Philippine E-Journals

The New Communicator: Serving and Becoming Consumers in a New Media Ecology

Brian Saludes Bantugan | Emmanuel Ballecer | Ruly Cagadas | Joy Chacko | Manuel Oyson | Johnathan Rondina

Discipline: Mass Communication, Media

 

Abstract:

Central to the model of Business Process Outsourcing is the use of a new media platform – the Internet – and digital telecommunications infrastructure in still-evolving, border-crossing business transactions. Undoubtedly, the call center is a new mediated communication system, a kind of media ecology from which a new Filipino communicator emerges. This new communicator, immersed daily in transnational transactions for transnational corporations, is forced to negotiate constantly with a different culture using new media technology.  The study, using McLuhan’s Medium Theory, Gidden’s Structuration Theory and Palmgreen’s Expectancy Value Theory, aims to describe the changes brought forth by new BPO technologies as manifested in the primary locus of its operations and as experienced by its primary conduits – the call center agents – as indicated by their needs, preferences, and behavior. It hopes to clarify the ways by which the communication environment in a call center becomes a contributing force in changing the way its agents consume products and services.