benign0's blog

Get Real Post is now online! This is the forum where issues will be discussed from well-considered perspectives . Check it out right here , or logon with the following URL: GetRealPhilippines.com/Blog

In the aftermath of the 11th March super-earthquake that devastated Japan and caused a health and environmental crisis after damaged nuclear reactors started releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere, the Philippines remains mired in a too-little-too-late soul searching along two key areas: (1) its capability to respond in the event of a similar-sized disaster hitting its main population centres, and (2) the future of its nuclear energy program.

The Philippine blogosphere tends to buzz a lot about stuff that has to do with blogging. That's quite natural. Car enthusiasts talk about cars, sports fans talk about sport, and bloggers talk about blogging. The thing with this of course is that non-bloggers (more so those outside even its outer circle of Twitterers and other "social media" aficionados) cannot relate. This collective navel-gazing that the Pinoy blogging community gets into every now and then seems, therefore, to yield no real social value beyond, hopefully, an inward reflection that might result in some self-policing and, even more hopefully, some positive outcomes.

Of course, "entertainment" is a life necessity. But stop to think why Media conglomerates all over the world are pitching faster and faster access to the Net as some kind of human right. Simple. The more content that can be shoved down fibre optic cables, the more Media conglomerates make money. But also, consider that the cheaper they can produce this content, the bigger their profits. If you still cannot see what is wrong with this picture, let me spell it out: Content producers see their growth prospects in cutting content production costs, which results in crappier content, which is then sold to us in bigger quantities.

Rate of growth in the take up of social networking among Filipinos is among the highest in the world. From just 160,000 in July 2008, the number of Facebook users in the Philippines grew by huge leaps to 2.7 million in 2009 and then 14.6 million in 2010. The rate at which Filipinos are infesting Facebook is astounding, indeed. And while our immense numbers go on to pad Mark Zuckerberg's score card, the question remains: Are we adding intellectual, social, or cultural capital to the community?

In a recent article on ProPinoy.net , blogger Cocoy Dayao laments the implementation of volume caps on internet usage in the Philippines by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC). Before we fly off the handle here, I believe we first need to step back a bit and ask this more fundamental question: How exactly does increased access to high-speed internet for the average Filipino consumer make her "more productive"?

Ten years ago, we thought that the biggest thing the Web was going to be was a high-tech mail order catalogue. Some of the most publicised tech stunts in the first Web boom of the late 1990's involved geeks voluntarily locking themselves indoors for weeks and subsisting on stuff that can be ordered via the Web -- all to highlight the foreseen downfall of businesses derided by first-generation Web heads and their Wall Street cheerleaders as "bricks-and-mortar" establishments. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com was rewarded for fitting that "vision" when he was made TIME Person of the Year in 1999 . We now know that the Web went on to prove that its biggest direct value to the average schmoe was as a forum for "social networking". Facebook.com enhanced real-world and real-person networking while a plethora of massively-multiplayer gaming platforms opened alternate realities for alternate-person networking. Ergo : 2010 TIME Person of the Year = Faceb...