Watching the Nation, Singing the Nation:

London-based Filipino Migrants’

Identity Constructions in
News Reception and Karaoke

Jonathan Corpus Ong

PhD Candidate
Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom

Email: Jo296@cam.ac.uk
Mobile: +639175278094, +447442759754

Submitted to
ICA Conference 2008
Montreal

Biographical Notes
 Jonathan Corpus Ong is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Corpus Christi
College, University of Cambridge. He is one of only 100 students in the 2007 batch
with the prestigious Bill Gates Scholarship. He has an MSc in Politics and
Communication (Distinction) at the London School of Economics and Political
Science and a BA in Communication (Summa Cum Laude) at the Ateneo de Manila
University. He has worked in top media organizations including the BBC, McCann-
Erickson Philippines, and GMA Network. He is also a Lecturer in Media and
Globalization at the Ateneo de Manila University. His PhD dissertation is entitled
Cosmopolitanism, Media and Morality: How Audiences Relate with Distant Others In
and Around the Media. Fields of interest include: media ethics, media and migration,
child/youth audiences, and mediated public participation.

Paper Abstract

This study explores the processes of identity construction of London-based

Filipinos within and across the media of news and karaoke. While news reception
studies among migrant audiences have been popular, few research have been done
on the use of karaoke, and fewer still that examine both practices side-by-side. As a
study that bridges the “public knowledge project”, which studies news media, with the
“popular culture project”, which studies entertainment media, I argue in this research
that the seemingly innocent social practice of singing involves the raising and erasing
of symbolic boundaries. As national identities are constantly flagged in everyday life
(Billig 1995), I examine here how Filipino audiences negotiate their multiple
attachments in both media practices. From participant observation and qualitative
interviews, I discover that news reception generally enables both banal nationalism
and banal transnationalism, while karaoke functions more as a homeland-directed
“high holiday.” Arguing against the notion that transnational media consumption
seamlessly lifts people out from their national context, I demonstrate how audiences
weave in and out of their loyalties to British and Filipino publics across the media of
British news, Filipino news, and karaoke. This bottom-up exploration also shows the
link between rational and emotional engagement with the media, suggesting that it is
in the most ecstatic moments of media consumption that Filipino migrants find
themselves reflecting, and reflecting on, their Filipino-ness.

Introduction
In March 2007, I visited the homes of Filipino migrants in London as part of
the initial phase of my fieldwork. It was the first time that I myself had been away
from Manila for a significant period, and I was starved for news about the
“homeland”, especially for updates on the May 2007 Philippine National Elections.
Philippine Elections, as many commentators say, are best described as
carnivalesque, with the whole country thrown into frenzy from campaign road tours,
catchy advertising jingles, and the literally star-studded lineup of celebrities-turned-
politicos (Bionat 1998). I was then curious as to how such an occasion would qualify
as a kind of “media event” of ecstatic nationalism (Dayan & Katz 1992) for Filipinos
living away from the Philippines. And with 11% of the Philippine population living
abroad (“Stock Estimate”, 2006), I wanted to inquire into how this politically and
economically significant community engage with homeland political affairs by
watching the news, learning about the candidates, and subsequently voting as
transnational Filipino publics.
While doing my interviews however, I found that news about the elections
was not closely monitored. Families did not readily gather around the television set,
as I had thought. And talk about Philippine politics was either minimal or severely
critical, as Filipino migrants compared them to the more “systematic”, “sensible”, and
“serious” politics of the British Parliament. Having satellite subscriptions to The
Filipino Channel (TFC) then did not “magically transport” them to the homeland as
engaged citizens indifferent to the politics of the host country—a view that
conservative thinkers, policy-makers, and even the media themselves assume
(Madianou 2005a: 522; Aksoy & Robins 2000: 351). In short, I didn’t get a sense of
ecstatic nationalism from their news watching at all.
But, still listening and observing, I noted that Filipinos reflect on their Filipino-
ness in their media practices from a variety of less extravagant, though not
necessarily humble, ways: commenting on British news media’s depictions of Filipino
nurses, boasting about Filipino athletes winning international tournaments, claiming
the superiority of Filipino soap operas over “boring” British soaps, and others.
My most interesting discovery though happened at a birthday party in a
respondent’s apartment in Bromley-by-Bow, East London. The media were a big-
screen television, two microphones, and a thick playlist of “local” and “foreign” songs.
Singing karaoke, it seemed, was what brought Filipinos around the TV and, perhaps,
was what brought them “home”. Karaoke, the migrants claimed, is a distinctly
“Filipino practice”. “Only in the Philippines do you get shot for singing out of tune,”
one said unabashedly, referring to a BBC report of a man killed in Manila after an off-
key rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way. And throughout such evenings, talk, gossip,
and jokes about what it meant to be Filipino would draw both serious debate and
bawdy laughs. The question whether such a practice could be called a “high holiday”
of national pride when juxtaposed against “traditional” media practices of news
reception then became a curious turning point for my study.
This study, drawing from my interviews and participant observation with
London-based Filipino migrants, attempts to demonstrate the ways in which the
media influence identity constructions and the ways in which migrants themselves
use the media to actively construct their own identities. While it follows the tradition of
research that highlights the dialectical relationship between media and identity (e.g.,
Gillespie 1995; Aksoy & Robins 2000; Madianou 2005), I go on to highlight that both
“serious” and “soft” media are implicated in questions of inclusion and exclusion, of
helping and hindering belonging, of raising and erasing symbolic boundaries, for a
social group that is continually making sense of who they are and who they wish to
become. By bridging the “public knowledge project,” which focuses on audiences of
the news, and the “popular culture project,” which focuses on audiences of
entertainment media (Corner 1991), I argue that we gain a deeper understanding of
the complex operations of the media as an “environment” (Silverstone 2006),
inextricably linked with the everyday symbolic project of constructing the self
(Thompson 1995). This approach is able to show how migrant audiences select (or
even choose not to select) different media at particular occasions to connect and
disconnect from multiple national imaginaries and why.
Further, by examining media as technology, content and context, I show that
“serious” and “soft” media (products, texts, practices) provide individuals tools,
occasions, and spaces for ecstatic and banal expressions of nationalism and
transnationalism. Instead of assuming that transnational media consumption
seamlessly lift people out from their national context, I explore from the ground-up
how audiences weave in and out of their loyalties to British and Filipino publics
across the media of British news, Filipino news, and karaoke. This bottom-up
exploration, I argue, may perhaps shift the emphasis of media as disembedding
mechanisms (Giddens 1990) but as resources for reflexive reterritorialization, for
bringing the distant near, bringing there to here, bringing the past to the present,
bringing the image to the material environment, bringing home to host—at the
wherewithal of active audiences in everyday life.

