Unearthing the disabling perplexities of a Filipino PLHIV online community on X’s #PLHIVDiaries as socially shared inquiry fostering pakikipagkapwa

Abstract

Filipino People living with HIV (PLHIV) have used X, formerly Twitter, as an avenue to make sense of what it means to live with HIV in the Philippines. However, big data analyses do not provide a comprehensive investigation of X as a community. Grounded in the concepts of Alfonso’s (1992) socially shared inquiry (SSI), this paper discusses how this discursive process of sense-making and sense-giving occurs in an X hashtag called #PLHIVDiaries through analyzing and interpreting tweets (n = 1089) that narrate the daily experiences of Filipino PLHIV. This describes how their different struggles are framed and reframed through SSI process which unravels disabling perplexities such as problem, barrier, conflict, absence, dilemma, and error. Among the non-disabling frames that serve as a foil to disabling perplexities, we identified a variety of tweets that contained testimonies, personal triumphant stories, and answers to problems that were endorsed and authenticated by community members.