Saturday, November 08, 2025
I just went on an unfriending spree, because Facebook was telling me I had reached my maximum, and because my friends' list really needed culling. Because why am I friends with restaurants and hotels and organizations [some of which are gone, and should really just use Pages], and buildings, and ... pets? Also unfriended dead friends, which was particularly sad.Labels: facebook, friends, life, social media
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Monday, July 17, 2023
8:30 PM |
We Don't Know What's Wrong Anymore
What amuses me, in these days when social media reign supreme in our lives, is how people — like that cookie-stealing lady and these name-dropping Lea Salonga fans — readily post online confessions of patently wrong behavior, thinking their misdirected indignation will gain them sympathy. Somehow we have learned to be so self-focused, and so trigger-happy with possibilities of public shaming, we don't know what's right or wrong anymore.
Labels: life, moral rages, social media, social norms
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Friday, June 24, 2022
The things that make contemporary life relatively easy are also invariably the things that make it hard when they go awry.
I remember growing up and coming of age in the 1990s when the idea of a cellphone was this cumbersome block of a thing we saw on American movies about yuppies and laughed at—the device was as big as your face!—and largely remained inaccessible to most of us, hence alien.
Instant communication via newfangled technology was not something we were used to in that decade—but not knowing any better, we had no problems. We lived.
So we resorted to keeping unspoken but somehow subconsciously agreed upon schedules with one another, meeting in places where we regularly hung out at specific times of the day. In college, this was the office of The Weekly Silliman at Guy Hall, where I was editor-in-chief. Or the swing at the Gallogo Compound behind Silliman Ballfield, at around 5 PM on the weekends. Friends would begin to trickle in around that time and in that place, and we would spend the remainder of the day trading stories, monkeying around, planning things, or preparing for a communal dinner where each one of us had a specific role to play. [I invariably was the buyer of two liters of Coke.]
That communal understanding of our comings and goings is largely gone now. The cellphone is the culprit. Its ease is heaven sent to most of us, allowing us to instantly message each other about, not just our comings and goings, but also most of everything else. [Booty calls included.] In the late 1990s, when everyone was starting to get a Nokia, I was probably the last holdout among my friends. I was deeply skeptical of cellphone technology, hated the ease it seemingly afforded.
For me, ease was—and is—an illusion, and also an intrusion.
What I loved about the pre-cellphone days was the bubble it afforded us with regards giving each other ample space. We communicated face to face, thus only during the hours we allowed ourselves to be together—and when we were apart, we were permitted our own breathing space, our own pace of doing things, our own solitary pleasures where we were not answerable to anybody’s company. I doubt that space exists today in a world where anybody can text us anything at 11 PM—asking something, demanding something, explaining something. That old bubble is gone, and we are barraged by intrusions 24 hours a day, not just through SMS, but also through Messenger, and WhatsApp, and the various inboxes of all our social media apps.
And that ease of communication? All an illusion.
I lost access to my Facebook account [and its accompanying Messenger app] for several days because I also happened to have lost my iPhone more than a month ago, and when I got locked out of Facebook because of a browser glitch, I could not retrieve the 2-step verification code it sent to that phone.
I was never checking my phone regularly to begin with. People who know me well know that I barely check my phone, and use it only to order food for delivery, or to inform my significant other where I’ll be heading for the day. It’s a behavior I’ve learned to cultivate to be free from the constant intrusions the phone provided a portal to, and which I hated. So when I misplaced my phone, I would not know until more than a week later when I felt the need to order food from Neva’s and found it gone from its usual perch on my work table. I searched the apartment, and could not find a trace of it. It just vanished.
But it was not as if I mourned its loss. You don’t mourn something you’ve always felt as something alien to your way of living—and a cellphone was an alien thing to me, something I used only for the most basic of services and barely even that. Besides, it was an old iPhone, a relic from earlier generations of the technology whose shape and utility I loved and found missing in the latest models. That it ran out of battery power within two or three hours of charging, or after a brief but vigorous use of its camera, was only a tiny inconvenience for me. I didn’t need a cellphone.
Until I got locked out of Facebook.
The 2-step verification required getting the code Facebook was sending me through my now lost phone. From a few years back, I had downloaded a set of 8-digit recovery codes just for this very emergency—but then I soon found out that Facebook was no longer providing that facility to recover my account. It insisted on the 6-digit verification code sent to my phone.
