Jonathan Corpus Ong
Biographic Data
| ID | 308012 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Corpus Ong |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan Corpus |
| FAMILY NAME | Ong |
| SIGNATURE | ONG J C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-1415-5169 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What counter-disinformation funders got wrong
Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor
This introduction for the special issue 'Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor' carves out a specific area of inquiry within the ever-growing field of disinformation studies, with its sharp focus on the commercial transactions, organizational logics, and entrepreneurial practices that propel the production of disinformation. Inspired by traditions of political economy, media production studies, and everyday life approaches, this frame…
Demystifying disinformation shadow economies
Engaging with the special issue theme of media freedom ‘from below,’ this article contributes ethnographically grounded and comparative research of two democratic Southeast Asian countries dealing with urgent threats to media freedom and democracy: Indonesia and the Philippines. Our research identifies the main disinformation work models in Southeast Asia, most notably through the use of buzzers (Indonesia) and trolls (the Philippines). Our resea…
Toward a worker-centered analysis in fighting disinformation
This forum focuses on the conditions and futures of the labor underpinning technology production and maintenance. We welcome standalone articles as well as interviews and conversations about all tech labor within the global supply chain of digital technologies. --- Seyram Avle and Sarah Fox, Editors
Roundtable
Contemporary Southeast Asia (CSEA) is one of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute"s flagship publications. Now in its fourth decade of publication, CSEA has succeeded in building up an international reputation as one of Southeast Asia"s premier academic journals. The aim of the peer reviewed journal is to provide subscribers with up to date and in-depth analysis of critical trends and developments in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.…
"Everything Is Connected"
Conspirituality refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. Conspirituality has thrived online: between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the QAnon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as Q puts it, “future proves past.” This panel traces forms of conspirituality f…
Digital Hate
The Media (Studies) of the Pandemic Moment
Television & New Media commemorates its 20th year anniversary with this diverse collection of short reflection pieces on the “intellectual and institutional turbulence” facing media studies and the ways our colleagues have taken up these challenges in their work. Our introduction to the anniversary issue specifically addresses the role of media and media studies in the COVID-19 pandemic moment. On the one hand, our discipline has the opportunity …
Fake news and scandal
This chapter aims to understand and misunderstand fake news as a research concept. It addresses each of the critiques by outlining elements of our research on fake news production in the Philippines, which was selected insofar as it provides a non-European case of a phenomenon the discussion of which is usually confined to the industrialized West and which serves as a launching pad for engaging in larger meta-theoretical reflection. The chapter d…
Conviviality as a politics of endurance
Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artis…
Toward an ordinary ethics of mediated humanitarianism
This article takes stock of the insights and approaches advanced by the last 15 years of critical research in humanitarian communication and distant suffering while arguing for a new agenda for ethnography. Ethnography lays bare the messy and fertile terrains of human experience and disrupts idealized figures of witness and sufferer, aid worker and aid recipient, event and the everyday. Bringing into dialogue the anthropology of aid literature an…
Queer cosmopolitanism in the disaster zone
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…
The Appearance of Accountability
New communication technologies are celebrated for their potential to improve the accountability of humanitarian agencies. The response to Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 represents the most systematic implementation of “accountability to affected people” initiatives. Drawing on a year-long ethnography of the Haiyan recovery and 139 interviews with humanitarian workers and affected people, the article reveals a narrow interpretation of accountability as fe…
Cosmopolitanism and the Media
Witnessing distant and proximal suffering within a zone of danger
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 …
Inclusion as Deliberative Agency
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 inclu…
The Ironic Spectator
Journal Article Book-Reviews Get access The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism Chouliaraki Lilie Polity Press, Malden, MA & Cambridge, UK, 2013$24.95 (soft), $69.95 (hard), ix + 238 pp. Jonathan Corpus Ong Jonathan Corpus Ong 1Hong Kong Baptist University/University of Leicester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 63, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages E1–E5…
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 sh…
Engaged, But Not Immersed
While most of the literature highlights the social, economic and cultural aspects of Filipino migration, this study explores its political dimension by focusing on the public connection of Filipino elite migrants in London. Unlike other types of Filipino migrants, such as Americanized balikbayans and ‘low-skilled’ labour migrants, elite migrants are expected to return physically to the homeland as part of their nationalistic duty to ‘lead the nat…