Media, Migration, Identities

Much of the early work in mass communication research have theorized the
relationship between media and identity, between media and audiences, in terms of
effects, where the media is seen to be determining attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of
individuals (e.g., Schramm & Porter 1982). Here media power is located in the hands
of media producers while audiences are seen as passive recipients of content.
While this tradition of research has been greatly challenged by cultural
studies over the years, the assumption that the media determines identities is still
present in recent scholarship in media and migration studies. For instance,
Saunders’ (2006) study of the identity construction of displaced Russian “digerati” in
European countries posits that sustained Internet activity leads to the development of
a post-national identity. This he surmises from survey questionnaires and interviews
that track the frequency of users accessing English-language webpages, foreign job
websites, and online shops. While not an effects study per se, Saunders’ approach to
the study of media audiences likewise suffers from the media-centrism and
technological determinism of early audience research, where the media is divorced
from the terrain of everyday life.
This study draws its inspiration from the “ethnographic turn” of audience
studies. Rather than privileging the idea of powerful media or—the opposite extreme
—powerful audiences (e.g., Fiske 1987), media ethnography is said to have
contributed to a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between media
and audiences. Madianou (2005), in her own review of audience studies literature,
cites the special significance of empirical work on transnational audiences (i.e.,
Gillespie 1995; Aksoy & Robins 2000; Robins & Aksoy 2001) for their thick
description of the dialectical interplay between media and identity. Using this
perspective, we are able to ask more nuanced questions to the study of the mediated
everyday life experiences of migrants. Instead of asking how the media may have
effects or influences on identities, we examine how the media creates spaces for
inclusion and exclusion. Instead of asking whether the reception of a particular
program determines an individual’s affiliation to a national community, we study here
how mediated cultural practices enable or disable belongings and the construction
and reconstruction of national imaginaries.
A bottom-up approach in the study of media audiences likewise gives us a
more rounded picture of what we mean by identity. Identity has long been identified
as a slippery term (Buckingham 2008). And here, identity is understood not as an
essence, but as a performance. It is understood not as fixed or given, but “as a
relation to something or someone else that the boundary is drawn” (Madianou 2005:
525).
For migrants, the more specific theorization of identity that is said to apply
best is that of diaspora. Ien Ang (2001: 44) defines diaspora as “transnational,
spatially and temporally sprawling socio-cultural formations of people, creating
imagined communities whose blurred and fluctuating boundaries are sustained by
real and/or symbolic ties to some original homeland.” Here, identity is best conceived
as always-already in process. The fluidity of identity hearkens Stuart Hall’s (1996: 4)
own conception of identity as both being and becoming: that it is as much about “who
we are” or “where we came from” as much as it is “what we might become,” rejecting
primordialist theories that conceive of nation and culture as “seamless wholes, with a
single will and character” (Smith 1998: 23).
For diasporic individuals displaced in time and space, the tension in the
process of identity construction is often expressed in the binarisms of roots/routes,
home/host, home/away, and here/there. But as Aihwa Ong (2004: 87) points out,
these dualities also fail to capture “the multiplicity of vectors and agendas associated
with the majority of contemporary border crossings.” Thus, scholars such as Shome
(2006: 106) argue for a more nuanced approach to the study of “hybrid communities”
that takes into account their “very constitution, contexts, and staging in colliding and
colluding contemporary [non-Western] modernities” [emphasis mine]. In this light, this
study seeks to approach these binarisms not from an either/or perspective that
actually reifies an “old” and a “new” identity, but from a both/and perspective that
recognizes how identities may be performed “both outside and inside multiple nations
and geographies that intersect at the collision of multiple times” (Shome 2006: 108).
Indeed the constant celebration of diaspora often glosses over its existential double-
edgedness and in-betweenness, where the common experience is not only being
“out of place” (Said 1999) but “out of time” (Ang 2001) as well. As I examine the
media consumption of migrant Filipinos in London then, it is imperative to view how
their media practices both sustain and subvert their imaginaries of home as well as
their banal and ecstatic practices of belonging to the nation.
Useful to this study of course are the twin notions of banal and ecstatic
nationalism. Billig’s (1995) concept of banal nationalism describes how routine,
familiar, even unconscious forms of nationalism, such as hanging a flag on a public
building, contributes to the maintenance of a national identity. He cites how
politicians’ speeches and mass media texts employ the homeland deixis (ibid.: 105)
—that is, the use of “us” and “them” in their language—to signify that nation and who
does and does not belong. Whereas Billig noted the importance of commonplace
practices of flagging the nation, Dayan and Katz (1992) turn their attention to the high
holidays of ecstatic nationalism, which they term “media events.” Media events—
state ceremonies, parades, funerals—integrate society into a cohesive whole, they
argue. From their phenomenological analyses of live broadcasts, they conclude that
such events “connect center and periphery” (ibid.: 196).
These are useful concepts to study the similarities and differences of the
media of news and karaoke as resources for audiences’ sense of belonging.
However, this study plans to expand on these original theorizations by a) examining
them bottom-up and not from textual or phenomenological analyses, b) situating
them outside a methodologically nationalist paradigm in the focus on migrant
audiences, and c) exploring them outside the “public knowledge project” which they
came to be entrenched, and see how might popular and participatory media such as
karaoke might foster (or not) the reflection and reterritorialization of nation(s). If we
are to think of identity as a fluid and fragile performance after all, then it is crucial to
understand how different media enable or disable particular identity constructions in
their symbolic and material work of inclusion and exclusion.

