Since the late 1980s, Filipino entertainment television has assumed and maintained a dominance in national popular culture, which expanded in the digital era. The media landscape into which digital technologies were launched in the Philippines was largely set in the wake of the 1986 popular movement and change of government referred to as the EDSA revolution: television stations that had been sequestered under martial law were turned over to family-dominated commercial enterprises, and entertainment media proliferated. Building upon the long development of entertainment industries in the Philippines, new social media encounters with entertainment content generate expanded and engaged publics whose formation continues to operate upon a foundation of televisual media. This article considers the particular role that entertainment media plays in the formation of publics in which comedic, melodramatic and celebrity-led content generates networks of followers, users and viewers whose loyalty produces various forms of capital, including in notable cases political capital.

自1980年代后期以来，菲律宾娱乐电视一直在并保持着在民族流行文化中的主导地位，并在数字时代不断扩大。在1986年的民众运动和被称为EDSA革命的政府更迭之后，菲律宾在数字技术领域的广泛应用已基本定型：根据戒严令被隔离的电视台已转变为家庭主导商业企业和娱乐媒体激增。在菲律宾娱乐业长期发展的基础上，新的社交媒体与娱乐内容的接触产生了越来越多的公众，其公众在电视媒体的基础上继续发展。