I emailed a friend who worked at Facebook Philippines for help, but never got a response. Luckily enough, it provided one last recourse: a seemingly simple matter of requesting Facebook to let me access my account again by using a valid national ID which Facebook captured via an in-app camera. It felt like a relief. I went through the process, but whenever I submitted the screenshot of my ID, all I got was Facebook’s version of the “color wheel of death”—a spinning little arrow with the label: “Submitting Your ID.” The arrow spinned. And spinned.And spinned without end. It was exhausting to watch and wait. And when I’d check the page hours later, the arrow was still spinning. I was beginning to think there was a bug in the system—although on that, I was not surprised.
It took many, many days of waiting for me to get a response. Facebook emailed me. That one was a surprise. Apparently one of my attempts to send an ID worked. The email provided a link to process re-entry to the app, and then, just like that, I was back in Facebook again.
It made me realize that we really have no idea how insidious Facebook’s hold on our work and lives is—until we get locked out of it.
I wish this weren’t true, but it is.
I left Facebook last year for more than six months, starting around September, for a much-needed mental health break. I stopped posting, I stopped scrolling down to read everyone’s feed—which felt like a load off my burdened brain. But I was still accessing Facebook Pages to do my work in. I was out—but not entirely: it was a necessity to still somehow be in, even in a diminished capacity.
When I lost my access to Facebook altogether, I found myself actually on the verge of buying a new phone! Just so I could retrieve my old number. Just so I could access Facebook again—because all the things I was doing [preparing for events, contacting people for these events, etc.] apparently needed Facebook to properly manage and execute. Without Facebook, I was lost—I was adrift in a sea of anxiety of not being able to have proper executive function.
It felt crazy, that swirling need to be inside this social media platform in order to properly do things. I absolutely hated that hold on my capabilities. And I realized for the nth time that Facebook has changed the genetic makeup of our lives and time, and I think perhaps for the worse.
But on that note, Facebook did provide a semblance of human connection throughout the pandemic and gave us a kind of virtual comfort. (Although it also magnified the depression among so many, and helped in the skyrocketing of mental health breakdowns [and visits to psychiatrists] in the interim.)
It did serve as window to others coping with their lockdown loneliness by sharing their music, sharing their art, sharing their expertise when people needed practical help to get through things in the limiting space of quarantine. (Although we also quickly grew to detest all those Zoom events, the inevitable detachment of things that once felt intimate.)
It did serve as news bulletin when we were hungry for morsels of information to understand the rampaging virus and the other troubles that also plagued the world. (Although it also magnified all the fake news as well, strengthened various conspiracies, and—with YouTube and TikTok—helped make a dictator’s son attain the highest office in the land.)
The ease of Facebook is palpable, communication-wise, but it is also an illusion, and an intrusion. I need it, but I also don’t really need it—and I also know that I hate having to acknowledge that I do need it somewhat. (So many qualifications!)
As for that phone, I still might have to buy a new one, to be honest.
To order food delivery.
To tell the s.o. I’d be in Qyosko for the day.
And to be able to get into Facebook just in case I’d get locked out again.
Labels: life, social media
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Wednesday, June 22, 2022
I lost access to my Facebook account [and its accompanying Messenger app] for several days because I lost my phone more than a month ago, and when I got locked out of Facebook because of a browser glitch, I could not retrieve the 2-step verification code it sent to that phone. I had to request Facebook to let me access my account again [using a valid national ID it captured via an in-app camera], and it took many days of waiting for me to get their response.
Today, I got it.
[Sigh.] One has no idea how insidious Facebook's hold is on our work and lives — until one gets locked out of it. I wish this weren't true, but it is. Even when I left FB for a mental health break for more than six months starting around September last year, I still accessed the Pages I needed to do work in.
The past few days, I was on the verge of buying a new phone just so I can retrieve my old number, just so I can access Facebook again, because the things I'm doing right now apparently needs Facebook to properly manage. It felt crazy, that need. [I still might have to buy that phone though.]
