< hmmm... >

   When I read my friend Noreen's entry on her childhood filled with fun and games, I bled with the kind of jealousy and bitterness expected, well, of a 21-year-old young man who had his first girlfriend at 19, the girl cheated on him for his best friend and then, months later, realized she was a lesbian (haha, if you read TMX I, you'd probably be very aware of this).  Only in my dreams do I play games like "patintero" and Prisoner's Base: as a kid who went to school in an obscenely expensive sectarian school (cough, Saint Louis University Laboratory Elementary School, cough), I never got to even step in the playground.

   To preserve my pride and my manhood, I was a wuss.

   "Skinny" and "sickly" are terms which oversimplify my situation then: I was a regular at the school clinic (by "regular," I mean the same case as the drunkards at your neighborhood sari-sari store), since my mom insisted that I keep my anemia in check.  And in elementary school, skinny, sickly, anemic wusses are pariahs, untouchables, and best left alone during breaktime.  Nothing to look forward to but making up a game with those silly colored pencils.

   I've been practically condemned by my peers - yeah, except for those times where they copy my assignments... the ingrates.  The thick glasses and the buck teeth didn't work for me either.  Yup, I was the school - no, not the class - nerd.  My accursed intelligence quotient whisked me off to "Project Wellspring:" a program designed by the school to recognize the "highly intelligent" kids.  The way I saw it, Project Wellspring was a fun way of torturing kids so that they will one day become Albert Einstein.  This is a simple case of the ends not justifying the means.

   So there, I never played childhood games.  The only time was when a friend, who probably pitied me and my "games" with colored pencils, invited me to play "Touch the Body by the school chapel" (where all the "cool" kids played).  The game is a deceptively simple exercise of throwing a soft rubber ball at a running kid.  Needless to say, the ball was thrown at me with the same speed and velocity of a Spanish-era cannon (hey, it left a damned bruise).  I ran back to the classroom and hid my tears reading the English reader I borrowed from the library.

   Rather than spend my time running between bases risking life and limb, I spent my elementary school days in the Guidance Office or the school library.

   At the Guidance Office, I was welcomed by the guidance counselors.  Not because they caught wind of me being bullied by, well, bullies, but because I was the Wellspring kid who enjoyed playing with Zaks and Legos and was perfectly quiet making towers and robot-like thingies.  It was also there where I was pushed to use my vocabulary to the limit: they taught me to play Scrabble and Boggle.  I became hooked.  That was nothing, though, compared to the fun I had with plastic blocks.  While I was building some architecturally-unsound model of a tower, some kid was being counseled for beating up a small kid or for peeking up the skirts of girls playing Chinese garter.

   As fun as Guidance Office time was, it was nothing compared to the fun I had at the library.  It was there where I had an insight to how much reading - and writing - was.  The assistant librarians became my best friends, as they always smiled when they saw me borrowing English readers.  As soon as I was done with one, I borrowed another.  I was reading everything I can get my hands on: atlases, encyclopedia volumes, even technical religious books that the faculty kept handy.  At an early age, I had my favorites: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," Saki's "The Open Window" (which happens to be my favorite poem: none of that "Trees" crap they made us memorize back then), Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird."  It was speeches that really hit me: Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream," and my personal favorite, Mahatma Gandhi's "Noncooperation."  It was my delivery of "Noncooperation" that won me an award for declamation in sixth grade, and won me the respect of my peers.

   In retrospect, I haven't had a bad childhood.  Compared to today's kids who squabble over the silliness of computer games and free-television anime, I was introduced to a kind of childhood that molded me into what I think to be, at the very least, a well-read person.  Had I not been reading or building those blocks I would have been condemned to a life of misery and woe.  Had I not come across interesting personalities like Mahatma Gandhi and Harper Lee, I wouldn't have had the lens I have today for viewing and critiquing the injustices I see.  Had I not been in the library as a kid I would have committed suicide for reading a technical theory book in my course.

   So maybe I wasn't able to enjoy recess time games and cutting classes for a game of Mortal Kombat.  I don't care.  I lived something better.

< you might be surprised on how frank i am with this one >

   I remember telling somebody once, while I was rambling on philosophy or something I presume myself as well-read on, that the world is full of "pink elephants."  She said, "I can't see them."  I replied, "You don't want to talk about them."

