#Mediatization: Heeding the call for mediatization studies in Asia
Article
In a milieu where technologies heavily mediate the environment and processes of everyday life, a cultural phenomenon that Sonia Livingstone described as the “mediation of everything,” scholars are encouraged to heed the call for more mediatization studies. The mediatization approach integrates the institutionalist and social-constructivist perspectives in critically analyzing the changes in both media and communications, on one hand, and culture and society, on the other hand. Reflecting on my past research works applying mediatization theories, I highlighted the value of the mediatization approach through its dialectics: Technological and social; Literal and symbolic, material and semiotic; Descriptive and critical; Objective and subjective, quantitative and qualitative; and Meso and micro levels. In the end, I also surfaced some criticisms of the mediatization approach, which, I argued, prove to be its strength in enabling researchers to keep pace in studying a highly mediatizing Asia and in indigenizing or Asianizing communication research and theorizing.
Intensive care: Mediatized parenting and the circulation of transnational family care between Hong Kong and the Philippines
Article
Studies of transnational families have explored the various approaches by which separated members of the family exchange care across distance. In the context of the Philippines, transnational caregiving is widely studied as transnational mothering, looking at how migrant mothers balance their breadwinning and mothering roles using available communications. In this article, I investigated how the circulation of global care among migrant families is increasingly and intensively mediatized in the past decades. Using Andreas Hepp’s (2013) mediatization approach and Loretta Baldassar and Laura Merla’s (2014) care circulation framework, I conducted interviews with 20 migrant parents in Hong Kong and their 25 left-behind children in the Philippines to reveal the stories of how digital and convergent technologies have altered the communicative practices surrounding the four main modes of transnational care circulation: gifts, cross-border mobilities, remittances, and transnational communication. I have also found how mediatized parenting is now a more intensive and embodied mode of distant caring that has sustained families across borders. This study aims to contribute to the mediatization research paradigm and draw practical implications for sustaining families affected by this transnational phenomenon.
“Gendered space”: A study of newspaper opinion journalism as emergent and oppositional to the dominant culture in journalism
Article
This paper reviews the literature in academic journals and books and asserts the importance of studying opinion journalism as a genre of emergent and oppositional journalism and a form of public engagement. Using Raymond Williams’s Marxist cultural theory of base and superstructure, this writer takes the perspective that newspaper columns are a genre that contributes to residual and emergent forms of alternative and oppositional culture which counters the texts and values in the dominant culture of journalism. Exercising traditional public scholarship, op-ed writers utilize columns, essays, and other forms of creative nonfiction to address issues that concern women, the working class, and other vulnerable groups that are kept at the periphery of public discourse.
Cruising Through Spaces: Exploring the Mediatization of Gay Cruising in the Philippines
Article
The emergence of new communications technologies has provided a new space for initiating romantic and sexual relationships among gays who perceive social and physical places to be a traditional space that largely promotes connection among heterosexuals. Now, mobile networking applications like Grindr have made it easier for gay men to “cruise” and meet other men, and are seen to lead to the increasing number of sexual partners, being exposed to risks like sexually transmitted infections (STI), among others. Thus this study, framed within the theory of Mediatization – which critically analyzes the dialectic process in which both media and communications on one hand, and culture and society on the other, mutually shape and change each other in an interactional process – explores the question: How have gays’ way of cruising, or the initiation of romantic or sexual relations (among others), in the Philippines been mediatized across history?
