Filipino politicians, by the very nature of their profession, are gaudy performers, enabling them to be crafty practitioners of what is known in the trade as “performative politics.”

Not too long ago, such performances entailed bombastic, sometimes slanderous, speeches atop public stages, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress. 

An amped-up showbiz staple of jokes, singing and dancing came later, which in turn convinced actors and actresses that politics provided stable employment once the people got tired of them. 

But when the digital era bloomed into what it currently is, more and more of these staged performances veered towards the preponderant use of social media’s craziness for rage-bait, trash-talk, knee-jerk toxicity, gauzy affirmations and hashtag claptrap. 

All of which were far from the concise, catchy and easily consumable political content of the bygone analog era of gate-keeper newspapers, radio and TV; which in turn triggered bouts of confused head-scratching for some of us.  What are our pols up to?

In fact, the head-scratching became severe in the past few months when the badly explained antics of neophyte but digital-native lawmakers like Cavite’s Kiko Barzaga and Batangas’ Leandro Leviste stormed social media political news feeds.

Before anything else, however, a word about “performative politics.”

Generally, indulging in “performative politics” is reasonable.  Politicians, after all, cannot get elected unless they succeed in presenting themselves in ways that voters find attractive, compelling and that capture their emotions and trust.

Nonetheless, “performative politics” is otherwise empty, largely because it puts symbolism above substance.

By showcasing emotional spectacles instead of the crafting of concrete socio-political policies and resource allocations, a lack of ideas bedevils “performative politics.” It’s all flashy marketing with very little political meaning. 

Translate all that into really shady or bad effects and we inevitably end up misinformed or, worse, stupid, or to put it charitably, “reducing our cognitive load to zero.”

It also gets worse in this algorithm/AI-driven social media era where everyone in politics now recognizes that digital strategy is a major tool in any politician’s kit. For pols, cultivating a social media presence is nonnegotiable.

This means politicians and their backers recognize that the best way to put themselves in front of internet-addled audiences is by competing with influencers, cute animals and memes. 

For anyone who still reads newspapers, listens to the radio and watches free TV, those memes or whatever is attractive to Filipino internet audiences would be unfathomable, even nonsensical. 

But that’s the point, says the Columbia School of Journalism Review. “They’re (memes) strange and specific in ways that resonate with a particular demographic of (a politician’s) online supporters.” 

In short, the memes or whatever outrageous postings are out there are effective in our current unmitigated reality of propagandized polarized politics. 

Anyway, this disastrous scheme of things wherein politicians and their backers rely on social media platforms to reach citizens directly and become less dependent on newspapers, radio and TV does sport a name.

For your appreciation, the communications and information industry’s tool that’s being heavily exploited is called “direct-to-consumer model.” 

Simply put, the model is about finding “places where people are getting their news and where they’re getting their information and where they spend their time online,” as an American political strategist put it in another context. 

Anyway, the point of all this is that what we can understand we can change, with the added benefit of reproaching singing and dancing politicians to do some real work.