< i'm starting a series >

   In this age of new media, where everyone is subject to the ultra-democracy that is the digital democracy, more and more voices spring up to be heard. However, they scream in silence.  There are just too many people talking.

   Don't get me wrong: there are a lot of people in the world who can write well, but in the end we end up reading trash.  YouTube is popular on account of girls mauling each other for a chance to become a digital celebrity.  The Web has sort of become the new American Idol.  Just who exactly gets the golden ticket and why, nobody knows.

   In the effort to be heard out in the new public sphere, the effort to change the world is nothing compared to the new "important" discourses being formed: you have to be aware of the next boy band or the most tasteless in pornography.  The problem with the new digital democracy is that it is more of an anarchy of discourses: really, there are too many opinions being formed to the point that everybody's got one and nobody listens to voices from below.  In order for your blog to become popular, outside of writing well you have to be able to manipulate choices.  You have to be able to sway opinions.  If you can't, and you choose instead to rant about the next big thing in shoes and kikay kits, you contribute to the cacophony of voices that characterize the disorderly new democracy that is the World Wide Web.

   Now don't get me wrong: if you choose to write about your personal choices it's OK, since it's your task in the new digital democracy to unearth voices from below.  But what about those voices which should be heard?  My argument is this: the free individual entering cyberspace feels the pressure and succumbs to the extent that too much information brings him.  The effect?  Take a look at Friendster profiles and the way people portray themselves to be, presenting only the front stage that would look appealing to the mindless crowd of drones.  Take a look at the bricolage surrounding blogs and the way some people try to put as many images and media in their sites just so that people would not instantly be turned off.  Too much information results in a form of schizophrenia for society: too many voices are being heard at the same time.  The individual becomes drowned in the multiplicity of voices and is lost.  The result: the individual becomes decentered.

   Being confronted with too much information sets aside the dangers of the new digital democracy.  In order to sell your profile to an audience of billions, you have to post your sexiest picture on your website, describe yourself in the best possible manner, and be dishonest with yourself to the point that you present yourself so strongly just to be noticed in a crowd of zillions of profiles and websites.

   The effect?  A sort of schizophrenia.  Too many voices, too many paranoid delusions, too much information.

(to be continued...)

< this may sound boring >

   When I started blogging two years ago, it was seen as akin to psychological striptease.  We bloggers have often been accused of publicizing our private lives on the public sphere, thereby seeking publicity for all our actions.  Making blogs were almost nonsensical on account that too much information flooded the World Wide Web and resulted in an anarchy of various discourses.

   Today, it's different.  More and more blogs are sprouting out like mushrooms from the void, talking about everything from one's lovelife to one's taste in food to one's opinion on politics.  And the difference now is that it actually makes sense.  Not only blogs, mind you: YouTube is starting to be a popular venue for amateur filmmakers to show their work.

   Is this the beginning of a popular digital democratic revolution?

   TIME magazine voted us bloggers and them users of YouTube to be the Persons of the Year, on account that a massive change has resulted from the democratization of mass media.  The philosopher Jurgen Habermas stated before that commercial mass media has contributed to the downfall and decay of the bourgeois public sphere and resulted in consumption of media rather than media being a tool for public discourse.  What seems to be, however, is that more and more discourses are formed over the World Wide Web and the virtual environment and have resulted in a new public sphere, where there is an accelerated democratization of information.  Anyone can now be a journalist by blogging or a filmmaker by using YouTube or a talkshow host through Podcasting.

   If you asked me, information is the new capital.  The ability to create and disseminate information has become a crucial turning point in human history.  Although the fact remains that the Internet is still pretty much a Western construction and is part of the monopoly of societies that revolve around the exchange of information, one cannot deny that the ability to manipulate information is so central to our existence.  Without competence in information technology one is condemned to the sidelines of the information revolution.  To answer Habermas, yes, the public sphere has been revived in the form of the new digital democracy.

   From the anarchy that characterized the blogosphere just a few years ago we are seeing a new revival in the creation and exchange of information.  The blog, in my view, has become the single most important factor in the formation of the new digital democracy.  It is the new virtual newspaper.  Anyone can now opine about the news, and more and more opinions have resulted in a healthy exchange of discourses along the World Wide Web.  Anyone can now practically manufacture information - become a celebrity, a pundit, a commentator.  The new mass media is now the central focus for the exchange of information in commercial society.

