonially rooted cultural diversity. One is the city-state of Singapore, where there are overt public policies about managing plurality. The second is the Philippines capital of Metropolitan Manila (henceforth, Manila), where there is a general elision of public talk about plurality. The article takes a comparative lens to these two cities, assessing how their different mediations of postcolonial multiculturalism are entangled with broader global dynamics, including with each other.
The article sketches ethnographic portraits of disinformation architects to shed light on their work routines, social and financial motivations, as well as the mental acrobatics they make to justify morally sketchy work. It identifies the vulnerabilities in the creative industries and particularly the digital influencer industry that have not only enabled disinformation work but made it financially rewarding.
The Philippines, with its highly organized digital labor force represents a “stockpile of digital weapons” that have potentially grave consequences to democracies in the West. The report outlines preliminary policy recommendations and argues against a one-size-fits-all approach to disinformation interventions in global context.