Home⇛PCS Review⇛vol. 14 no. 1 (2022)

Kapwa: A phenomenological inquiry on the lived mediated communication practices of Anakbayan activists in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lordivine Marie T. Pineda

Discipline: media studies

 

Abstract:

Anakbayan is one of the largest student-led mass organizations in the Philippines that uses cyberactivism to protest against the abuse of governmental power. It has been red-tagged multiple times in the past. It was red-tagged as a communist-terrorist group by the Duterte administration. Red-tagging is “the act of labeling, branding, naming and accusing individuals and/or organizations of being left-leaning, subversives, communists or terrorists as a strategy by state agents, particularly law enforcement agencies and the military against those perceived to be ‘threats’ or “enemies of the State” (Pimentel-Simbulan, 2011, p.12). Red-tagging has its dark roots in Philippine history whose records of tortures since the Martial Law era have not yet received justice. The militarized “shoot-them-dead” protocol of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic forced activists to shift online and continue their protest actions. The rampant red-tagging in the Philippine locale also enforced the use of various social media platforms to create posts that will produce more online engagements and strengthen their calls to action. Using a phenomenological hermeneutic approach to qualitative research and the theory of Apparatgeist on Time and Being, Anakbayan youth activists interpreted their experience-capacities and limitations in doing cyberactivism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a series of indepth dialogic interviews, ten Anakbayan youth activists demonstrated how they maintain, sustain, and promote the organization’s social causes through cyberactivism. Results show that Anakbayan youth activists minimized the effects of incivility, disinformation, red-tagging, and algorithm-produced social media bubble filters online through pakikipagkapwa in public and private counterpublic discourse arenas. Anakbayan youth activists further interpret online antagonisms as part of the collective struggle created by the gaps between individuals’ material conditions in the age of the World Wide Web.



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