   I mean, think about it: we are at a crossroads.  Not that it's a new paradigm shift, but when you come to think about it, there must be something to the rise of outsourcing the information industry.  This is new capitalism.  This is the revolution that Marx has seemed to have propounded in The Communist Manifesto: the equality and equity of all information and the production of information in the ultra-democracy that is the World Wide Web.

< politics >

   When you have the likes of Prospero Pichay, the man who wants to be planted in the Senate like Chinese cabbage (his namesake), waste all your television time, you start to wonder if it makes sense to vote for a man with a vegetative mind to run for the Senate even if he is one of the prime proponents for the abolition of the Senate.

   That's Philippine politics for you.  Go home and plant camote.  May you be picked up where kangkong grows.

   When I come to think about it, making a living out of camote and kangkong is paradise for the likes of us who wonder if it still makes sense to live in this country despite all its imperfections.  It doesn't: being a Filipino nowadays means to be a moron in the political arena.  We don't know what's going on because personality politics dominate this country.  Rather than having strong parties with strong platforms, we have political parties where incompetence predominates.  I mean, really, in the real world, with all the obviousness of it, would you vote for Richard Gomez or Cesar Montano and the lot of actors and actresses who profess nationalism and run for a seat in our already awry government?

   Would you vote for a guy like Kiko Pangilinan who runs a cheesy ad even if it is obvious that he is a modern version of a political butterfly?  Would you vote for the likes of Mike Defensor and Migz Zubiri who pretend to be everybody's friend on the account that they have Lito Camo jingles?  Come on, there has got to be more to this than what we already have now.

   Next thing you know the battle lines will be drawn on the pregnant belly of Kris Aquino and the vote becomes evident on what they think is up with her and James Yap.

   I say, let the battle lines be drawn on real reform.

< hmmm... >

   When they say that quitting smoking is a mere matter of mind, I guess they were right.  I was able to quit smoking for two days until I once again smoked like hell today to compensate for the lack of smoking I've been doing.

   I've always said to the neophyte smoker that the only way to quit smoking is to stop smoking, but I couldn't say that to myself considering that I am already smoking anyways.  I wouldn't do well in the "Pinoy Big Brother" house considering that a single smoke will cut the budget of my housemates by a good amount (I hear a smoke costs 50 smackers a stick) and that Big Brother would probably give me a special assignment consisting of quitting smoking.  Abroad, I would probably get arrested for smoking in all the wrong places.  But that's just me.

   Of course, I couldn't quit smoking just yet.  I'm at that point in my life where I am practically addicted to nicotine.  I don't know why I even smoke anymore.  It's just one of those silly little vices I have.  Of course, I managed to quit drinking and kick alcohol out of my system.

< hmmm... >

   I guess you want to know where I've been for a month, not writing experiments.  First, I haven't been eating shawarma at Session Road even if it's tempting to do so.  Second, I haven't had a love life, even if it is tempting to go back to being a bumbling Casanova.  Third, I am not dead, so there.

   What has been troubling me for the past few months is my thesis proposal.

   Yup, Marocharim has finally moved on to write his great thesis.

   The topic?  Virtual communities and Alfred Schutz.

   Before you wonder who this Alfred Schutz guy is, lemme explain.  Alfred Schutz is a phenomenological social philosopher who theorized about the Lebenswelt and gave us a fuller understanding of the temporality of life pace Husserl.  Before I lose you on the account that I'm smoking while I do this, I am wondering if a really fast PC will work for me while I'm hunched over my books, a pile of readings and 10 megabytes of downloaded related literature.  I don't know about my professors and thesis adviser, who all say that we should return to the classics and read real books instead of copying and pasting text in Internet research.

   I say, "Duh, my thesis is about the Internet.  How else am I going to read books when the damned library has very little literature on my topic?  Do you expect me to create a magical little book about virtual communities and then propound myself as a maverick?"

   Short answer: they are, considering that the magical book expected of me is a thesis.  I always said that I'll get my little revenge on the College of Social Sciences faculty by writing a 300-page thesis, and I guess I'm on Page 10, plus the nifty little theoretical framework I built for my theoretical analysis of virtual communities.