Labels: life, social media
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Friday, July 23, 2021
Had to block a beloved former teacher on FB today. They once taught me the value of asking questions, delving deep, and trying to be comprehensive in our reportage — but perhaps in their anger at current issues, they’ve asked me to abandon the journalistic principles they’d once espoused in my effort to do narrative reportage. I don’t blame them, but incivility in comments [accusing me of being “bayaran” for interviewing the principal figure in the issue] is something I can only take so much. For their sake and mine, unfriending is perhaps the only recourse.Labels: dumaguete, issues, journalism, life, social media, teaching, writing
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Tuesday, July 06, 2021
12:00 PM |
The Ravages and Rages of Moral Twitter
I’m reading
an essay about the YA book industry and the rages of Twitter from Nicole Brinkley, and I keep nodding and nodding. This particular passage encapsulates something I’ve always wondered about for some years now:
“This scrutiny and demand for perfection [in the cultural text] is infinitely higher for marginalized authors, who are often the target of the most critical segments of their own reader communities. Black authors must be perfect representations of Blackness despite the wide range of Black experiences. Queer authors must be out of the closet, in a neatly labeled box, for their queer representation to even be considered acceptable.”
So true! So many examples! The worst critics of gay movies are gay people — they were the ones who complained the most about the “imperfections” of shows like HBO’s
Looking, among others. And the way they have demonized pathbreaking older shows like
Queer as Folk, which were so important for queer people of my generation and helped us forged a more visible identity! The worst critics of Filipino representation in mainstream media are Filipinos. Take a look at those taking potshots at Netflix’s
Trese.
Brinkley aptly described the whole sad phenomenon this way: “The notion of perfect representation [has] been weaponized.”
There is no such thing as perfect representation.
Labels: books, moral rages, social media, wokeness, writers, writing
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Friday, July 24, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 90
[90th of 100]. Everything you want to know about Facebook is there in the very first scene we see in David Fincher's 2010 examination of the legal [and moral] tumult of that social network's founding. As written by scribe Aaron Sorkin, the films opens with Mark Zuckerberg on a date in a bar clearly populated with college types. He is with a girl named Erica Albright, a fictional addition to the story, and they make an attempt at conversation over the din. They have been going out for a while, but which does not at all help in stringing together conversation where each understands perfectly the other: in the stew of topics that includes the IQ of the Chinese, SATs, rowing crew, final clubs, among others, they demonstrate the very essence of communicating in Facebook -- which is that it is a landmine of misunderstanding. The scene begs transcribing:
MARK: Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?
ERICA: That can't be true.
MARK: It is true.
ERICA: What would account for that?
MARK: Well first of all, a lot of people live in China. But here's my question: How do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SAT's?
ERICA: I didn't know they take SAT's in China.
MARK: I wasn't talking about China anymore, I was talking about here.
ERICA: You got 1600?
MARK: You can sing in an a Capella group.
ERICA: Does that mean that you actually got nothing wrong?
MARK: Or you row crew or you invent a 25 dollar PC.
ERICA: Or you get into a final club.
MARK: Or you get into a final club, exactly.
ERICA: I like guys who row crew.
MARK: [Beat] Well I can't do that. And yes, it means I got nothing wrong on the test.
ERICA: Have you ever tried?
MARK: I'm trying now.
ERICA: To row crew?
MARK: To get into a final club. To row crew? No. Are you, like -- whatever -- crazy?
ERICA: Sometimes, Mark-seriously-YOU say two things at once and I'm not sure which one we're talking about.
MARK: But you've seen guys who row crew, right?
ERICA: No.
MARK: Okay, well.. they're bigger than me. They're world-class athletes. And a second ago you said you like guys who row crew so I assumed you'd met one.
ERICA: I guess I meant I liked the idea of it. The way a girl likes cowboys.
MARK: The Phoenix is good.
ERICA: This is a new topic?
MARK: It's the same topic.
ERICA: We're still talking about the finals clubs?
MARK: Would you rather talk about something else?
ERICA: It's just that since the beginning of the conversation about finals clubs I think I may have had a birthday.