   There are a lot of things we don't want to talk about.  Farts, for example, are best left not talked about.  You don't see anyone, save for a urologist, talk about herpes.  Foreskin: now that's a pink elephant in more ways than one.  Crab lice.  Animal gynecology.
  
   Enema.

   Of course, as much as I like to talk about the many philosophical implications of cat urine, I'd rather talk about something less perverted.  Something serious.

   I would be lying if I said that as a UP student, I never had an encounter with rebels and subversives of all sorts.  In the mishmash and hodgepodge of personalities in the freest university in the country, you would come across one or two people who, for purposes of not disclosing anything you're not supposed to know, have connections with the Communist Party of the Philippines.  Just to make everything clear, UP is not a "terrorist madrassah" as a certain Secretary of Injustice would be quoted on national media.

   If you come across one of those Marxist professors, you would be all-too-familiar - hell, even bored - with the political history of Communist subversion in the Philippines.  If you happen to have a critical mind - or if you happen to be a political science student - you would have an opinion about "armed struggle" and "protracted people's war."  You would have an opinion about the half-century-old Communist insurrection in the country.  Not too long ago, some people asked me about what I think of Jose Maria Sison on account that I refract some measure (too much, I suppose) of Marxist analysis in airing my views, either in a paper or in class, even if I'm not a hardline Marxist compared to other people I know.  I was once dared to disclose whether or not I'm a "re-affirmist" or "rejectionist" (it was my Philippine Institutions 100 class - where we were supposed to be discussing Jose Rizal's homosexual inclinations.  Oooh, how fun.)  I was very surprised, hell, even shocked, at the frankness of the question.  I replied: "I'm a fence-sitter."

   That was years ago, when I was still afraid of taking a stand on account that I might be talking to a deep-penetration agent of either the government or the Reds.  Anyway I looked at it, if I answered I would probably get shot on my way home.  Nowadays I prefer to be frank.  The thing is, it's in the news.  Why shouldn't we talk about it?  Let's get real.  I mean, if the government continues to purge NPA rebels at the boondocks, and if walls are being spray-painted red, and if this has been going on for the past half-century, why do we continue to treat it as political taboo?  Following the government's logic, we're supposed to be at war.  I mean, it's there.  People should talk about it.  Maybe not in dinner tables: supper is a bad time to discuss politics.

   OK, Let's take the news as an example.  Party-list groups like Bayan Muna, Gabriela and Kabataan Party, among others, are being tagged as terrorist fronts by the military, on account that they have been critical of the government in much the same way as the CPP releases statements through the underground press.  What do I think?  I think it's bullshit.  In recent memory, social movement sectors like BM have been criticizing the government through legal means.  If these legitimate organizations were indeed terrorist fronts as our paranoid military would claim, we would have long been raising red flags and singing the "Internationale" on account that BM - the supposed terrorist front - is the number one party list group in the country.  If these legitimate organizations were indeed terrorist fronts, Congress would have been bombed, or maybe Satur Ocampo would be shooting capitalist congressmen in his privilege speeches.  Did that happen?  No: matter of fact, Satur Ocampo had a warrant of arrest issued against him for a murder charge implicated two decades ago.  If you asked me, he's innocent.

   The thing is, I'm not surprised at all on why young, intelligent, capable individuals are leaving the cities to take up a gun and live the life of a traveller in the Sierra Madre or whatever.  I mean, there's every reason to do so.  Revolution is seen by many to be the best way to cure the Philippines out of its ills.  Our ills are a lot like hemorrhoids: you don't cure the buggers by taking the course of your mouth, you cure them by taking the course of your ass.  And revolutionaries have taken the course of the latter.  To them, armed struggle - not parliamentary struggle - is the primary course of action.  Take the course head-on.

   A military man well-versed in English (hmmm, good luck with that, considering what I've seen of them) would probably talk to himself and say, "Hmmm, this jerk is a Communist, all right."  I say, hold it right there.  I've got some explaining to do.

   As a UP student, I am well-acquainted with the thought of Karl Marx (it's tradition, not dogma).  Years of UP education has brought me to a very curious insight: as much as I like Karl Marx the social thinker, I also as much despise Karl Marx the revolutionary.  Absolute power may come from the barrel of a gun, but it doesn't have to.  You don't take up a gun to threaten: you take up a gun to kill.  The guy you kill can't kill you back.  Killing, in its manifold forms, is not justice: it's vengeance.  And no amount of vengeance can ever compensate for a measure of justice.