Watching the Nation, Singing the Nation
This study explores the identity construction of London-based Filipinos across the media of news and karaoke. In bridging the “public knowledge project” with the “popular culture project,” I argue that the seemingly innocent social practice of singing involves raising and erasing of symbolic boundaries. As national identities are constantly flagged in everyday life, I examine how Filipino audiences negotiate multiple attachments in both media pra…
The cosmopolitan continuum
The purpose of this article is not only to provide a review of how cosmopolitanism has been theorized in the past, but also to propose a new way of thinking about cosmopolitanism. Beginning with a critique of how media and morality literature ignores an exploration of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of everyday life, this article proposes that we examine cosmopolitanism as an identity with four key ‘performances’ with a distinct moral hierar…
The television of politics, the politics of television
The cosmopolitan continuum
The purpose of this article is not only to provide a review of how cosmopolitanism has been theorized in the past, but also to propose a new way of thinking about cosmopolitanism. Beginning with a critique of how media and morality literature ignores an exploration of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of everyday life, this article proposes that we examine cosmopolitanism as an identity with four key ‘performances’ with a distinct moral hierar…
Queer cosmopolitanism in the disaster zone
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…
Witnessing distant and proximal suffering within a zone of danger
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 …
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 sh…
Engaged, But Not Immersed
While most of the literature highlights the social, economic and cultural aspects of Filipino migration, this study explores its political dimension by focusing on the public connection of Filipino elite migrants in London. Unlike other types of Filipino migrants, such as Americanized balikbayans and ‘low-skilled’ labour migrants, elite migrants are expected to return physically to the homeland as part of their nationalistic duty to ‘lead the nat…
Toward an ordinary ethics of mediated humanitarianism
This article takes stock of the insights and approaches advanced by the last 15 years of critical research in humanitarian communication and distant suffering while arguing for a new agenda for ethnography. Ethnography lays bare the messy and fertile terrains of human experience and disrupts idealized figures of witness and sufferer, aid worker and aid recipient, event and the everyday. Bringing into dialogue the anthropology of aid literature an…
Inclusion as Deliberative Agency
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 inclu…
Watching the Nation, Singing the Nation
This study explores the identity construction of London-based Filipinos across the media of news and karaoke. In bridging the “public knowledge project” with the “popular culture project,” I argue that the seemingly innocent social practice of singing involves raising and erasing of symbolic boundaries. As national identities are constantly flagged in everyday life, I examine how Filipino audiences negotiate multiple attachments in both media pra…
Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor
This introduction for the special issue 'Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor' carves out a specific area of inquiry within the ever-growing field of disinformation studies, with its sharp focus on the commercial transactions, organizational logics, and entrepreneurial practices that propel the production of disinformation. Inspired by traditions of political economy, media production studies, and everyday life approaches, this frame…
Roundtable
Contemporary Southeast Asia (CSEA) is one of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute"s flagship publications. Now in its fourth decade of publication, CSEA has succeeded in building up an international reputation as one of Southeast Asia"s premier academic journals. The aim of the peer reviewed journal is to provide subscribers with up to date and in-depth analysis of critical trends and developments in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.…
Conviviality as a politics of endurance
Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artis…
The Media (Studies) of the Pandemic Moment
Television & New Media commemorates its 20th year anniversary with this diverse collection of short reflection pieces on the “intellectual and institutional turbulence” facing media studies and the ways our colleagues have taken up these challenges in their work. Our introduction to the anniversary issue specifically addresses the role of media and media studies in the COVID-19 pandemic moment. On the one hand, our discipline has the opportunity …
The television of politics, the politics of television
Watching the Nation, Singing the Nation
This study explores the identity construction of London-based Filipinos across the media of news and karaoke. In bridging the “public knowledge project” with the “popular culture project,” I argue that the seemingly innocent social practice of singing involves raising and erasing of symbolic boundaries. As national identities are constantly flagged in everyday life, I examine how Filipino audiences negotiate multiple attachments in both media pra…
The cosmopolitan continuum
The purpose of this article is not only to provide a review of how cosmopolitanism has been theorized in the past, but also to propose a new way of thinking about cosmopolitanism. Beginning with a critique of how media and morality literature ignores an exploration of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of everyday life, this article proposes that we examine cosmopolitanism as an identity with four key ‘performances’ with a distinct moral hierar…
