Category Archive for: internet

komentaryo

Ressa, Amnesty International, Duterte, words

I am the last person to even defend (or care for that matter) about Maria Ressa and Rappler. I still don’t think that is a credible website, I still question the kind of work that it does, and I still never read it, and rarely link to it (unless they’re the only ones who carry a story).

But at a time of d/misinformation and troll discourse, especially given a consistently discredited media, it’s important to see a misstep for what it is, especially from government officials who are skewing what should be a pretty straight-up, clear-cut, important discussion that needs to be had about why Amnesty International Netherlands included President Duterte in a video of leaders who are taking away our freedoms.

This was an opportunity to discuss the bases of the inclusion. Instead it became about the blame game, with mainstream media as the favorite punching bag.
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komentaryo

Andanar’s PNA train wreck

This is all very simple, really. The Philippine News Agency (PNA) has made enough mistakes, has been in the news often enough for being nothing more than a laughable excuse for a newswire service, and ultimately responsibility falls on Communications Secretary Martin Andanar.

After all, I have personally heard him talking about how much he idolizes China’s Xin Hua News Agency, and how he would like to emulate its technology, its offices across the world, its professionalism. The fundamental problem with this of course is that Xin Hua is a state news agency in a country with censorship, where there is no freedom of the press, or of speech. And unless that’s what Andanar hopes for the Philippines, there is absolutely no reason to even think of emulating Xin Hua.

But PNA’s foreign news section is filled with news taken from Xin Hua, and that can only fall on Andanar’s shoulders. Why are you even thinking this news service to be credible source of news about China, and about the world?  (more…)

komentaryo

#Andanar’s learning curve, social media user accreditation, #PCOO’s downward spiral

It seems the learning curve is steep for Martin Andanar — and everyone else on the Duterte communications team. A year in, and this week’s mistakes and mishaps can only be symptoms of the bigger crisis that is Presidential and government communications. We are also reminded (yet again!) that we are wasting public funds on the salaries of officials who have no idea what they’re doing.

After a year, instead of actually evolving in his knowledge of social media, Andanar is still stuck on his simpleton assessment of what social media is about. He’s still working with the nonsense of counting followers like it matters. Department Order 15, which seeks to accredit “social media practitioners” to cover PCOO and Presidential events even asserts that social media is where “the citizenry” might be “engaged” in order to “enrich the quality of discourse.”

Was Andanar in the Philippines the past year? At what point did partisan social media (that is, pro-Duterte and pro-Dilawan) “enrich the quality of discourse”?

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komentaryo

Writing, criticism, hope

In the five years that I’ve been doing this column, and the nine years of writing independently full-time, the most fulfilling parts of it have been about being able to talk to students who wonder about writing. Often the questions revolve around notions of fear, which automatically go to the presumption of courage: that it is brave to write about things that others wouldn’t write about, or to have a contrary opinion from what dominates the discourse.

Yet it would be delusional to imagine that sitting in front of a computer, in the safety of my own home (or my middle-class spaces), writing about issues that to me are important, is bravery defined. In the provinces, broadcast and community journalists are being killed, activists are being illegally detained and threatened, communities being militarized.

To be trolled or threatened on social media is nothing compared to that. (more…)

komentaryo

Everything I needed to learn about writing, I learned through blogging

And I mean old school blogging via this blog, which first went up in 2008, a gift from my Kuya who had also pushed the mother to start blogging two years earlier. At the time there was an active blogging scene with intellectuals and pundits writing and discussing issues of the day, bouncing off each other, openly debating.

Trolling was frowned upon, as was namecalling. Anonymity was put into question.

I like to think of that time to have been pre-Joe America and pre-Mocha. It was also pre-social media. People were actually having conversations, threshing out issues, doing research, building credible arguments. Opinion writers in the broadsheets were called out, as was government; people were not simply dismissed based on their ideological leanings; sound arguments were the rule not the exception.

Those days are gone. (more…)