   Do I think that the character of Philippine society today is based on injustice and inequality?  Yes.  Do I think capitalism, imperialism and feudalism is to blame?  Of course.  Do I think that the Philippines is a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society?  Absolutely.

   Do I think that armed revolution is the proper course of action?  Definitely not.

   The way I see it, the world has changed.  The Philippines has changed.  For a half-century, the last believers of the cause of Communism in the world have fought a war that lasted a full half-century based on the premises that the liberation of the Philippines from injustice and inequality lies in armed revolution.  And today, we still continue to fight that war.  And war, my friends, is good for absolutely nothing.  A half-century of war has changed nothing, and we who are aware are sick and tired of waiting.  Tired of the government wasting taxpayer money better spent on structural solutions than on guns and bullets.  Tired of the underground awash with unfulfilled promises of a better tomorrow.

   If you asked me for a solution, I say let's hypothesize, test and conclude.  Legalize the Communist Party of the Philippines, I say, and let's see if it will survive.  Bring the men, women and children down from the mountains and give them the opportunity to run for office and let's see how they will change things.  Let's have them participate in our political system.  If you can't beat the hemorrhoid, sit on it.  Suffer the pain.  You'll get used to it.

   OK, the world has changed: the envelope of ideologies have opened up to accommodate change.  That's what everybody has been afraid of all along, for both the military and the Communist underground have been operating on that same static, unchanging plane.  I mean, I'm speaking out: why can't we all just change?

   I'll be honest: I'm just a regular guy.  College student, smoker, occasional beer drinker, writer, whatever.  I don't have, nor do I claim to have, the answer to the problems of the Philippines, I don't know what it takes to cure the country of its ills, I do not claim to be the Messiah, whatever.  All I'm saying is: as much as I don't agree with the government, I don't agree with the Reds either.

   Had I written this entry, say, three years ago, people would be pointing fingers at my face and accusing me of everything that a child-molesting rapist from the Church of Satan would be a saint compared to me.  I don't know if it's the same case now.  I'm probably a condemned man by now, maybe someone would be out to abduct me or kill me, perhaps blow me into smithereens (no, not that kind of "blow") either for being a "terrorist," "brainwashed," a "capitalist coddler," whatever.  The point, says Marx, is to change it.

   And that, my friends, is that pink elephant in Philippine history that nobody wants to talk about.  You don't see it in history books, you don't see it talked about in the streets, you don't see it in op-eds in national newspapers.  Communism: a fifty-year-old war waged right in our countrysides and sometimes in our cities.  What is to become of it?

   I remember asking the same question to that girl I asked about the pink elephants.  I never got an answer.  And I probably never will.

< hmmm... >

   Today found me in the school library researching everything I can about my least favorite topic to rant or rave about: religion.  On Wednesday, our class will hold a debate on religion.  First, whether religion is an instrument of change or of oppression.  Second, whether the world needs religion or not.

   Not that I'm a hardline Marxist, but I subscribe to Karl Marx's opinion of religion in "Toward a Contribution to Hegel's Philosophy of Right:" religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of an unspiritual situation, the opium of the people, yadda yadda yadda.

   The problem about debating about religion, in my view, is that it all basically boils down to doctrine and not reason.  Which is why I am an avid fan of "Ang Tamang Daan," broadcasted by Net 25 (which is owned by Iglesia Ni Cristo), and I just love it when they use the glass-breaking effects whenever Eliseo Soriano, the leader of the religious sect Ang Dating Daan, speaks out.  Not that I have anything against both sects, but it's just funny how people can debate over interpretations of a single Bible.

   You might be asking, "Hey, Marocharim, aren't you an atheist?"  True: while I write down "Roman Catholic" on forms whenever required, the truth is I don't participate in organized religion.  The falling-out that I have had with religion results from a disillusionment in a religion that believes in many different Christs.

< mcluhan on an entry on activism? >

   Somewhere around Entry #807, I wrote a letter to a freshman activist in UP Manila by the name of Gerome.  It's one of the sickest and lowest entries I have ever written in the native language, but I believe it's one of the most truthful.