Setting the Context: Filipinos in London

In 1969, only 3,694 Filipinos left the homeland to work in foreign countries. As
of 2004, approximately 4,000 workers leave the Philippines each day on a
contractual basis (Tyner 2004: 55). And as of 2006, more than 10 million Filipinos, or
11% of the total population, are said to be living outside the Philippines, most of them
falling under Cohen’s (1997) category of “labor diaspora.”
With the third largest labor diaspora in the world, behind only China and India,
the Philippines considers the “migration industry” as a significant pillar of its
economy. Philippine economic policy is said to emphasize the role of labor export, as
seen in the government’s much-publicized target to send a million workers every
year abroad (Asis 2006). Scholars such as Tyner (2004) have also cited how
discursive constructions such as the balikbayan (literally, returnee to the nation) have
been used by the state apparatus and the media in valorizing the overseas Filipino
worker (OFW) as the modern day hero, whose special ability is to send money back
home. With the increased mobility of Filipinos of course comes smoother flow of
capital. In 2006 alone, the Philippines received over $12 billion in remittances from
overseas Filipinos, the fourth largest recipient behind India, China, and Mexico
(“OFW Remittances,” PIA Online).
But overseas Filipinos are not at all business and corporate types. In fact
more than one-third of all overseas Filipinos are “laborers or unskilled workers,”
according to data from the Philippine National Statistics Office (“One in three,”
GMANews.TV). This category includes domestic helpers, cleaners, and factory
workers. Meanwhile trade workers make up 15% of overseas workers, while service
workers (nurses included) make up 14%.
The United Kingdom then provides an interesting case for the study of
Philippine migration, as it has interesting divergences from the general scenario.
Only 10% of Filipinos in the UK are classified as low-skilled workers—mostly female
domestic helpers—and a sizeable two-thirds are nurses or are in allied medical fields
(“Profile of,” Philippine Embassy UK Online). In fact, Filipinos are said to make up the
largest and most visible group of internationally recruited nurses in the UK, especially
in the Greater London area (Gordolan 2004).
Table 1.1: Top 10 Countries with Significant Filipino Populations
(source: “Stock Estimate,” 2006)
Country Population
1. United States 2,278,209
2. Saudi Arabia 1,019,577
3. Canada 437,940
4. United Arab Emirates 311,793
5. Malaysia 239,373
6. Australia 236,525
7. United Kingdom 165,564
8. Kuwait 144,955
9. Singapore 139,318
10. Hong Kong 135,115
The UK hosts the 7th largest overseas Filipino community, and it is the 5th
highest source of remittances for the Philippines (“Overseas Filipino,” BSP Online).
In politically economic terms UK-based Filipinos may then seem to hold significant
clout, but one issue often cited during my initial fieldwork is the issue of
representation. Filipinos in the UK are rarely seen and talked about in both British
and Philippine media, they say. They note that there have been dozens and dozens
of films and news documentaries about Filipino migrants in the Unites States, Hong
Kong, Italy, the Arab World, etc., but British-Filipinos have been rather invisible. Even
media outlets have been slow to respond to the demand of Filipino migrants in the
UK for more targeted content, as GMA Network, the top-ranked television station in
Metro Manila, has delayed its UK launch after its rollout in other regions, giving ABS-
CBN’s The Filipino Channel a monopoly on Filipino transnational television. In
addition, there too has been little attention from political leaders to the situation of
UK-based Filipinos. While Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo made a
high-profile visit to a London hospital in 2006, regular assistance from government
officials, including the Philippine Embassy, is said to be limited (“PGMA visits”, OPS
Online).
From this brief review of Filipinos’ situation in the UK, one can identify
possible sources of tension that this study can explore. In my intent to examine the
construction of identity in news- and entertainment-based media practices, I wish to
closely investigate how London-based Filipinos express notions of belonging to both
home and host countries. For instance, in connecting to home, they may be attracted
by the popular discourse of overseas Filipinos as modern day heroes saving the
Philippine economy, but at the same time, from their privileged position, they may
wish to distance themselves from their less well-off compatriots, recognized by
Cabanes (2007) as a strategy of asserting social status. Indeed, social class issues
may very well be salient here especially in the context of their talk about how the
news represents Filipinos, as the composition of UK-based Filipinos is starkly
different from the popular picture privileged by Philippine and international news
media.

Watching, Singing, Observing, Interviewing

Fieldwork for the project comprised of 18 in-depth interviews, informal chats
with informants, and 18 home visits to 7 London-based Filipino families. As an
audience study of migrants’ identity construction in news and entertainment media
practices, I relied mainly on qualitative interviews and participant observation. The
qualitative interview, as a method that yields “rich sources of data on people’s
experiences, opinions, aspirations and feelings” through its flexible and sensitive
dynamic (May 1993: 91), proved as a salient site for Filipino migrants’ “media talk.”
As Buckingham (1996: 57) suggests, “In discussing what we watch, and in making
judgments about what we like and dislike, we are making claims about ourselves.”
Participant observation was productive in identifying how news consumption and
karaoke singing were embedded in the everyday life contexts of Filipino migrants.
While it would have been possible to gather data about their mediated practices from
interviews alone, I recognize that what people say and do in relation to the media
may often be contradictory (Gillespie 2005).
According to Creswell (1994), informants that would best answer the research
questions are purposefully selected in qualitative research. In this light, purposive
sampling was used for this study, where seven London-based Filipino families were
selected.
In this study, “London-based Filipino families” were defined as Filipino
nationals who live together in one household and have been residents in the UK for
at least five years. I purposefully selected respondents from different backgrounds to
give adequate representation to the variety of experiences within the diaspora. I
recruited four of the seven respondents mostly through the help of personal contacts
in London. I also recruited three families by visiting Filipino establishments in the
Earl’s Court area and attending Filipino gatherings in the Philippine Embassy.

