“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.
Spectres of New Media Technologies in the Public Sphere
Article
New media technologies are mechanisms of representation that reveal the relationship of technology and society. In the deconstructive politics of Jacques Derrida, the social and technological ontology of new media technologies produce spectres. Spectres introduce doubts and instability in dominant discourses and modes of representation in the public sphere; this becomes possible through iteration, which refers to the transformation of hegemonic authority through repetition of its fundamental terms of identification.
The essay presents a critique of new media technologies in the context of the Philippines. It is inspired by the work of Derrida, in his deconstructive reading of Marx’s spectres, and Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of the public sphere offered an implicit appraisal of spectres. This examination of spectres will answer the question: what are the political possibilities of new media technologies in the public sphere?
