Tag / history

by Michael Janairo

A short history of Twitter

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2006: The first tweet: just setting up my twttr

2007: Twitter finds users: Everyone at SXSW is doing it, and now #hashtags

2008: Barack Obama blows up Twitter: #YesWeCan

2009: Finding followers becomes a thing followuback #ff fun

2010: One of the most popular accounts becomes @shitmydadsays (it later becomes a short-live sitcom starring William Shatner)

2011: Political activism found a voice in #ArabSpring

2012: Clickbait tweets arrive and you won’t believe what happens next (remember seeing tweets like this? They’ve all but disappeared)

2013: Twitter adds photos, and the #Oreo Cookie Superbowl power outage may have been the greatest of the year

2014: Then came Ellen Degeneres and the famous #OscarSelfie

2015: #LoveWins

2016: Remember when people thought 2016 was the worst year EVAH!

2017: We don’t need 280 characters to say “WE’RE ALL DOOMED!!!”

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by Michael Janairo

Photo: An early all-girls basketball game in the Philippines

 

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“P.I. : Filipino girls playing basketball (early 1900’s). (Worcester); 1855; 1900/1910.” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclphilimg/x-1855/phld038. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

Basketball is a huge sport in the Philippines. In trying to figure out how that happened, I came across this image in the archives University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, which includes lots of images from the early interactions of the US in the Philippines.

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by Michael Janairo

Book review: ‘A War of Frontier and Empire’

First published: Sunday, October 7, 2007, in the Albany Times Union

sibleyAs President Bush tries to shape his legacy in regards to the Iraq war, he should pick up David Silbey’s engaging history “A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902” (Hill and Wang; 272 pages; $26).

Though both were wars of choice, the details are quite different. Still, the generalizations that can be gleaned from Silbey’s account are eerily familiar: a quick and stunning conventional military victory turns into longer-than-expected guerrilla warfare; a failure by the United States to understand its enemy; a sense of racial superiority that enflames troops and politicians in Washington; and a native population whose loyalties seemed to change depending on the time of day.

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by Michael Janairo

New poem: ‘Benevolent Assimilation’ in re:asian magazine

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Thank you, re:asian magazine, for including me in the “firsts” issue!

The poem touches upon things I’ve been thinking about since grade school when I first read the phrase “benevolent assimilation” as a U.S. description of its colonial policy with the Philippines.

The magazine has also published a photo I took of the home my Lolo — grandfather — grew up in Cavite.

Here’s an excerpt from the poem:

Something like fear structured my feelings around the word
Philippines and whatever it was that connected me to it

Check out the full poem on the re:asian website here and let me know what you think — either here or on the re:asian site.

 

 

 

by Michael Janairo

An Ohio Woman in the Philippines, published 1904

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