Table 2.1 Respondents’ Profiles

Background
Family 1 Family of five (parents are nurses in the UK for 7 years,
(middle class) nursing college graduates; children are 9 and 7; one male co-
(Ida, Red, worker lives with the family, has lived in the UK for 3 years)
Boyet)
Family 2 Family of two (one sister is an accountant in the UK for 5
(middle class) years, university graduate; the other sister is a nurse in the
(Norma, Nora) UK for 2 years, nursing college graduate)
Family 3 Family of two (mother is a domestic helper in the UK for 30
(working class) years, some high school education; daughter is a university
(Liza, Bea) student)
Family 4 Family of four (father is a bartender in the UK for 25 years,
(working class) some high school education; mother is a domestic helper in
(Angel, Zeny, the UK for 20 years, some high school education; 17-year old
Kim, Carl) daughter and 12-year old son are in high school)
Family 5 Family of two (female cousin is a shop owner in the UK for 12
(middle class) years, some high school education; male cousin is a
(Lea, Ricky) shopkeeper in the UK for 10 years, some high school
education)
Family 6 Family of three (father is investment banker in the UK for 25
(upper middle years, university graduate; mother is a housewife for 25
class) years, university graduate; son is a university student)
(Herman,
Cora)
Family 7 Family of two (husband is an accountant in the UK for 6
(middle class) years, university graduate; wife is an NGO worker in the UK
(Hector, Lolit) for 4 years, university graduate)

In recruiting respondents, I told them that my research project is about “the

media consumption of Filipino migrants.” I had decided to use a broad, catch-all
theme in describing my project so as not to pre-empt their responses. The interviews,
which usually lasted for an hour, were often held in the homes of the respondents. It
must be noted that the interviews were not often attended by all members of the
household; often the children expressed that they were too busy or too shy to
participate. Then depending on the outcome of the first interview, I would ask
whether I could visit the family again for follow-up interviews, informal chats, or join
when they would watch TV or sing karaoke.
Out on the field, I realized that it was my own body that served as the most
significant research “instrument.” After all, it was through my own senses and my
own ways of interpreting people’s words and actions that I came to decide what
counted as “data” and how they would later be analyzed. In addition, as a person
with mixed ethnicity (Filipino-Chinese), I often found that I had to “prove” my Filipino-
ness to some of the respondents. As I was usually mistaken as Chinese and not
Filipino, the first few exchanges in our meetings were not about them but about me.
But, I soon discovered that my being fluent in Tagalog, the official language of the
Philippines though, allowed me entry to their “inner circle”. After the first interview, I
almost always found myself invited to their birthday parties, family dinners, and even
to Sunday Church. Hospitality, one respondent claimed, is a “distinctly Filipino” trait
after all.
To aid my data-gathering, I prepared an interview questionnaire that aimed to
probe the respondents’ general media consumption habits before delving into issues
of belonging and identity. Here I also explored the tensions between news and
entertainment media practices and what their motivations were in engaging with
these. The purpose of the questionnaire really was to have common questions that I
could ask respondents from different socio-economic backgrounds to enable
comparison. While this is an exploratory study that examines identity construction in
media practices, it is also comparative after all as it looks at how news reception and
the use of karaoke were similarly (or differently) appropriated in everyday life
contexts.
In my subsequent visits to respondents, I also came up with informal topic
guides, wherein I drew from their previous responses and asked follow-up questions.
I also brought a notebook with me where I jotted down field notes immediately after
conducting an interview or participant observation. I actually realized that some of my
most interesting observations were recorded while I was on the Tube or the bus on
my way home from a particularly productive night of news watching or karaoke
singing.
Once fieldwork was completed, I began analyzing the data. I transcribed the
interviews and grouped responses according to important, emergent themes relating
to: 1) news and karaoke practices in everyday life and 2) discourses of nation
(Filipino-ness and British-ness) in news and karaoke. My notes from the participant
observation were similarly grouped to these two broad themes, as I paid attention to
the instances when they talked about home, belonging, and citizenship in relation to
the media. At the same time, I paid attention as to how news and karaoke
themselves enabled/disabled belonging to national imaginaries according to their
articulations as: 1) technology, 2) content, and 3) context.