When I watched this scene in the autumn of 2010 in San Francisco, it just felt like electric banter that I've come to expect from the dialogue master who has written the screenplays for
A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, Moneyball, The Newsroom, and
Steve Jobs. To watch a film written by Aaron Sorkin is to witness characters wading through words, the best of them encapsulating vivid characterization in the process. I'd only been on Facebook for about three years when I saw this film; for those of us who migrated to it after the disappointments of Friendster and MySpace, we felt very much like evangelists for the newly ascendant social network, telling everyone they must -- they absolutely must -- sign up. [I sigh in regret now.] In 2010, to watch a film of Facebook's founding was more than just enticement, it felt like beholding the origin story of a beloved platform. The critics were similarly enthused, and it must have been the best-reviewed film of the year [which later on culminated to the shock of
The King's Speech winning Best Picture over it]. So we watched it in that vein, and while we learned of the shenanigans and betrayals behind its establishment, what was absorbed was allure of the platform. It would take six more years, in 2016, to discover that a platform we considered a benign and beloved connection tool with friends, acquaintances, and family would turn out to be not just a capitalist monster in possession of our data, but one that embraces the preponderance of fake news and fascist propaganda in the name of profit. The film was prescient. We turn back to Fincher and Sorkin's work no longer just a chronicle of a tech revolution, but also distinctively as a warning we never deigned to heed. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: current events, film, life, social media
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Saturday, March 21, 2020
1:40 AM |
On Taking Down Mocha Uson Blog
I thought of it as social media “people power,” and granted it's not a black and white issue, and granted it can be viewed as a kind of undemocratic cyber bullying. [This is a nuance about democracy that a lot of strongmen actually manipulate. Also ironic: cyber bullying the person who has the patent on cyber bullying?] But I also thought back to some of my own questions about instances in history when fascism took root, and we asked, “Why didn't the people do something?” Well, as of Friday night, we did one thing at least. To quote Karl Popper: “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” Labels: democracy, issues, politics, social media
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Saturday, November 04, 2017
I remember about six years ago I was looking at my own Facebook timeline, and an odd thought came to me: "I wish I had that life for real." It came unbidden, and I had to laugh -- but it revealed something about social media I think everyone knows at a fundamental level but cannot seem to grasp fully. All our posts are curated: we cherrypick our lives to create a narrative we want the world to believe about ourselves. IT IS NOT BAD, but it's also not good if we come to compare our days with the curated posts of our online friends. They aren't always at the beach. They aren't always chasing beautiful sunsets. They aren't always having dinners with fabulous friends. They aren't always gazing romantically at their beloved's eyes. You don't see the long and frustrating commute alone, or the rainy days, or the betrayals of an old friend, or the vicious fight with the significant other. [The ones who air their dirty laundry online is another story.]
Realizing this does bring a measure of relief, no? But it's a realization that's hard to sustain. We have been culturally programmed to think of photos as being truthful, and immediate. And so even though we know they are curated, seeing the visual representations of friends' social media selves make the old pangs of rabid comparison rise up again. That adventurous trip through Argentina, those beautiful flexed biceps from gym workouts, that fun Broadway show -- why am I here browsing Facebook in my pajamas in a bedroom that needs cleaning now?
Why am I writing this, at midnight? I'm really not sure, hahaha.Labels: life, psychology, social media
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Saturday, September 10, 2016
3:12 PM |
The Ides of the Retrograde
Late night conversations with cat.
“Meow.”
“No, I’m not letting you out.”
“Meowwwwwrrr.”
“No, no, no. Plus it rained a while ago—”
“Mewrrrr.”
“—I know but I let you out last night. I can’t have you out every night.”
“Meowwwwwww.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me that. No.”
“Mewrrrrhhhhmrrr.”
“Nope.”
“Meow.”
“Like I said, no.”
* * *
I read somewhere that a cat’s meow is singularly tailored to its human; every sound that a cat makes evolves to a pattern that corresponds to particularities of meaning, which, over time, a cat owner absorbs, learns, and understands. There’s a meow for
I’m hungry. There’s a meow for
Stop caressing me now, I want to be alone. There’s a meow for
Open the door, and let me out, I need to see my beau. And the human perfectly gets each one, apparently. Cat owners know exactly what their cats are saying. But it is a non-transferable privilege. A cat’s meow apparently will never be understood by another human.
I think of this sometimes whenever I want to marvel at the bond that happens when communication between people is pure, unhindered, and clear. To have the need to pour out your soul, and to find someone willing to listen, that is a measure of a blessed life.
