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Facebook is just a promenade

Wired to the Internet
Wired to the Internet, live on the Web. Choose to plug into Facebook, or not. It's your choice. (Image from 321clipart.com)

I’ve been reading and hearing a lot of philosophical analyses and streetwise observations about Facebook—many of them excellent insights but a few mediocre ones too. Twenty years ago the talk was about the Internet itself. Then 10  years ago it was about the explosive growth of the Web. Now everyone’s trying to define social media, especially Facebook.

I think the simplest way to describe Facebook is in terms of road systems. Think of the Internet as a network of roads, originally designed for quick military deployment but soon expanded to accommodate all kinds of civilian use. Now think of the World Wide Web as an immense assortment of useful (and some not so useful) structures—sidewalks, benches, stalls, stores, markets, supermalls, skyscrapers, parks, parking lots, billboards, office and apartment buildings—that proliferated along the more accessible parts of this road system. It’s still based on the underlying road system, but it’s now a fast-growing city.

Continue reading “Facebook is just a promenade”

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Boatless Badjaos

Badjao houseboat
Badjao houseboat in modern times. (Photo from http://carrieannt.blogspot.com/2011/02/badjou-people-forsaken-but-not-god_16.html)

I was just telling my neighbor here, Kabsat Kandu, about a chance encounter I had with a Badjao beggar family who were stranded in flooded urban streets, minus their boat.

I was recently in Manila, gulping down my second cup of coffee in a rush to catch an appointment, when someone banged on the steel gate of the old family home (which now housed a printing press) where I was staying. She was waving a letter and shouting in an unfamiliar language. The noisy machine drowned her out, and no one else in the house seemed to want to indulge a visibly desperate beggar.

“My lucky day,” I told Kandu with no trace of irony. Continue reading “Boatless Badjaos”

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Women as blind items

Is it ok to "blind-item" women? Once upon a time I did it, not just once, not twice, but thrice. Well, not really, because at the end I outed one of them. Mentioned her by name at the end of the article, with explicit details. I hope I'm forgiven today, March 8, International Working Women's Day.

There’s this naughty genre of journalism that teases and titillates by posing “blind items,” in which juicy tidbits of gossip about showbiz and public figures are dangled. They give sparse clues and don’t identify by name. That’s why they’re called blind items.

Nearly every weekend, my spunky neighbor Kabsat Kandu tosses to me tattle tales like these, then chides me about not printing them in the newspaper I edit. So far we had steered clear from this kind of journalistic action, but today—for a change—I hereby make three women the subject of my first blind-item column. Continue reading “Women as blind items”