On the petty and the sosyal: A defense of social media

A response to an older writer’s diatribe about online youngsters and their tweeting ways. No, this is not about Mai Mislang. This is about the Internet and the ways we use it. It’s about Twitter and tweeting, and why it is never just about responding to someone with 140 characters or less. It’s about the old pointing a finger at the young and new, highlighting our lack of manners, maybe our lack of knowledge and intelligence, too. It’s about being told that we are sosyal because we are online. It’s about pettiness. Because only one who isn’t online every day, who doesn’t see it as part of his life, who doesn’t care much for it unless he’s got something published there (though the question does become why does he even publish here?), would talk about the Pinoy’s online behavior as if we were only being introduced to it now. There are meanwhile many things to say about one who sees the demonizing of someone who displays ill-breeding on Twitter to be exactly the same as the victimization of a woman in a Hayden Kho video. But I digress.

If you want to say your piece about Twitter but aren’t on Twitter, then how do you even know how it works? (Artwork by Analyn Perez)

Anyone who has been engaging with the virtual Pinoy world, maybe someone who has tried blogging, would know that while in the mid-90s anonymous Blogspot blogs were the schtick, in the past decade or so, anonymity has slowly and surely been looked upon with disdain. You only need to look at current and relevant Pinoy blogs to see that most, if not all of them, have named owners usually with profiles and CVs to boot. Anonymous blogs still pop up once in a while, but these lose readership quickly enough, a measure really of an audience’s insistence on knowing whom they’re reading and why he’s writing. To a certain extent, anonymity has come to be seen as nothing but cowardly. And so to even mention anonymity as a function of the Internet in this country at this point, is to reveal one’s limited experience of the Pinoy virtual community. To say that the Pinoy blogging community is still a disputatious lot is to point not to its immaturity, but to the fact that you’re out of touch and wrongfully judging something you don’t know about. Meanwhile what we do know is that more than anything, it’s the insistence on personality and identity that has allowed for Twitter and Facebook to succeed. In these spaces we know whom we’re talking to, and they are “real" to us, albeit virtually. Our Facebook friends and Twitter followers know that when they respond to our statuses and tweets, they are interacting with a real person and not a machine. This also means we are always ready for argument, because not everyone will agree with what we say. This means we are mindful of what we say, knowing when the 140 character-count will not suffice for the full idea, or when the 420-character count requires that we put in something in the FB comment box. This means we know when something is just about the funnies, e.g., I actually follow @Jesus on Twitter, and did too @PCOSmachine post-May elections. This means we are aware that the Internet isn’t a billboard for statements that shoot-from-the-hip, and writings that are ill-informed. Whether in a blog, on FB or on Twitter you prepare for being taken to task for what you say, and you know there’s always someone somewhere, if not many people all over the place, who are ready to say their two pesos’ worth. And that is their right, that is the right that we accord those who are online, those who read us, those who follow us on Twitter, and add us as contacts on Facebook. This is also the right accorded us. And most important: this is reason for more debate, intelligent and otherwise, to happen among bloggers and FB contacts, Twitter followers and followed. I am far from saying that the Internet and these social networking spaces is one that equalizes and deems social class irrelevant. But I will argue with the idea that this is all sosyal and petty. The truth is if you don’t read Pinoy blogs or see it as nothing but horrid, you’re in no position to talk about it. If you want to say your piece about Twitter but aren’t on Twitter, then how do you even know how it works, and how it felt to read those horrid tweets (in the plural and not just in one response to her boss) of someone whose Vietnam trip we paid for as taxpayers. If you aren’t on Facebook, how can you even say it’s all just a hi-tech lynch mob, when FB pages for a particular cause including hatred isn’t all that it’s about? The jury is only out on social networking for someone who doesn’t know how it happens; the jury is only out on blogging for someone who is still not ready to be taken to task for what he says and what he does. Maybe invoking age, and the old times when friendship and decency and manners existed, now that’s looking at something with a whole lot of pettiness, plus a sosyal nose up in the air. Ah, that sounds like Mai Mislang after all. – GMANews.TV