Jonathan Corpus Ong

“Witnessing” or “Mediating” Distant Suffering? Ethical Questions across Moments of Text, Production, and Reception

This article identifies that the current literature on “distant suffering” lacks a nuanced account of the relationship between televised representations of suffering and the audiences that encounter these in their everyday lives. Text-centered studies overemphasize how news narratives cause compassion fatigue, while audience-centered studies enumerate audience responses with inadequate references to the textual elements and social factors that shape these responses. While recent theorizations about “media witnessing” have provided a guidepost in thinking about the ethical consequences of showing and seeing suffering in the media, it however obscures the normative from the descriptive and universalizes the experience of the “witness” it speaks about. To address these gaps and develop a holistic approach to examine televised suffering, the article proposes the use of mediation theory to account for the distinct ethical questions that arise from the specific “moments” of mediation and how they should altogether inform the ethical critique of media.

Tweeting Supertyphoon Haiyan: Evolving Functions of Twitter during and after a Disaster Event

When disaster events capture global attention users of Twitter form transient interest communities that disseminate information and other messages online. This paper examines content related to Typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda) as it hit the Philippines and triggered international humanitarian response and media attention. It reveals how Twitter conversations about disasters evolve over time, showing an issue attention cycle on a social media platform. The paper examines different functions of Twitter and the information hubs that drive and sustain conversation about the event. Content analysis shows that the majority of tweets contain information about the typhoon or its damage, and disaster relief activities. There are differences in types of content between the most retweeted messages and posts that are original tweets. Original tweets are more likely to come from ordinary users, who are more likely to tweet emotions, messages of support, and political content compared with official sources and key information hubs that include news organizations, aid organization, and celebrities. Original tweets reveal use of the site beyond information to relief coordination and response.

Inclusion as Deliberative Agency The Selective Representation of Poor Women in Debates and Documentaries about Reproductive Health

Mass media play a double-edged role in promoting deliberative democracy: they enforce hierarchies in public discussion by prioritizing the voice of particular groups, yet they remain the best, if not the only institution that can temper inequalities in deliberation, particularly in their capacity to grant ordinary people opportunities for voice in deliberative settings. We put forward two criteria that can assess media’s capacity to enforce inclusiveness in public deliberation. A mediated deliberative system is inclusive if it (1) proactively gives visibility and voice to vulnerable groups to be seen and heard on their terms and (2) allows those with less power to act as “deliberative agents” capable of facing their interlocutors, articulating, defending, and considering one’s views. We provide empirical context to this argument through the case of the Reproductive Health debates in the Philippines, as they played out in two different television genres that differently accentuate deliberative agency.

Witnessing distant and proximal suffering within a zone of danger: Lay moralities of media audiences in the Philippines

Drawing on the anthropology of moralities, the phronetic turn in media ethics scholarship, and audience research in media studies, this article explores how media audiences in the global South are implicated in moral dilemmas of bearing witness. Central are the diverse audience practices of engaging with proximal suffering on one hand and distant suffering on the other, where sympathy with or denial strategies towards suffering others are shaped not only by audiences’ geographical distance to tragedy, but crucially by classed moralities that profoundly shape judgments to sufferers and the media that represent them. A synthesis of ethnographic audience research with middle-class and low-income populations in disaster-prone Philippines shows how middle-class moralities of respectability inform social denial to proximal suffering, while low-income people’s personal experiences of suffering lead to the instrumentalization of television narratives as symbolic resources to cope with their own suffering.

Queer cosmopolitanism in the disaster zone: ‘My Grindr became the United Nations’

This article reflects on the significance of cosmopolitan socialities and intimacies following disasters, and the opportunities and risks they offer for restorative and reparative action for survivors and their communities. Reporting in particular on the experiences of LGBTQ Filipinos in post-Haiyan Tacloban, I discuss how the presence of foreign aid workers in everyday social spaces provided opportunities for queer identity expression and social attachments. I argue that cosmopolitan socialities, including new connections initiated via mobile dating platforms, were embraced by LGBTQs for their potential to share and repurpose wounds after rupture, especially in a conservative small-town context where LGBTQ identities have been historically repressed. This article attends to the opportunities and risks of queer cosmopolitanism as an uneven experience between middle-class and low-income LGBTQs.

Local aid workers in the digital humanitarian project: between “second class citizens” and “entrepreneurial survivors”

ABSTRACT This paper examines the experiences of Filipino workers recruited for technology and communications work by international aid agencies involved in the Typhoon Haiyan response. Filipino workers, many of whom were personally coping with the social and economic impact of this disaster, were hired on short-term contracts to test and implement various digital humanitarian innovations such as feedback and hazard mapping technological platforms. These workers were doubly marginalized: first, as tech workers whose work was viewed by aid officers on the ground as less substantial than that of food or shelter programs; and second, as local voices often drowned out by national and international colleagues. Moving beyond the usual figure of the cosmopolitan and adventure-seeking Western humanitarian acting on distant suffering, this paper draws attention to local aid workers’ aspirations for personal and professional mobility as they seize novel opportunities opened up by the digital humanitarian agenda. It outlines how the digital humanitarian project’s ambition to facilitate the inclusion of disaster-affected communities is fundamentally undermined by labor arrangements that doubly marginalize local aid workers.

Who Laughs at a Rape Joke? Illiberal Responsiveness in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines

When a presidential contender makes a joke about lusting over a dead Australian missionary, one could expect that this candidate would not go very far; but not in the year 2016. Dubbed as ‘the year of voting dangerously,’ the Philippines rode the tide of global discontent and gave landslide victory to the controversial Rodrigo Duterte. We argue that part of Duterte’s electoral success is a form of responsiveness that speaks to the injuries a frustrated public had to endure over years of a reform-oriented, technocratic yet often callous politicians associated to Duterte’s predecessor and other ‘progressive’ political elites. This form of responsiveness, however, takes an illiberal character—a kind of selective responsiveness that restores the esteem of many, but simultaneously thrives by denying the humanity of others.