   I would like to add to that: "Hindi lahat ng Iskolar ng Bayan ay tibak."  In English, not all the Scholars of the State - students of UP - are activists.

   Why?  I just realized that the medium is, after all, the message.  If there's anything more poignant from such a boring author like Marshall McLuhan (media critics: my opinion), it's precisely that statement.  Lately, the new breed of activists in my part of UP have resorted to disrupting classes and literally banging on walls just to make their point.  In Diliman, some activists have resorted to throwing eggs at high-ranking police officers, damaging UP property and disrupting events like the Malcolm Madness.  I echo the statement of Atty. Ted Te: "if you are weak on the facts, pound on the law; if you are weak on the law, pound on the facts; if you are weak on the law and the facts, pound on the table."

   Again, whe medium is the message.

   Before I lose you in repeating McLuhan's statement all over again, it's this simple.  If you bang on classroom walls, screaming on megaphones in the corridors, disrupting classes, all the while having a legitimate message to send to students like being against tuition and other fee increases (ToFI) or calling for greater democratization in the use of facilities and equipment, nobody gives a crap.  Not because UP students of today have turned apathetic, but because of a reason of a completely different nature.  Nobody gives a crap about scholars who walk out of their classes and sloganeer in the streets with a public outcry for greater state subsidy (such a student has earned 6 absences).  The clear message sent by an activist who disturbs classes in a "voluntary" walk-out (where the call is pasted all over bulletin boards in sizes not prescribed or condoned by those in charge of the walls) is not his/her gripe against the government or whatnot, but the fact that he/she disturbed the peace.  It's hooliganism: I don't do it, I don't endorse it, and I certainly don't condone it.

   Heck, I'm an activist (sort of), but as a student I stopped believing that there is something to be learned going out on the streets rah-rah-ing for whatever cause disturbing the flow of traffic.  If you happen to rally on Session Road, I can honestly say that the kind of passion you feel is only made much more poignant by that colorful Andok's eatery dominating the view: a passion brought about by hunger.  A hunger not only that's deep seated in one's stomach, but a hunger for knowledge.  True knowledge - real knowledge - is founded on standing on the shoulders of giants.  Those giants, you would never get to know on the street.  Those giants are the classics and the imperatives you get to read and study in class no matter how much of a Marxist you are.  All I know of Marx was built not on an (admittedly biased) educational discussion on but on two semesters of boring theory classes.  For each, I've earned a 1.25.

   If I were ever a bully (I wear glasses, I'm the target of bullies) I would have dared an activist to define imperialism in Lenin's terms or have him/her write a full-length essay on why Leandro Alejandro is the paragon used by many an activist.  I don't: it's this day and age that without an educational discussion on imperialism an activist would probably define it as "ibagsak" and Lean's memory is literally being pissed on by people who refuse to debate, but instead wreck the UPD Chancellor's car or disturb classes.  I'm sure that a man as learned and as articulate as the late Lean Alejandro would probably do that.  Of course, I'm not that old to have known him.

   Anyway, back to McLuhan.  The medium being the message.  That stunt where one threw eggs at General Esperon?  The medium is the message.  That stunt where a student barged into a class without the teacher's permission and started screaming leftist slogans to walk out of class?  The medium is the message.

   This blog entry?  The medium is the message.

< philippine media >

   In the news today, Malaysia's information minister called on readers to stop using blogs to get their information.  "Rumor-mongering" among Malaysia's bloggers consist of reportages on corruption by government figures.  Malaysia's media is kept in so tight a control that, according to the Agence France-Presse report (oh, so that's what AFP stands for), two bloggers are currently being sued by the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times Press.

   In the Philippines, the publisher and seven editors of the Philippine Daily Inquirer were detained at a police station in Manila after they posted bail for a libel suit filed against them by First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo.  The Inquirer is known to be very critical of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's administration and have posted op-eds criticizing the regime.  (To add to that, just to be fair and balanced, I read six newspapers in a day.  I don't get my facts solely from PDI.)

   It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that there is a clear harassment of the media (and in Malaysia's case, multimedia) going on in Southeast Asia.

