Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7521-9029
Abstract
With the ubiquity of social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok, influencers or “digital content creators” have taken current Filipino popular culture by storm, spurring an enormous volume of discourse and becoming trendsetters and role models. This paper focuses on the case of professional influencer Buji Babiera, a bicycle advocate turned storyteller who shares random narratives, such as urban legends and slice-of-life anecdotes, on his main platform Storytime on TikTok. I sought to answer how underlying neoliberal political economic structures, as embedded in Storytime’s production processes, relate with the distinctively postmodern character of its content. Guided by Marxist political economy and neoliberal postmodernism adapted from Fredric Jameson, I frame Storytime as a postmodern digital cultural artifact that reinforces neoliberal power and structures. Through a semi-structured interview with Babiera and a multimodal thematic analysis of select Storytime reels, this case study provides an insider’s view of the forces and relations that define the mode of a Filipino influencer’s content production and how they produce the fragmented “anything goes” content that has come to dominate our digital screens. Ultimately, the study interrogates influencing as a possible superstructural mechanism through which neoliberalism is maintained in the Philippines.
Recommended Citation
Bragais, Ma. Rosa Cer
(2026)
"Neoliberal Postmodernism, the Cultural Logic of Buji’s Storytime: A Case Study on the Political Economy of the Commodified Influencer,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
50, Article 14.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2286
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss50/14