News Practices: British by Day, Filipino by Holiday

In this section, I argue that news consumption enables migrants to connect to
both British and Filipino national imaginaries. These connections occur in different
ways: consumption of British news is a banal practice while consumption of Filipino
news is a rare, often emotional, occurrence. In both media practices however, the
media do not facilitate a seamless connection to host or home countries; rather, they
can also serve to exclude, as issues of access and representation become
significant.
Among all seven families, British news was seen as indispensable to their
day-to-day activities. Most of the respondents expressed that reading newspapers
and watching primetime news were “mere habits.” “Sometimes it’s unconscious…
like, I’m not thinking when I pick up one of those free papers in the street. I just do it
every time,” Ricky claimed. Initially, statements such as this seemed to suggest that
practices of news consumption are significant because of their routine nature. But
when probed further, the act of engaging with news content reflected deeper issues
at hand—most crucially, issues of belonging and participation.
The 31-year old nurse Ida said, “I never fail to read the morning paper on my
way to the hospital. I know when I get there my British co-workers and bosses will be
talking about current events.” Knowledge about British current affairs could function
as a social lubricant for Filipino migrant workers working as minorities in workplaces
with predominantly British staff. Nevertheless, for Zeny, a domestic helper who would
rarely interact with her Jewish employer (she would only come to her employer’s
house while they were at work so she could clean and prepare the evening meal),
watching British news allowed her to connect symbolically to the British public: “Yes,
the Philippines is my original home, but the UK is my new home now. Most of the
time I really don’t care about the Parliament. But I also know that when something
happens, I’m part of it too.” This something Zeny referred to ranges from football
matches to terror laws to transport updates. Indeed, for the respondents who have
been residents of the UK for seven years or more, their being part of the “British
public” was something that they affirmed and reaffirmed in news reception.
While watching UK news with the families (preferred news channel: the BBC),
we would often hear the term “British public” in news reports. And for the most part,
Filipino migrants remained unblinking and unaffected when this phrase was dropped.
One time I called out Angel, bartender and father of two, and asked, “You told me
earlier in the interview that you only consider yourself Filipino. What do you feel when
you hear ‘British public’ used like that? Do you still feel like they are talking to you?”
He replied,
“Whatever you make of it, you’re still living in their land. Of course as Filipino you can never
truly be British. Just look at our skin. But when it comes to the news, it’s for everyone. Filipino,
British, Indian, everyone who lives here is implicated in the news. That’s why it’s important.”
 Using Billig’s (1995) concept of deixis, we see how Angel’s statement reflects
their conflation of you, me, and us—underscoring the quality of their news viewing
experience as integrative to a wider, “universal” public. Indeed Couldry (2003) has
identified how the news, and its perpetual claim for “objectivity” and access to
society’s “center,” may function as a social glue. For Filipinos who find themselves at
the margins of the social order in everyday life, where they otherwise would never be
interpellated as part of the “British public,” watching British actually enables them to
participate in the dominant national imaginary.
At the same time, it is noticeable that their news consumption practices do
not facilitate a faultless integration to the host country. Issues of power and
marginalization are expressed in the audiences’ talk about certain news items as
well. For instance, there was one occasion in Family 3’s home wherein the mother,
the daughter, and I were watching the evening newscast while having dinner. The
newscast had faded into the background while we enjoyed the hearty meal.
However, at the announcer’s first mention of the word immigration, the mother, Liza,
stopped and immediately turned to the TV set and cranked up the volume. While the
news clip recounted the new hardline British policies to “crackdown” on illegal
immigration—deploying more police constables, raising fines for firms supporting
illegal immigrants, etc.—Liza shook her head, disgusted. Her daughter, university
student Bea, meanwhile went on chewing her food politely and even engaged me in
small talk. At the conclusion of the news clip, Liza began her rant about how these
tougher rules for immigrants are “unfair.”
Liza: “They lump them into these evil bunch of wrongdoers when sometimes they’re really the
victims!”
Bea: [interrupts] “But they broke the law.”
Liza: “They’re still human. They’re not pests to be exterminated!”
Bea: “Huh? I didn’t say they’re pests!”
Liza: “Don’t you feel sad for them? No wonder [you feel that way]. You didn’t grow up there.”
I noticed that these instances where news viewing produced a relationship of
dissociation with the host country were not merely a result of the themes or topics of
news reports (i.e., immigration, race relations, terrorism, Philippines, etc.); they were
also a result of specific representational practices. Specifically, respondents were
highly critical of how British media rarely covered issues pertaining to the Philippines,
how Filipinos were only shown as “novelties,” and how Filipinos came to be
represented only as service workers and not professionals. Of note here are how
mainstream news media’s representation of Filipinos as poor and underprivileged is
severely criticized by middle- and upper middle-class professionals such as Norma.
As an accountant, she is offended by Londoners often mistaking her as a maid when
she is “classified [by the UK government] as a migrant with ‘desirable professional
skills’”—an attribution that she attributed to the limited representations of Filipinos in
British and global media. Curiously, even working-class Filipinos echo this complaint,
as they cite that Filipinos are “achievers” on the global stage, not simply victims.
Clearly, the work of representation by the British news media—who they represent
and how they represent—creates spaces for exclusion for migrants. Given how this
representation is in opposition to Philippine media’s dominant representation of
migrants as modern day heroes, we can understand how their hurt and anger shape
their reception to such stories. This is likely why news coverage of Filipinos’
successes in international competitions from boxing (e.g., world champion Manny
Pacquiao) to singing (e.g., British-Filipina Myleene Klass of ITV1’s Popstars) are, in
contrast, recalled with great fondness, as these are consonant with the heroes
discourse.
Feelings of exclusion from the host country as well as the emotive pull of
everyday symbols of the homeland prompt Filipino migrants to maintain, and in some
cases very actively sustain, a public connection with the homeland through practices
of news consumption. While many of the respondents described their consumption of
British news media more in terms of routine and habit, the consumption of Philippine
news media often involved an interruption of their daily schedules. Crucially their lack
of regular access to Philippine news outlets often pushed them to “go out of their
way,” as Ida claimed, to access Philippine news content.
This “break” from everyday routine is rooted largely in the fact that only two of
the seven families mentioned were subscribers of The Filipino Channel.1 The Filipino
Channel is a “transnational media” package (i.e., homeland-to-host) produced by
Philippine media giant ABS-CBN. The Filipino Channel (TFC) is actually a package
of five different Filipino channels (a main channel offering delayed telecasts of the
ABS-CBN flagship channel from Manila, a news channel, a movie channel, and two
broadcasts airing radio programs) available on satellite TV for a steep monthly fee.
And so, for a majority of the respondents, and likely for the overwhelming majority of
Filipino migrants in the UK who are not subscribers of TFC (Buenafe, Personal
Conversation, 9 May 2007), watching a Philippine newscast would actually constitute
a special occasion. Philippine news on TV is something they only get to see when
they would attend a get-together at their friend’s house, go to a Filipino restaurant at