   As for myself, I've been a student journalist for the better part of my life as a student (counting my stint as a poem-writer [I'm not a poet] for my elementary school paper, that would be 11 years) and I have experienced censorship head-on when I was editor-in-chief of my high school paper.  In college, stirring the pot of controversy was part of my job not only as an alternative journalist, but a critic as well.  My former life as a journalist was marked by censorship and, to a certain extent, harassment.  So I quit journalism and found refuge in blogging.  At least, in the "new digital democracy" that is the World Wide Web, I'm free to write whatever I want with consequences I am very familiar with.

   Just like a hundred or so other bloggers who choose to take a stand and use their blogs to make a difference.  Of course, we're still the sad minority.  Most blogs out there are fan sites or disclosures about romantic love and things of that nature.  Compared to mainstream media outfits and megaphone-toting slogan-chanting activists, we bloggers are small fry: we aren't even worth arresting in a setting which already resembles a media Holocaust.  I myself doubt that FG Mike Arroyo has the testicular fortitude to file a libel suit against a blogger.

   (Believe me, there is a ton of anti-government content out there in the Philippine blogosphere.  TMX is just one of them, written by someone [i.e., me] who has already dared the government to arrest him for whatever suit there is to be filed against a common man who disagrees with government policies.  My friends and family have already told me to stop writing dissentful entries on account that I'm treading dangerous ground.  But I'm not the only one.  Every blog hosting site out there definitely has at least three government dissenters writing there.)

   The way I see it, in the case of the Philippine government (I don't know much about what's going on in Malaysia), instruments of justice - from arrest warrants to the use of a jail cell - are being used by those in power (and those who, plain and simply, have a proverbial bull's-eye painted in their foreheads) as instruments of vengeance.

   Vengeance against whom, you ask?  Not against legitimate terrorists like suicide bombers and murderers and gunslingers somewhere in the boondocks of the Philippine countryside, but against those who legitimately exercise their responsibilities to inform the public about the wrongdoings and shortcomings of the Arroyo administration.  In the case of Mike Arroyo, the man actually exceeded the limits of his restraint by suing 45 - count them, 45 - journalists for various imagined offenses.  Offenses that he himself would not probably disclose on account that only he could probably defend such offenses in an already corrupted justice system.

   Then again, what can one expect of a government which is, for all purposes of the term, run by the insane, the crazy and the paranoid?  When Manuel L. Quezon said that he'd rather prefer a country run like hell like Filipinos, he probably didn't expect a country where people are being shot left and right for exercising their right to free speech and the right to peacefully assemble and organize.  He probably didn't expect a country where the right to free speech is limited only to Presidential speechwriters paid to write only about economic growth and to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to media censorship and extrajudicial killings that the government has yet to answer for.  Quezon probably did not expect his rhetorical "hell" to be marked by a regime literally pissing on the very freedoms our forefathers sought and fought for with their very lives.

   We pride ourselves, as Filipinos, on having the freest press in Asia.  But that's not one without consequence.  This country has 45 journalists sued for libel in one day or so, more than a dozen already killed and forever silenced, and media outfits being closed down just because they criticized the government for all they're worth as watchdogs and critics of the nation.  Free?  I don't think so.  This, by far, is the worst definition of "freedom" I have ever heard, considering that people everywhere are being handcuffed for having dissenting views against the government.

   Then again, there are a few people out there who continue to dissent.  Bloggers all over the Philippines should unite and speak out their views and challenge the government to do better than to arrest media personnel left and right or issue baseless warrants of arrest to those critical of government.  Bloggers everywhere should challenge the government to do better for the nation than to be wary and paranoid of the kind of "terrorism" that is already ill-defined to begin with.  We have the power.  The Internet is yet something the government has to regulate.  The next course of action is not one of the streets, in my view.  It's a declaration of a war of attrition, a war waged from information.  Alternative new media vs. the government.

   If the government, maybe FG Mike himself, files a single suit of libel against a single blogger (consider this a worst-case scenario), we should all band together to fight for the one thing that is worth fighting for.

   Freedom.

< hmmm... >

   Here's an "endorsement."

   I don't log on to YouTube on account that I don't have the equipment and bandwidth to participate in the latest in what I like to call the "American Idol"-ization of the Internet, but it seems that I can't watch a free set of indy movie trailers by the Broadcast Communication 130 people at school on account that it's 79.1 megabytes long.