   Sir Gino, my teacher and social scientific confidante, says that I am working on the very frontiers of social science.  I am: I like working on edge, but I guess I bit off just a little more than I can chew.  Maverick as I am when it comes to methodology and theoretical framework, I have little in the way of balls in defending whatever I have in mind to some androgynous professor who grades my rev-lit a 5/30.  What else should I do, bend over backwards?

   Well, bending over backwards is another one of my specializations.

   The voices in my head are telling me to read more, but I have adopted a special technique in reading while writing down a very niggardly (I don't mean niggardly as meaning something to throw off my black audience) review of related literature.  While I read on the material, I instantly hunch over formatting toolbar to write a long quote, just to prove to my professors that I'm not stupid.

   While my other classmates are probably as frustrated as I am when it comes to writing their thesis proposals, I guess they have it better.  They have simpler topics that run the gamut from, as my favorite Philosophy teacher puts it, the analysis of a hundred pan de sal shops to tigers marauding the wildlife in the Cordilleras, and I have a frontier topic that, at the rate I'm going, would go to my promise of 300 pages for my thesis.

   I knew I should have taken up Journalism, but being in MassCom in my university is tantamount to admitting that I'm a social climbing insecure idiot whose idea of a thesis is about newspapers and making a documentary or an independent film.  I know how hard that is, but I can make one in a snap if I have the proper equipment.  I would probably suffer more if I took up Engineering (hey, I passed the quota) but if this thesis is going to make my name in Social Sciences and as my friend Mhik put it, "Rock Soksay," I'm sure as hell gonna do it.

   Marocharim Update: I'll be heading to UP Diliman on the 26th.  See you there when I see you.  Don't be surprised about my short hair.

   Marocharim Out.

< hmmm... >

   After my ten-year-old computer went bust, my parents came to the rescue.  On a loan, they got us a brand spankin' new Intel Dual Core PC complete with 512 MB of RAM.

   Now that's power.  Now to figure out how to pay for it.  With my own money.

< hmmm... >

   It's Flower Festival season once again and the world I live in is teeming in over a hundred thousand people.

   I can't take it.

< hmmm... >

   I told you, but you just won't listen...

   Now that it appears that June 2006 board passers would not have the chance to be employed in an American medical facility, I have this rather smug attitude which I would gladly apologize for, since after all, I'm not a Nursing student.  But outside of that, this is what happens when cheaters prosper: everyone suffers.  When presented with an avenue to actually act upon the anomaly, like, say, a retake, everyone seems to be against it.  A friend of mine puts it this way: he's not going to retake an exam he passed.

   Well, too bad for them.  A retake of the Nursing Board Exam is the only way out of the scandalous impasse, but would anybody listen?  Nope.  Would anybody let cooler heads prevail and let the case run its course?  Nope.  Would anybody have at the very least an idea of the benefits of a retake?  Nope.

   To be honest, I wouldn't entrust my life to a Gapuz reviewee or a June 2006 board passer because of the scandals, and the only way that can be internally resolved is when these people take a retake of the exam so that I can be sure of their competence.  In any high school setting (again), one cheater makes everyone a cheater.  Anyone who fails to understand the consequences a single cheater may bring upon a class means that everyone fails to understand the consequences of cheating.

   But would anyone listen?  No, everyone's up in arms over the simplest and most favorable way to resolve the impasse and everyone wants to be a nurse even if credibility is already an issue passed on by a single cheater.

   Cheating to win never helps anybody.  As I said before, cheaters only prosper if the end is that simple.  But in this case, the end is anything but simple.  Therefore the means are everything but simple.

   See what happens if you just don't listen?

< hmmm... >

   I have finally eliminated alcohol out of my system.  The cigarettes may be there to stay, but so far as alcohol is concerned, I quit.

   We people who have quit drinking are often ostracized in many social circles because of our refusal to drink.  I quit drinking because my medicines counteract the effect of alcohol, and I end up puking the hell out of myself.  The old ironclad stomach has corroded.  I can't drink anymore.

   The health benefits of quitting drinking are wonderful.  For one, you start to have a better feeling in your guts because of irritation.  For two, you start to enjoy the pleasures of other drinks, like say plain old-fashioned water.

< hmmm... >

   I appeal unto all senatorial candidates and party-list groups to please, stick to the rules.  The sight of all your putrid and bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping posters littering every corner of my fair city is just sickening.