But it is not always easy to listen, even if we seem to find ourselves to be a well-spring of expressiveness. We gossip, we use our electronic devices for an endlessness of chat, we throw our unsolicited opinions to the air where they land as explosive posts in our social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are a morass of so much talking—and people hear without really listening.
The world has become a model of iron-clad irony: in an age of so much information at out fingertips, we have learned to be suspicious of facts; in an age of so much interconnection, we have learned to be distrustful of our friends; and in an age where the means of communicating with each other have become ubiquitous, miscommunication often seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
Read YouTube comments and Facebook posts, and feel the ragged viciousness that has come to define our humanity. They are enough to make anyone recoil.
* * *
It doesn’t help either that sometimes the stars are in cahoots with the demons of miscommunication, disrupting our efforts at being perfectly understood. This year, there are three instances of Mercury going into retrograde, and we are currently living through the final one, between August 30 and September 22. The Old Farmer’s Almanac explains that “sometimes the planets appear to be traveling backward through the zodiac; this is an illusion. We call this illusion retrograde motion.” When the planet Mercury goes into retrograde, communication apparently goes haywire. This is because Mercury rules communication, clear thinking, truthfulness, and travel, and so when the planet goes into this spin, all these things go backwards, they get tangled up. Your travel plans go kaput. Truth becomes obscured. Confusion reigns. And miscommunication happens: your cellphone dies on you, your important email goes into the bulk folder, your letters get lost in the post office.
My friend, the eminent writer Krip Yuson, experienced his retrograde quite early on. Even before August came to an end, his iPhone sputtered to death—which didn’t stop him from ranting about the retrograde in Facebook.
But it pays to be extra careful these days about the things we say and announce. The Duterte government—if this can be an excuse—has been, thus far, a veritable victim of the retrograde devils: every pronouncement of the President has been broadcast, interpreted, and quarreled over. More recently, even before landing in Laos for the ASEAN Summit, his words, always “colorful,” have ignited diplomatic firebombs—particularly the “putang ina” he allegedly lobbied at President Obama. It was unfortunate dirty language that was heard around the world, the perfect soundbyte for a scandal-hungry world. Some people say he has been very disrespectful, unstatesmanlike. Some people say he was grossly misunderstood—“It wasn’t a personal attack!” Reports later came that President Duterte had expressed regret for his choice of words. But later reports also came that his speech during the summit again managed to insult Obama. And even much later reports say Obama did not take any of it personally. And while Philippine traditional media and social media tossed and turned over the nuances of words, Stephen Colbert and other American TV comics suddenly made “Duterte” a familiar name in their comedy routines. The uproar continues.
Welcome to the crazier side of the retrograde.
It doesn’t have to be political, too. The retrograde can be personal, and it is best to anticipate it. We were having a birthday party at one of the swankier night spots in town for one of our American friends. Nalingaw ko sa minor cultural debate namo that night:
“Amerikano bertdey ni or Pinoy bertdey?”
“Amerikano bertdey ni.”
“Hala, sige, bayad ta.”
But you don’t have to take the retrograde seriously. For most people, it is astrological mumbo-jumbo that has no bearing on anyone’s lives at all. Phones die all the time. Emails get unread all the time. Fights flare out all the time. And this: after two months of refusing to turn on, my iPad suddenly whirred back to life today. On the fourth day of the retrograde. Which is not bad at all.
* * *
One cause for misunderstanding is, of course, the opinions we hurl at each other in the nonstop debate chambers of Facebook. I was reading
The Guardian online, and I came across this quote by the playwright David Hare: “In an internet age it is, at first glance, democratic to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. That is surely true. It is however a fatal step to then claim that all opinions are equal. Some opinions are backed by fact. Others are not. And those that are not backed by fact are worth considerably less than those that are.”
Hare is apparently writing the screenplay of the film about the 2000 litigation brought about by historian David Irving against author Deborah Lipstadt for her description of him as a Holocaust denier. In this
article for The Guardian, Hare evokes the timeliness of the subject matter in an age where historical revisionism is everywhere.
And I’m thinking, if anyone can historically revise the horrors of the Holocaust and make an interpretation of history that is sympathetic to Hitler, what more the Marcoses and Martial Law? The revisionism began on that some time ago, and many Filipinos have drank the Kool-Aid.
