Competing Narrative Influences in the Philippines

Competing Narrative Influences in the Philippines Competing Narrative Influences in the Philippines Overview: Given the strategic location of the Philippines, the historical ties with the United States, and developing conflicts with rising China (e.g., Spratly Islands), this program will focus on narratives circulating in social media (specifically Twitter) that crystallize around issues of strategic influence between US, Chinese and Philippine interests, paying close attention to the influence of culture on perception. Twitter is planned as a source of data for the following reasons: 1) it provides insights to both communication themes and processes (i.e., narrative); 2) Twitter data is relatively easy to access, and its short form content mimics the much more prevalent, but more difficult to obtain, SMS communication (the Twitter analysis could be a proof of concept of short form narrative analysis); 3) network analysis techniques can also be leveraged with the narrative analysis techniques for a more complete picture of strategic communication influence.