1
The two TFC subscriber families were Family 2 and Family 5. Family 2 claims that they are “addicts” of
Filipino soaps. As recent migrants, they said that having TFC made their transition to living in London
“smoother”. Family 5 subscribes to TFC for their business, a Filipino shop in Victoria that also functions
as a tambayan (“hangout”) for customers, and for their home. Both middle-class families complain about
the steep subscription fees, but say that a subscription is “worth it”.
Earl’s Court, visit the Filipino store at Victoria, or sit in the waiting room at the
Philippine Embassy. This is Hector, an accountant, non-subscriber of TFC, and away
from the Philippines for six years:
“It’s usually when a friend has a party in his place that [my wife and I] get to watch TFC. We’ll
all chip in and bring [food such as] kare-kare and sinigang. Then if it’s a Sunday party, we try to
get there early to watch [showbiz news] and then [primetime news]. Yes, you can read about
Philippine news online, but it’s not the same [as TV]. And of course it’s always a riot to watch
the news with fellow Filipinos.”
Hector’s statement is echoed by the other non-subscriber respondents.
Consumption of homeland newscasts is generally a collective experience and
marked well in advance in their calendars. There were cases where news-viewing
practices were “reverential,” in line with Dayan and Katz’s (1992) description of
media events, such as in a get-together of Filipina professionals planned for the day
of the Philippine elections. They had all planned to leave work early to make it to the
primetime newscast, each one pitching in, bringing takeaway food. The viewers,
while expressing their frustrations with the Philippine political system and their
disdain for celebrity politicians, were nonetheless hopeful about their country—a
country that they claimed to love and wish to return to.
I also want to focus on another important point expressed by Hector: his
assertion that reading about Philippine news online is simply not the same as
watching it on TV. And I think that this points to how television, for these migrants
(and perhaps even for non-migrant audiences), remains as the medium that is most
central to the ritualistic experience of news. While some respondents admit to going
out of their way and buying Filipino newspapers in Filipino stores or logging on to
gmanews.tv, the sentiment remains:
Boyet: “I don’t feel as connected. It’s still different if you see it on TV. It’s more real.”
…
Cora: “It’s not as if I have difficulty with imagining things. But the impact is much greater when
you can see it for yourself.”
Television as an integral part of the moral economy, of the environment of the
household, has been underscored in the literature (Silverstone 1994; Livingstone
1998a). And while recent scholarship has emphasized the role of the Internet in
fostering diasporic public spheres (e.g., Mitra 2001), perhaps migrants’ experience
with television—and television news, in particular—remains as the most enabling and
disabling medium in their everyday symbolic project to integrate with the publics of
home and host. Its banality, continuity, and audio-visual force all contribute to its
ritual character and its concurrent promise of social cohesion. And when television
representations deny migrants and minorities of this promise, the crush of rejection is
perhaps more painful here than with other media.

Ritual of Karaoke: High Holiday of Filipino-ness

In contrast with news consumption practices, which connect migrant identities

to two national imaginaries, karaoke singing serves as a practice that is more
directed to the homeland. Nevertheless karaoke practices contain elements of both
ecstatic nationalism for the homeland and banal nationalism for the host country. And
like news media, the media’s double economy of inclusion and exclusion is seen in
karaoke: The media of karaoke, as integrated to Filipino celebrations that themselves
become celebrations of all things Filipino, also come to exclude certain individuals
who do not fit essentialist understandings of Filipino-ness.
For one, the respondents describe karaoke, or videoke, as a distinctly Filipino
activity. In spite of its Japanese origins and widespread popularity throughout
Southeast Asia (Mitsui & Hosokawa 1998), Filipino migrants claim for unique
ownership of karaoke:
Ricky: “In the parties of white people here, it’s all champagne and nice food and being
pleasant. They only allow themselves to have fun if they’re in the pub. That’s the only place
they get wild. For us, we’re happy with videoke. The family is here. Complete. It’s good fun.”
…
Lolit: “Yes, they have videoke as well in the Chinese restaurants. But it’s more fun here at
home with all your Filipino friends. It’s quite embarrassing to go out in front of other people,
don’t you think? And it’s much cheaper at home!”
…
Hector: “Yes, they have karaoke in other countries. But it’s only in Manila where you get shot if
you’re out of tune with [Frank Sinatra’s] My Way.”
Hector here referred to a case that had been publicized as a novelty item in
the British media where a 29-year old Filipino was murdered for apparently singing
out of tune in a karaoke bar in Manila. Of course one can look at essentialist
discourses, in Philippine media most especially, that assert Filipinos’ “natural” talent
for singing as their reference when they claim for cultural ownership of this activity.
The respondents cited that karaoke serves as the “highlight” of all Filipino
gatherings, pertaining to birthday parties, Christmas parties, Easter celebrations,
post-Sunday Mass get-togethers, and Philippine Independence Day events. These
events are attended by Filipinos only—usually their friends and coworkers—with
some occasional “foreign” guests. This labeling of non-Filipinos as “foreign” is indeed
interesting, as they come to map their home (or their friend’s home) as a Filipino
space in spite of it being located in British soil, signaling the work of
reterritorialization in this ritual.
 Party hosts often tell off their Filipino guests to act nicely and sensibly in front
of “ibang tao” (distant others)—whom they came to label their “foreign” guests. In a
dinner party of a middle-class family that I attended, I recalled that the host had to
issue a disclaimer to her Filipino guests to use utensils and not eat with their hands
so as to not cause hiya (shame) to their white guests. I later learned from another
guest that the disclaimer was a reference to a past incident when a guest “straight
from the province” ate with her hands. Clearly, the presence of “others” creates a
greater need to differentiate one another in terms of social status, wherein they
simultaneously associate themselves with “positive” Filipino traits and dissociate
themselves from “backward” Filipino practices.
In the two houses that subscribed to TFC, watching Filipino TV programs and
movies usually served as a prelude to karaoke. While in the houses without TFC,
often the TV was turned off, with ambient music provided by a CD player playing
American and Filipino pop music in the background. In both cases, the crucial
components of the evening were: food, talk, and song. In both cases, the unveiling of
the karaoke machine was left for the third act, with teasers peppered throughout the
first two acts:
Ida: [greeting a guest] “Aha! Dear, your outfit is very Regine Velasquez [famous Filipina
singer]. You’re obviously ready to hit the high notes later tonight!”
…
Red: “Sigh. Work was so hard today. Always overtime. I’m hoping I still have energy [for
karaoke] later.”
…
Angel: [to researcher] “O! You have to duet with my daughter tonight, okay? I’m sure you’re a
big fan of karaoke. All Filipinos are.”
For the most part, there was great continuity of symbols asserting Filipino-
ness throughout the three acts. Always a central point of discussion, culinary
concoctions were often judged for being “authentic,” even for the Filipina with a
British passport who had not visited the Philippines for 20 years. Once a guest asked
whether the host family did their grocery in the Filipino store because the food tasted
“very much like home.” Even the choice of alcohol became an issue about Filipino-
ness, as the San Miguel Beer—greatly popular in the Philippines—that is imported
from Spain and available in the UK was claimed as not as good as “the original.” But
one can argue that banal nationalism for the host country was also evident within this
ritual. Aside from some Filipinos’ preference for chips over chicharon (deep-fried pork
fat) as their after-dinner snack, there was also some talk about British current affairs,
as they compared social issues such as transportation and health care in both
countries.
 For the most part however, the conversations during these parties revolved
mostly around work issues and gossip about Filipino friends and Filipino coworkers,
and the language used was mostly Tagalog (the Philippine national language), with
only few English phrases used. As Ida said, “My nose bleeds from speaking too
much English. At least here we’re all Filipino.” It is crucial to note that this bias for
Tagalog as the default language in Filipino gatherings, while allowing a majority of
the participants to better simulate everyday life dynamics in the homeland, actually
served an exclusionary mechanism for the Filipinos who were not native speakers of
Tagalog. The migrants who originally hailed from other regions in the Philippines,
where over 180 languages and dialects are spoken, expressed difficulty in speaking
Tagalog but then felt forced to do so for fear of being excluded. “If I speak in English,
they might think I’m acting superior to them when in truth English is simply easier for
me to speak than Tagalog,” Liza, who is fluent in Visayan and English, but not
Tagalog, shared.
Once all the guests finished their dinner, the host would bring out the karaoke
machine and would plug it to the living room TV. It is worthwhile to note here that all
seven families interviewed owned karaoke machines, with three out of the seven
owning as many as four karaoke machines each. Their preferred brand was Magic
Sing, an easy-to-use Filipino-made machine that consists of a microphone and
individual microchips that are sold separately. While most bought their karaoke
machines from Filipino stores in the UK, a key issue among them was getting newer
editions of the microchips that would contain more Filipino songs; the microchips
included in the purchase of Magic Sing, they complained, had mostly English-
language songs.
In most cases, the host or the celebrant performed first, and anyone could
volunteer to sing next. For new friends and guests, especially those who were shy or
were not familiar to the rest of the group, the host suggested a duet to alleviate
anxiety. And for the most part, everyone was free to select which songs to perform,
except for a few cases where “requests” were made (i.e., some were asked to repeat
memorable performances from the past). As for song selection, there was always a
good mix of English and Tagalog songs, with a bias for classics and pop songs from
the ‘60s to the ‘80s. “Mandy,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and “Dancing Queen”
were favorites. While the popularity of English-language songs may indicate how
karaoke did not merely connect them to the homeland, it is still notable that a
majority of the selected English-language songs were the versions covered by
Filipino artists. And while there was much imitative singing, the idols that they
imitated were Filipinos.
 The Magic Sing device also has another interesting function that further
promotes feelings of ecstatic nationalism: its visual display consists of still images
from the government-sponsored Philippine tourism campaign called WOW
Philippines. As the song lyrics are displayed onscreen, the background changes from
one Philippine tourist site to the next: pristine white sand beaches, nature resorts,
colonial-era houses, even parks with statues of national heroes. Throughout the
evening, these striking reminders of Filipino-ness would become the subject of
conversation (“We should visit Bohol the next time we come home”). And as long as
guests remained, food, talk, and song would flow, marking another holiday with both
banal and ecstatic reminders of the homeland.

