Facebook wasn’t around then.
Back in 1989, I had no idea what the Internet was. I was a
regular church-goer, along with my buddies who all came to Canada from
Singapore to look for a better future. I helped prepare the church newsletter.
I wrote about members of the congregation, little personal testimonies that
they wanted to share. The man who ran the newsletter was an older white guy who
downloaded his material from somewhere --- religious stories and articles he
gathered from sources online. Only it wasn’t called ‘downloading’ then. He ‘copied’
them.
What he did seemed strange to me at the time. I got my
information from newspapers, books and magazines. I communicated through the
phone, the fax machine, or by snail mail. (Snail mail, for the benefit of the
millennials, is when you write something by hand, stuff it into an addressed
envelope, stick a stamp to it and drop it into a mailbox.) My boss, who worked
from home, was very impressed that his foreign nanny owned a fax machine. I
heard him telling his friends about my fax machine. Sometimes he even used it.
Back in the Philippines, my family and I talked regularly by
long distance phone and less regularly, by snail mail.
At that point, a technological tornado was slowly brewing but
nobody among my friends and family members ever noticed, least of all myself.
The Internet was about to arrive. According to history, the World Wide Web was launched
on the 6th of August
1991.
The precursor to the internet itself was born in 1969, when
scientists working for the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) connected
computer networks between the University of California and the Stanford
Research Institute. Email was invented in 1971, to facilitate an exchange of
information among the networks. (I only started using email in 1997.)
Around the same time, projects like the DARPA’s were also being
developed in other countries. Geniuses back then created a system that
connected even larger networks together for more efficient information exchange
and sharing, and thus the Internet came to be. The same protocols they applied then
are still being used today. I didn’t think those guys foresaw how their
invention would change the world.
The Internet came to us like a bottomless empty vessel. One could
pour into it whatever one wanted. See what we got back: To date, the Internet
and the social media have made the world smaller; helped carry out regime
changes; overturned election expectations; influenced public opinion, killed some
traditional businesses and gave birth to new ones; created its own version of established
truths; encouraged crimes; solved others, and made friends out of virtual
strangers.
The number of internet users in 2018 totalled 4.021 billion, while social media
users were pegged at 3.196 billion.
Millions of these users are from the Philippines, plus over
10 million more Filipinos scattered all over the world. It’s amazing to see how
interconnected Filipinos are, by phone or social media, how cheaply
communication can be achieved nowadays. Second hand phones back home are
readily available. Almost everyone else I meet in urban areas has a cell phone.
Less so, however, from the rural areas. Still,
one can buy a load of minutes for several pesos and send a text message for one
peso. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere.
Facebook was
launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook and Messenger have since become a favourite social
medium for Pinoys, both at home and abroad. It’s free, it’s always available,
and totally democratic. My daughters and I talk everyday by Messenger and
follow each other’s news feeds, although we don’t subscribe to the practice of
posting what we ate, or purchased, nor our duck-faced selfies. We leave all that
to others. The only misgiving I have is, it could have been so much easier and
cheaper if Facebook were available in the early years of my absence.
For a lot of people in the Philippines, Facebook has become the
place from where we reach out to the world, express our dreams and desires, our
joys, sorrows, angers and frustrations. It’s also the place from where can show
the best version of our ourselves.
But there’s a flipside to something free, available and
totally democratic. Facebook and other social media sites like Twitter, have also
been used to change the course of events all over the world, to achieve darker
purposes. Even the Philippines has not been immune to all this.
Good thing I only read dog and cat stories that have happy
endings.
Published at the Mill Woods Mosaic on January 15, 2019.
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