TXT-ING SELVES

CELLPHONES AND
PHILIPPINE
MODERNITY
Thesis:
“Cell phones enable their
users to maintain and reproduce
existing social relationships in
expanded spatio-temporal
context . They are also able to
constitute new relationships
involving virtual selves in a
cyber and global world”
 General Aim
Virtual Organizations in cyberspace
The Philippine setting
Extensions of Orality
Political Implications
Cellphones and cultural codes
Cellular identities
Overseas workers and rural communities
Communication and Govern mentality
Gendered messages
The benefits of conversion
The medium is the message
The constitution of the public sphere
Back to the future
Forward to hard reality
The social construction of self
Technology and Identity
Private identities in public world
Apparatgeist
Grounded response
Political use of cellphones
The silent and garrulous Finns and Filipinos
The gift of text
Cellphones and global modernity
Key points:

- Cellphones have become major icons of Philippine

life.

- Cellphones are now common.

- Cellphones have extended the scope of social

relations.

- Cellphones in the Philippines are mainly used for

texting.

- Cellphones are the ultimate symbols and

expressions of global modernity and complex
connectivity.
 - Filipinos have taken cellphones for two main
reasons. The first has to do with the lack of
adequate telephones and other modern
communication technologies.

- The other reason for the success of cellphones

has to do with the necessities, desires
ineluctabilities of the modern condition.

- Filipinos use the cellphone like most other

people in the world, except for their preference
for texting.
 - Cellphones are
comparatively neutral about
gender, generation, class and
local culture.

- Cellphones are a
necessary tool in a global
world.