Hare writes: “We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding ‘Well, that’s my opinion’ – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t.” The people who We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding “Well, that’s my opinion” – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t.”
These are precarious times indeed. The people who speak for Marcos are charlatans. Let them know it.
* * *
I have been grappling about what to do with my Facebook lately. It has become the most unhealthy of things: the venom that spews from it every second is foul, and it has poisoned, generally-speaking, my relationship with many friends, which is spilling out to real life. Every day I’m tempted to deactivate, but much of my work as a writer and as a teacher is bundled with the platform, and so I cannot. But I know I have to somehow find a compromise.
RACHEL LAW EMERY: I hope you can find a happy medium. I’ve seen snippets of the negativity and it is sometimes surprising to me to see the sources.
LORD ALLEN HERNANDEZ (
computer programmer): You can start by fighting the urge to log in.
ME: My compromise now involves just parking on my profile page, and never going into the homepage.
SHAKIRA SISON (
writer): Wow, this is my struggle now too. Really tempted to delete my mobile social media apps. I might give it a shot.
MAIA RAYMUNDO (
biologist): That’s why I made this new one. For exactly that reason. My home feed is so refreshingly positive. #facebookdetox
JAMES NEISH (
artist): I struggle with this issue a lot. I hope you don’t mind my two cents: block or unfollow people who just complain and post upsetting things; limit people’s access to your personal stuff; never ‘post to public’ unless you expect a couple of trolls; and limit your usage to just twice a day, 15 minutes at a time, maximum. Oh, and don’t use Facebook as a news source or a place to have intellectual discourse unless it’s with very good friends.
* * *
I came across this
article about Facebook freakout and envy at the NPR. The writer Jon Brooks gives his own freakout as an example: “I experienced an emotional flip-flop myself around Thanksgiving of 2008, when I first joined up. For a week or so, I marveled at Facebook’s ability to connect me to people who had long ago faded into the remotest recesses of memory. But by Christmas, I was in the midst of a full-fledged metaphysical breakdown. Those scrolls [sic] down memory lane were killing me... It was the collapse of that natural partition between past and present that I found upsetting, and a few months in, after noting the male-pattern baldness of yet another long-lost pal, I figured out why: Facebook punctured the intransigently juvenile aspect of my personality that had refused to recognize the passage of time. And that, of course, provided yet another piece of evidence for the harshest reality of life: We are all going to die. OK, that was my Facebook freak-out — how about yours?”
Mine is this: some of my friends, and many of them I still love, are “monsters.”
* * *
The apocalypse doesn’t come with mountains trembling and hordes trampling the streets in a spectacle. It comes with sly slowness, baring its fangs intermittently you’d mistake it for a regular smile.
The people of Pompeii were going about an ordinary day with the earth slightly trembling now and then, thinking it was just one of those ordinary murmurs—and then the hot ashes came.
The Jews of Europe dutifully lined up to register when the Nazis took power in the early 1930s, hoping that obeying the anti-Semitic edicts would spare them future indignities. (The list of names would eventually be used systematically to obliterate them in the Holocaust.)
When the Bolsheviks finally seized power in Russia in October 1917, it was through a very quiet coup. The revolution that had gotten rid of the czar was actually begun by other people and had occurred early that year in February, leading to an interim government. But people tried to go about as usual, ignoring the signs of the coming systematic and wholesale bloodletting that would last from Lenin in 1917, to Stalin in the 1940s. “On the evening of October 25 [in 1917], Princess Meshchervsky went to the opera in Petrograd,” Douglas Smith writes in
Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy. “She noticed some trouble with the lights and a strange atmosphere in the theatre, but nothing out of the ordinary. Her experiences accord with most others in the city that night, for whom life, though chaotic and unpredictable, was uneventful.”
That made me pause. People went to the opera when the apocalypse came.
FLOY QUINTOS (
playwright): Thank you for this. A quiet warning. The princess going to the opera...
ME: She refused to leave Russia, Floy. She even castigated her son who managed to escape.
BEN S. MALAYANG III (
Silliman President): Facts. Disturbing. Truth. Now and always?
ME: Now and always, Sir Ben. It really pays to study—and remember—history.
