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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

Email: icasocot(at)gmail.com

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Thursday, May 29, 2008

entry arrow1:47 AM | Is There a Class Line Online?

When the Internet was new, we were beguiled by the promise of democracy it offered. "It will level everything," they said. Not so, it now seems. The class line proves significantly harder to cut. There's one kind of Internet for those with broadband or wifi straight to their Macs in the privacy of their bedrooms and offices, and there's another kind of Internet for those who frequent Manong Nat's Eezy Breezy Internet Cafe with its Pentium 2 PCs that come cheap at P10 per hour.

Case in point: some people I know are abandoning their Friendster accounts to transfer to Facebook, because Facebook, they say, is classier. Plus, in Facebook, you can poke each other and give each other li'l green patches. "Friendster is so baduy na," someone recently confessed to me, "so jologs, what with its inane usernames with asterisks and zeroes and apostrophes and what-not before their stupid names -- ****arlheneluvzdude! -- just to get a higher placement in the alphabetized order of friends! -- and everybody, including my aunt's maid, is there." Everybody, including people like mHariZa, a true-blue metlog as far as the hilarious Metlogs or Rurogs is concerned.



Meet mHariZa. Enjoy the sheer artistry of her profile picture. Her Friendster profile reads, in part:

Occupation: collage student
Movie: the ant
About Me: ahm.......about meeh!!!??? ATTITUDE? kind,suplada minsan.. pro most of da tym mabait meeeh..., makulit, lagi na nka-smyl ngaun... talented pa! i can dance. i can sing....i can fly basta ba my wings, eh...he!he!he! OUTLOOK? syempre maganda,noh! alangan nmn laitin k ang sarili koh...height koh? 5'3'' ASSET KOH? my legs sbi nila.... taken na meehh....... ...should i say yes!?

That's Friendster. Bow.

But for me, the day I decided Friendster had gone to the dogs was when I opened my account one day, and there, on the sides of my profile page, were pictures of Ruffa Gutierrez, Gretchen Barretto, Judy Ann Santos, and Claudine Barretto selling Pantene. It felt like an invasion into my private space. Yes, these social networking sites do need ads to survive, but that was so ... cheesy.

In other similar news, YugaTech claims that "the poor use Yahoo and the rich use Google." Go figure.

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