Engaged, But Not Immersed
While most of the literature highlights the social, economic and cultural aspects of Filipino migration, this study explores its political dimension by focusing on the public connection of Filipino elite migrants in London. Unlike other types of Filipino migrants, such as Americanized balikbayans and ‘low-skilled’ labour migrants, elite migrants are expected to return physically to the homeland as part of their nationalistic duty to ‘lead the nat…
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 sh…
The Ironic Spectator
Journal Article Book-Reviews Get access The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism Chouliaraki Lilie Polity Press, Malden, MA & Cambridge, UK, 2013$24.95 (soft), $69.95 (hard), ix + 238 pp. Jonathan Corpus Ong Jonathan Corpus Ong 1Hong Kong Baptist University/University of Leicester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 63, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages E1–E5…
Inclusion as Deliberative Agency
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 inclu…
Witnessing distant and proximal suffering within a zone of danger
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 …
The Appearance of Accountability
New communication technologies are celebrated for their potential to improve the accountability of humanitarian agencies. The response to Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 represents the most systematic implementation of “accountability to affected people” initiatives. Drawing on a year-long ethnography of the Haiyan recovery and 139 interviews with humanitarian workers and affected people, the article reveals a narrow interpretation of accountability as fe…
Cosmopolitanism and the Media
Queer cosmopolitanism in the disaster zone
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…
Fake news and scandal
This chapter aims to understand and misunderstand fake news as a research concept. It addresses each of the critiques by outlining elements of our research on fake news production in the Philippines, which was selected insofar as it provides a non-European case of a phenomenon the discussion of which is usually confined to the industrialized West and which serves as a launching pad for engaging in larger meta-theoretical reflection. The chapter d…
Conviviality as a politics of endurance
Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artis…
Toward an ordinary ethics of mediated humanitarianism
This article takes stock of the insights and approaches advanced by the last 15 years of critical research in humanitarian communication and distant suffering while arguing for a new agenda for ethnography. Ethnography lays bare the messy and fertile terrains of human experience and disrupts idealized figures of witness and sufferer, aid worker and aid recipient, event and the everyday. Bringing into dialogue the anthropology of aid literature an…
The Media (Studies) of the Pandemic Moment
Television & New Media commemorates its 20th year anniversary with this diverse collection of short reflection pieces on the “intellectual and institutional turbulence” facing media studies and the ways our colleagues have taken up these challenges in their work. Our introduction to the anniversary issue specifically addresses the role of media and media studies in the COVID-19 pandemic moment. On the one hand, our discipline has the opportunity …
"Everything Is Connected"
Conspirituality refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. Conspirituality has thrived online: between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the QAnon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as Q puts it, “future proves past.” This panel traces forms of conspirituality f…
Digital Hate
Demystifying disinformation shadow economies
Engaging with the special issue theme of media freedom ‘from below,’ this article contributes ethnographically grounded and comparative research of two democratic Southeast Asian countries dealing with urgent threats to media freedom and democracy: Indonesia and the Philippines. Our research identifies the main disinformation work models in Southeast Asia, most notably through the use of buzzers (Indonesia) and trolls (the Philippines). Our resea…
Toward a worker-centered analysis in fighting disinformation
This forum focuses on the conditions and futures of the labor underpinning technology production and maintenance. We welcome standalone articles as well as interviews and conversations about all tech labor within the global supply chain of digital technologies. --- Seyram Avle and Sarah Fox, Editors
Roundtable
Contemporary Southeast Asia (CSEA) is one of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute"s flagship publications. Now in its fourth decade of publication, CSEA has succeeded in building up an international reputation as one of Southeast Asia"s premier academic journals. The aim of the peer reviewed journal is to provide subscribers with up to date and in-depth analysis of critical trends and developments in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region.…
Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor
This introduction for the special issue 'Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor' carves out a specific area of inquiry within the ever-growing field of disinformation studies, with its sharp focus on the commercial transactions, organizational logics, and entrepreneurial practices that propel the production of disinformation. Inspired by traditions of political economy, media production studies, and everyday life approaches, this frame…
What counter-disinformation funders got wrong
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Media Studies and Communication (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)