The Filipino Mind is in a nutshell is a website that amalgamates a vast variety of topics such as theories that varies from political, economic, post-colonial, post-structural and its application in Filipino society; a huge collection of articles about Philippine history from pre-colonial Philippines (Spanish) to the downfall of the Marcos regime in 1986 including a lot of the scandals that took place in between; and other critical analyses such the influence of popular American culture in the Philippines and criticisms of various idiosyncrasies in the every day life of the Filipino people.
The achievement of the site is providing sophisticated intellectual material while also providing fundamental pieces of literature to be fully immersed in the discourse of Filipino nationalism and history. For example the site includes excerpts of Marxist theory and some works of Noam Chomsky. What is also a notable achievement of the site is that even though it is a website about the Philippines, it refuses to neglect international issues and subjects such as terrorism, globalization, economic pacts (past and present) and even the Wall Street financial meltdown of 2008. I think having this all inclusive approach imparts credibility and an opportunity to encourage its audience to be more aware of global affairs <i>wholly</i>.
The media praxis here in this case is the act of <i>collecting</i> and <i>publishing</i> information through a form of digital media—the website. The website have a clear intention of disseminating information that are often times inaccessible for a lot of ordinary Filipino people. I think it’s ethical to provide not only subjective opinions on serious topics such as politics, and history (which is often the case) but also provide fundamental materiel to educate and disrupt the convenience of unthinking and light the philosophical fire to enable people like myself to step away from our own bubble and see our country in a more objective lens with the hopes of finding a way to bring us dignity that have been lost after centuries of direct and indirect colonialism. Though it does not proclaim itself as an “activist” website, it sure does help one to direct its energy to a more productive and objective path.
This website is very close to me both personally and intellectually since it has given me (continuing still during the time of writing) the fundamental tools to articulate my budding nationalistic tendencies and integrate it in my intellectual and artistic pursuits. For example the nexus of ideas from articles about American colonialism and later the effects of American popular culture on Philippine mass media impelled me to make my lifelong mission to find a way to reverse it using media itself (in my case filmmaking) which eventually lead me to the theories of <i><a href="http://www.mediapraxis.org/?cat=10"The Third Cinema</i></a>, which incidentally part of our lectures for our class.
by Kevin Arota