News, Entertainment and the Politics of Inclusion/Exclusion

From my interviews and participant observation with Filipino migrants in their

practices of news viewing and karaoke singing, it is evident that they grow to reflect
upon their national identity in both media practices. While news, especially television
news, is seen to enable a public connection with both home and host countries,
karaoke generally functions as homeland-directed media practice. We can surmise
that this divergence is a result of the biases of the two media in terms of their
technology, content, and context.
The television news content that Filipino migrants access more readily is
British rather than Filipino after all, and in the few cases that Filipinos are
represented in British news media, audiences tend to have a critical reading of how
Filipinos and the Philippines are represented. But more than a “rational” critical
reading, their expression of anger, hurt, and fear point to how Filipino-ness in the
media provoke emotional reactions—emotions directed to the homeland. In contrast,
the visual content of karaoke machines such as Magic Sing tend to be cheerful “high
holidays” of Filipino-ness, as famous tourist locales from the homeland literally set
the scene for their mediated performances. These images come to frame the lyrics of
songs both Filipino and “foreign.” Thus in terms of audio content, while a wide
selection of songs from different countries composes the playlist of each ritual, the
actual performance of the participants tends to be imitative of the versions
interpreted by Filipino artists.
As media technologies, news and karaoke, I recognize, have the “social
behind them, the social in front of them, and the social embedded in
them” (Silverstone 1999: 145). From my observation, both media tend to have
different forms of sociality embedded in them. While news practices tend to be
practiced as part of audiences’ daily routines, karaoke singing involves an
interruption of everyday experience, a red-letter ritual performed by close friends and
family. Located in living room space and observing “holiday time,” Filipinos
proactively strive to recreate the homeland through symbols and rituals in food, talk,
and song. Karaoke, as a more interactive medium than television news, indeed
provides the tool, time, and space for the project of reterritorialization. As much as
this medium is a “nucleus of reflexivity” (Beck 1992), it is simultaneously a nucleus of
reterritorializaiton.
It must also be noted that the line between banal and ecstatic nationalism are
not as clear-cut when examined empirically in the context of everyday life. Symbols
and practices have different meanings and emotive pulls for each individual, after all.
Individual symbols and practices of both banal and ecstatic nationalism—directed to
dual national imaginaries—constitute the social environment of these media
practices and enable/disable identity construction differently for the participants.
Table 3.1: Articulations of the Media of News and Karaoke
News Karaoke
Technology • Television at the center of • Television at the center
loving room of living room
• Philippine transnational TV as • Karaoke machines:
costly to access and offering from status symbol to
limited choice common gadget
• “Gift” quality of song
chips containing
Filipino songs
Content • UK news widely available • Filipino and “foreign”
• News about Filipinos rarely songs available
seen in mainstream UK TV • Images of Philippine
• News about Filipinos very tourist spots displayed
one-dimensional and onscreen
predictable in UK media • Greater selection of old
• News media about Filipino songs over new/recent
migrant not widely available hits
(only in Filipino stores)
• Philippine news media rarely
cover British Filipinos
Context • UK news consumption as • Used on special
routine, habitual, everyday occasions (birthdays,
• Philippine news consumption graduations, parties,
as interruption of daily routine holidays, Philippine
community events,
after-Church service)
• Culmination of evening
of food, talk, and song
reminders about the
Philippines
Conclusion

