It strikes me that for a blog claiming to be about my research on Filipino bloggers, I haven’t actually discussed blogging yet.
Partly it’s because I’ve been setting the ground for discussing Filipino bloggers. Filipinos don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s hard to talk about them without talking about the Philippines. This is especially true when you want to discuss nationalism and national identity.
But how do I define Filipinos and how do I define blogs? And how do I define Filipino bloggers?
Well, I define blogs using the most inclusive definition: a website that displays dated entries in reverse chronological order. I’m not interested in hairsplitting between online journals and blogs. When people make this distinction between online journals and blogs, they usually define online journals as being about personal issues in the author’s life while blogs are about larger issues (i.e., politics or information technology) which are covered in more of an essay format. I don’t agree with this distinction, which I think is partly an attempt to exclude female and youthful bloggers from the blogging world. Online journals are dominated by females and youths, and the attempt to define them as merely journalers creates a scheme where females and youths talk about who’s dating whom on journals whereas older and more masculine bloggers talk about big stuff like the war in Iraq. In other words, the mushy emotional stuff is for online journals, but the serious stuff is for blogs. And it’s no coincidence that the mushy emotional stuff is mostly covered by women and youths: it’s girly and childish, but the serious stuff is grownup and mature (i.e., masculine). This follows larger patterns in popular media, where the contributions of women and youths are devalued and where the emotional and personal are seen as superficial and shallow.
Since I don’t follow this distinction, then it should be obvious that a lot of the bloggers I examine are women and younger people. Quite a few are on Xanga and Myspace, too.
Now then, how do I define Filipino? It’s not really so important how I define Filipino, though, the relevant question is how I define Filipino bloggers. The definition I use is also very simple. Filipino bloggers are those bloggers that identify themselves as Filipino.
Actually, I don’t really mean that. What I mean is that for the purposes of my research, I am only studying those bloggers that identify themselves as Filipino. This means that I don’t cover those bloggers who consider themselves Filipino but don’t identify themselves as such in their blogs. Partly it’s for reasons of pragmatism. How would I be able to tell a blogger was Filipino if they didn’t tell me they were? It’s not like I could tell just by sight, since someone who calls themself Filipino could very well be mistaken for Chinese, Indonesian, or another ethnic group. And not all bloggers put up pictures of themselves in the first place. Sure, I know some bloggers that don’t mention being Filipino, but not enough to be able to base a research project on them. At least, not according to how I’ve designed the project; I can think of several ways you can conduct a project by just studying a couple of people or even just one person, but I’m not interested in the questions that only that type of research can answer.
I’m also relying on self-identification because I don’t want to impose my own definition of “Filipino” on the people I’m studying. Identity isn’t something that’s already there, but instead something that people actively create. No one is born Filipino, they’re raised that way. “Filipino” is a label that a bunch of people have decided to share, but it’s not some eternal and unchanging category like solid, liquid, and gas. It’s a label that has had different meanings at different times. Not even Filipinos have always been Filipinos — “Filipino” used to only refer to Spanish people born in the Philippines, or what are known as criollos or creoles in other parts of the colonized world. If I try and impose my definition of Filipino on the world, then I’ll be trying to set in stone what has always been in motion, rather like trying to put the wind in a box. It’s not the wind if it’s no longer moving, it’s just empty air. Would I then be studying Filipino bloggers, or would I be studying my definition of Filipino bloggers?
You see? It’s tough work having to think about this all the time.