In a lecture at Stanford University, Walter Mignolo (Duke University) provided an outline of the five domains of human experience that articulate what he calls the logic of coloniality:
1. Control of labor
2. Control of authority
3. Control of gender/sexuality
4. Control of nature
5. Control of knowledge
His outline of the logic of coloniality is, in a nutshell, a splendid discourse about a topic that I continue to theoretically struggle with. For example, the power of cell phone text messaging and its ability to gather crowds for a common issue, and, in the case of the Philippines, as an instrument able to bring the downfall of a corrupt presidency (Estrada), begs the question of how soon will it take for state or corporate authority to take “control of knowledge”, Mignolo’s 5th condition in the logic of coloniality. To subvert this, and to go beyond modernity, Mignolo introduces the concept “transmodernity” as a path of struggle that hopefully would lead the minority to victory.
In concrete terms, his proposal is to encourage and grow indigenous media. This is not entirely new.  Friere is the pioneer in this field, an academic who put theory to practice while serving in the U.N. and in Brazil’s media industry. However, the battle is still being fought in terms of bringing indigenous intellectuals into the media logosphere. In the Philippine case, this praxis remains elusive. Much work along these lines was being done before Marcos installed his dictatorship and who then co-opted these into his own propagandic media infrastructure, a practice that the state continues to follow under the guise of “educational TV/radio”.  This effort is primarily not so much to eliminate say, ignorance of agricultural and health knowledge but to capture the indigenous knowledge space into the logic of governmental programs and authority. In the Philippines, as is probably the same of countries with similar histories, the state and the economic elite that support it, have always contested their competitors and promoted themselves as the director of modernity.  In Mignolo’s definition, where modernity hides the logic of coloniality, it would seem that the continuous leadership of the state is nothing more than the perpetuation of the logic of coloniality.  Many Filipino scholars have expressed similar conclusions but they fail to reckon into their argument that modernity itself is the problematic, especially if the notion of modernity is derived from western linear historical constructs and especially, if some unconsciously adapted its definition, since most of the Filipino scholars are, after all, schooled in the West.
Thus, going back to the phenomenon of “txt-ing”, its popularity in the Philippine case is due to the opportunity it offers for both private and surreptitious conversation in a recently gained democratic space.  The state, fortunately, does not have the ability (yet) to develop surveillance technology, nor has it been able to legislate monopolistic controls over cell-phone providers. The later would prove to be too unpopular and too risky for any politician to advocate.  In this hiatus then, what appears to be emerging is a new language, a ‘txt-ing’” literacy (I mean literacy in its broadest terms) that operates subalternously, underneath the formal and artificial rules of English and the national language, Pilipino. Clearly, cell phone technology is closing the effect of marginalization caused by the inexorable march of globalization. It instead connects and re-connects multiple “imagined communities” of overseas workers and families in a cyberspace that was heretofore impossible with earlier communicative technologies before the cell phone. We have seen how the cell phone became a potent tool for spontaneously organizing public opinion. It will be interesting to follow its development.  Invented primarily as a technology of communicative capitalism, will it ascend to the status of an enabler of democratic politics and of economic productivity and thereby create other areas of knowledge or will it become as it was intended for, a tool for global capitalism and consumerism?