MALAYANG: … And perchance not to repeat its evils.
ME: Pero, sir, nobody believes in history repeating. One begins to feel like a Cassandra in Greek mythology.
MALAYANG: History itself is not a repeating recurrence. It is its edifying and evil moments that are, crafted by its repeating confluence of virtues and vices.
ANA CENIZA MONTEBON (
designer): As I read your post, this popped into my head and thus I share, from John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
MALAYANG: Very nice, An!
MONTEBON: Thanks, Ben. Actually here also is the first line na wala na apil diay nako na apil copy.
MALAYANG: Bitaw. Thank you.
MONTEBON: Ako lang pud ni i-share kay so significant for our present times. [Here’s] the accompanying write up to the verse: “In the Catholic tradition, all humanity is connected in the Body of Christ, and all are equal before God; in the Afterlife, there is no more male or female, Jew or Greek. The Bible states that ‘we are many parts, but we are all part of one body in Christ’ and that ‘there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it. Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.” The implication for the individual living on Earth is that he is part of a greater whole, such that the death-bell has deep and significant meaning for everyone who hears it. We are all in this life together and part of the same divine plan, so the bell does toll for the sake of all who have ears to hear it.
MALAYANG: Creatures with life—however they differ in form, vices or virtues—have one thing in common: it is their having the phenomenon of life (the “thing” called life) and life—in whichever creature it resides or occurs—is the breath of God. Snuffing out life, it seems to me, is akin to snuffing out God.
SOL CORONG (
cultural worker): That’s why nakakatakot din ang listahan ngayon sa atin. Baka gamitin sa masama.
* * *
I have been mulling over Department of Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade’s statement for hours now. “A state of mind adds to the problem of traffic. Let’s stop blaming traffic. If you’re late, that’s that.” I still don’t know what it means. It’s a sentence so opaquely constructed, it’s practically begging for misinterpretation.
What does it mean? “A state of mind.” That refers to individual psychology, right? Hence, the individual? Hence, you? So you and your mindset adds to the problem of traffic. “Let’s stop blaming traffic.” That means, traffic is not at fault. “If you’re late, that’s that.” That means, it’s your fault. Hence: the traffic is fine, you’re the problem.
Still doesn’t sound right in many levels.
MACKY CALO (
businessman): Tumpak! Tagalog na lang kaya!
ORLANDO RONCESVALLES (
economist): I think [Tugade] understands that traffic is a Tragedy of the Commons, which is a problem of unrealized expectations. In the classic tragedy, every farmer (motorist) thinks he can fatten his cow (drive fast), but, since everyone else has the same state of mind, the cows get thin (traffic grinds). Of course, the solution is to make the “victims” behave better. For the commons, it is to give or sell to individual farmers their own land. For traffic, it would be to charge motorists a fair price to drive, i.e. tolls and higher car registration fees. Singapore, Hong Kong, London, the greater L.A. area have already implemented this, with varying success.
ERIKA PERALTA (writer): State of mind... Hmm, let’s say we shift our thinking/belief and turn to the opposite, which is “traffic” is not a problem. What would a person with this kind of belief do? He will leave [home] as usual, use the usual routes, get a job even if it’s relatively far from his residence, does not blame train delays, road works, etc. He takes responsibility and adjusts. Even so, he will observe that his external reality would [only] still get in the way: hours wasted on the road, pollution, commitments compromised, and so on. The individual could always adjust. But again, it can only do so much. This state of mind “works” on some levels by making us more aware of how much control we have, e.g., not giving in to road rage, making ways to travel more conveniently. But the immense beauty of good transportation system should never be reduced to a far-off “national wish.”
MONTEBON: Alicia Keys. We should perhaps ask her.
MALAYANG: Interesting read on this: Mr.
Boo Chanco’s column in today’s
Star.
TINA CUYUGAN (
writer): I would take Tugade’s words in a better spirit if the Duterte propaganda machine had not spewed millions of tweets blaming Aquino and Roxas for the traffic and claiming that Great God Duterte would wave a magic wand and all would be well on the highways and byways.