In attempting to bridge the “public knowledge project” and the “popular culture
project,” this study demonstrates how different media—“soft” and “serious”, news and
entertainment, national and transnational, mass and particularistic—are all implicated
in issues of identity and belonging, inclusion and exclusion. While hardly an apples-
to-apples comparison, examining the media of news and karaoke reveals how
technology, content, and context provide roadsigns directed to either home or host
(imagi)nations. From banal, taken-for-granted language calling viewers out as “British
publics” in the news to ecstatic, hyperreal images of the motherland in the video of
karaoke, individuals reflect on their dual loyalties in their use of both media.
But while the media prompt reflection among audiences, audiences
themselves actively appropriate media and provide them with meanings that
themselves give meaning to their condition. This dialectic is most evident in Filipino
migrants’ use of karaoke. In one direction, karaoke displays powerful reminders of
Filipino-ness in its selection of songs and images pointing to the homeland. And in
the other direction, audiences themselves confer on the medium greater social
significance by placing its use at the heart of Filipino community gatherings, indeed,
at the hearth of the home(land). As food and décor flag the nation in a more banal
manner, high holidays of Filipino-ness find their culmination in the singing of the
nation. In reterritorializing the homeland on foreign soil through their creative use of
symbols, the emotions of joy and even bittersweet nostalgia simultaneously enable a
temporary “lifting out” to the homeland. However, as it is a salient site where
symbolic boundaries are drawn, karaoke practices serve to exclude other Filipinos
who themselves do not carry traditional markers of the homeland, whether it be by
their language, hybrid ethnicity, or social class.
My findings also point to a great significance to the role of emotions in
connecting and disconnecting to national imaginations across media consumption.
Filipino migrants in everyday life, I discovered, are sincere, if not desperate, in their
attempt to “fit in” British society. They look to British news as a resource for them to
learn about British culture and to give them a common language, even common
accent, to speak with their British officemates and friends. Consumption of British
media is everyday, routine, necessary, indispensable. And they wholeheartedly, if
unconsciously, accept their interpellation as “British publics” by announcers of the
evening news. However, certain topics in the news that provoke fearful and
defensive responses snap them out from their fantasy to be included in British
society and direct them back to the homeland imagination. News items on
immigration and terrorism remind migrants of their not really being part of the “British
public,” whether they are contract workers or British citizens, and result in talk where
they exaggerate their radical difference with people of dominant white ethnicity.
Indeed, literature in media and migration studies (e.g., Gillespie 1995; Madianou
2005) have previously identified that representations of conflict wherein the news
media resort to binarisms of us-and-them tend to reproduce this same discourse
among migrants’ media talk. And here, this is expressed mostly in growing concern
for other Filipinos, rather than as an affront to the dominant ethnic group, such as
Cora’s response to a hate crime report: “This is why we have to stick together.”
Feelings of hurt and anger often greet British news media representations of
Filipinos and the Philippines as well, prompting a dissociation with the host country
and an association with the homeland. Complaints about Filipinos being represented
as destitute or dangerous or backward or bizarre by British media are all too
common, as they are able to compare these with the dominant discourse of Filipinos
as modern day heroes in their exposure Philippine news. But more fundamentally, it
is in the lack of visibility of Filipinos in international news that they speak with the
clearest and strongest voice acknowledging their Filipino-ness. Moments of tension
are when they begin to see themselves as representatives of their home country in
the foreign space of their host country. Across the media of news and karaoke then,
it is emotional, rather than rational, responses that direct migrants to the homeland. It
is in the most ecstatic moments of media consumption that they find themselves
reflecting, and reflecting on, their Filipino-ness.
Future studies should further explore the continuities and discontinuities of
identity construction across news and entertainment media. In bridging the “public
knowledge project” and the “popular culture project”, we not only gain a more
complex picture of the dynamics of mediation—its ability to include and exclude—we
also see how audiences engage and disengage, participate and withdraw, associate
and dissociate, with national imaginaries. While such efforts are seen in political
communication (e.g., Coleman 2006), we need to apply this insight more in media
and migration studies, where the politics of inclusion/exclusion is a central theme.
Studying migrants’ rational and emotional responses to fiction films about the
homeland and even home videos might provide us with greater insight as to the
hows and whens of their association with home and host publics. While I was not
able to see significant differences in identity construction among the families in terms
of social class, future studies will also benefit from a more diverse sample of families.
Social class—and its attendant cultural capital—are greatly recognized to
enable/disable belonging after all. I feel that my sample was too limited to tease out
its more subtle dynamics, and future studies can expand on this. Lastly, my attention
to media as technology, content, and context enabled me to bring together insights
from reception, domestication and everyday life traditions in audience studies.
However, Livingstone (1998b) reminds us that it is crucial for comparative research
to supplement the limitations of such approaches. Other researchers can perhaps be
interested to take up this challenge and see how migrant communities in other
contexts appropriate news and karaoke in everyday life and with what consequences
as regards their roots and routes, their tradition and translation, their being and
becoming.

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