   Seventy nine point one megabytes is just too much download time.

   Anyway, just because I have a popular blog (hmmm, yeah, right) the compiled trailers of such independent short films like "Biyahe," "Dis-Illusion," "Halaw," "Edukasyon 101" and "Kapalit" can be accessed here.  If you have a fast Internet conncection, I strongly suggest you watch the video.

< hmmm... >

   Yup, it happened.  A guy, Dingdong Flores, due to the stresses and the strains of working at a call center, died of hypertension.  That was the news last night.

   Somewhere in my small library of books is Upton Sinclair's classic, "The Jungle," which talks about the almost inhuman conditions of the meatpacking houses in Chicago in the turn of the 1900's.  The book itself turned a vegetarian out of me for a week (just like Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" turned me anorexic for a day), but could we say that there is a certain abuse and exploitation in the call center industry that a perfectly healthy fellow can die of stress?

   Since I haven't graduated yet (I'm still enjoying the carefree life of a student) I have seen my friends who work at call centers look like death.  Due to the stress, some of them have taken up the Gospel of Marocharim and professed that smoking is their only coping mechanism (the Lord be with you), drinking countless lots of coffee and they start to sound more and more like answering machines.  Most of them look like they came from the very toilet of Satan after a graveyard shift.  I wonder if the same future awaits me by the time I graduate.

   Dead because of a call center job?  Whose fault is it?

   The easy way would be to say that if only call centers offer a medical plan (I don't know if they do) and take care of their employees properly (again, I don't know if they do), the obvious disaster (which it is) wouldn't have happened.  The easy way would be to blame the health habits of already stressed call center agents killing themselves with an unhealthy lifestyle the obvious disaster wouldn't have happened.  But then again, in this world, there is no such thing as an easy way.

   The obvious disaster would have been averted if the Philippines had a strong enough economy - stronger than what the President says it is - and enough jobs so that the call center industry stays where it should be.  Not here in the Philippines, but over in the shores of America.

   It's that simple.  Agree?

< hmmm... >

   Lately I've been criticizing the Internet.  Maybe it's because I'm too much into writing my thesis that I have consolidated a few critiques of the Information Revolution or maybe because I'm just bored.  Nothing's been going on in my life save for that thesis proposal.  Had I been enrolled as a Communication Arts student at my school I would be talking about our new independent movie, but as good as I am with conceptualizing film, I don't write scripts.

   I have come to that point in my life where, save for a future in the call center industry, I could be the next critic of modern life, although I have to say we're past modernity and we're now being controlled by information, not capital.  That will not sit too well with my Marxist friends who would probably be accusing me left and right of being a technological determinist, but I've already been accused left and right for being an idiot in Math.

   Anyway, back to the indie film festival at UP Baguio.  For one, I don't want to watch it on account that I would probably be introduced to the kind of emotional enema of gay relationships (based on the spoilers, everything's kind of Brokeback) or to the mental endoscopy of socially-relevant brouhaha (down with capitalism, down with authority, stuff like that).  The reason why I'm using ass analogies again is that I'm insanely jealous of the kind of ease there is in being a Comm student.  We SocSci people trouble ourselves with a bunch of readings, manipulating regression lines and having to have to wear the jester's hat of being intellectuals when all we want is an end to the kind of mental torture there is in our courses.  In Comm, what is apparent to me is that you only have to have this big argument with your groupmates in BC 130 and this constitutes the highlight of your four-year stay.  It's so easy to spend four years in Comm on account that you don't have to literally breathe Marx, eat Almond and Verba, and then excrete your thesis.

   Yes, I said excrete your thesis.  I've seen that constipated look before from graduating students in libraries.

   I guess that watching independent films made by people you know would probably give you much insight into what they've learned in their frequent soirees to coffee houses and the Saturday night gimmick.  Yup, softcore porn.  We SocSci students talk about sex in passing, imagining some form of Samoan butt-sex in Malinowski (or is that Mead?) and then turn our attentions to gay and lesbian themes, which most teachers I know are already sick of.  Our lives are defined by that cup of instant coffee made in haste and a pack of Marlboros spent over a single reading of Jacques Derrida.  Surprise quiz tomorrow.  The book has been checked out.

   Gessellschaft, anyone?

< 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.