JUSTINE CAMACHO TAJONERA (
writer): You’re right. His bottom line was: it’s the commuter’s fault that he’s late. If you allotted 2.5 hours to make it to work and traffic got you there in 3 hours, you must adjust your life. Clearly, Tugade has no empathy for the Filipino commuter.
CUYUGAN: Possibly because he now has a government car assigned for his use.
RONCESVALLES: But that car would also suffer traffic.
CUYUGAN: He doesn’t have to line up, though.
RONCESVALLES: Just wait till they make personal drones. We can buy them using intel funds.
CORONG: May sayad ‘ata.
Labels: facebook, issues, life, politics, social media
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, August 09, 2016
5:06 PM |
Reflection on Digital Evolutions
I was watching this trailer for a documentary on the evolution of graphic design, and it made me think. Sometimes I'm struck with what for me is the relief of being born at the right time, especially when it comes to the digital divide of generations. In journalism/publishing, for example, I was editor-in-chief of
The Junior Sillimanian (the high school paper) in 1991, right around the time things were starting to go digital. Our first issue for the year was something assembled through the help of the old linotype machine, a huge contraption with a keyboard upfront and a boiler at the back that essentially "cooked" on the spot the metallic letters you typed in which you then assembled by hand to make metallic impressions for each page of the paper. By the second issue, we were using a desktop, the print resembling dot matrix letters that smelled of the future. In terms of desktop publishing, I started doing page design using Aldus Pagemaker which became Adobe Pagemaker which became InDesign, each change in platform requiring enormous will power for reeducation. (I hated InDesign when it first came out. Now I can't live without it.) When I was in college, we were assigned a journalism teacher who made us do headline writing by counting type -- there was a mathematical formula, and all -- which was the way they did it before the digital shattered best practices in journalism and design. I found that class incredibly sad, to be "taught" by someone who clearly didn't know what was current. She didn't last the semester. I can't remember who she was, and I don't know where she is, but she has since become the voice at the back of my head always warning me, "Keep up, keep up. Don't get stuck in the old ways of doing things. The moment you start complaining about new platforms -- I hate blogging, I hate Facebook, I hate Twitter, I hate Instagram, I hate Snapchat, etc. -- that's the moment you become old and irrelevant." It's a harsh reminder that's not entirely true, but it helps keeping me on my toes.
Labels: design, education, journalism, life, memories, social media
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, October 15, 2015
8:00 AM |
The False Glitter of Social Media Lives
The Financial Diet's
“My ‘Perfect’ Life On Social Media Is Putting Me In Debt” is a fascinating article about curated lives in social media.
There was a time in my social media life --
two or four years ago? -- where I found myself envying the "Ian" I saw on my own Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. Last month, an acquaintance also told me she loved the life I was living as she perceived it of course on my social media -- and I cringed. Both made for bouts of unsettling feeling.
It wasn't that I was posting lies through photos and status updates. They were all true. But they were also a highly curated assemblage of images I was more or less, consciously or unconsciously projecting to the world. In reality, life is hard, and most times I'm just winging it, always hoping for the good times to come. Not every moment is an Instagram moment. You don't see me or anyone posting photos of ourselves staring into space, wondering or panicking over what to do next. Sometimes I too get sucked into the vicious cycle of envy as I follow my friends' lives as they unfurl in my newsfeed -- and it takes some pinching by reality to drum into my head that theirs are curated lives as well. We're all sad and frightened little creatures just putting on our best social media smiles -- and it's perfectly all right, too. (Just don't get into debt, though.)
Labels: life, social media, web and tech
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Sunday, September 28, 2014
3:50 PM |
To Disconnection
I've decided to log off most of my social media networks today. I simply got tired of it. I'll stick with old-fashioned blogging for now...
Labels: life, social media, web and tech
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, October 18, 2012
5:46 PM |
The No Social Media Week Commences
Let me try this experiment, for a week at least. There shall be no heavy social media involvement from me. Will use Facebook only for posting links and for business correspondence. No Twitter except to reply to friends. No FourSquare check-ins. No Instagrams. But a lot of blogging -- because, lo and behold, blogging is
actually writing. Let's do this from October 18, Thursday at 5:45 PM to October 25, Thursday at 5:45 PM. Let me see if I can live without my usual heavy Internet rotation. Because I have got to start living a life offline.
Labels: blogging, life, social media, web and tech
[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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