Category Archive for: internet

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…)

komentaryo

Andanar sa PCO: Isang kasaysayan ng kapalpakan (2)

When 2017 started, Martin Andanar was on his seventh month in the Presidential Communications Office (PCO).

The Communications secretary wanted to welcome the year with a bang, so he decided to listen to pro-government troll discourse and be afraid of a yahoogroup. You got that right. A yahoogroup. In the year 2017. For what to him was a “national issue” involving the names of Filipinos in America and a staff member of VP Leni’s office, in purported conversation that was not only using a yahoogroup in the time of Viber and Telegram, but also apparently, a yahoogroup that could so easily be accessed or hacked.

This piece of “news” about a destabilization plot came from what we now know to be fake news sources, as fueled by pro-Duterte troll discourse. It is decidedly blind, it is fiction-writing based on the flimsiest of sources if not totally without basis. And the Communications Secretary was believing it, hook line sinker.  (more…)

komentaryo

Ressa, Mocha, Fake News

The Canada Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News website came out with an interesting piece about the state of discourse in the Philippines given mainstream media on the one hand, and the rise of fake news as propaganda on the other. Written by Senior Correspondent Adrienne Arsenault, it had as headline a quote from Rappler’s Maria Ressa, saying that “Democracy as we know it is dead,” which first made me imagine that the article was going to talk about the urgent concerns of summary executions on the streets and drug-related deaths, or the continued control by big business, oligarchs, and feudal lords over government despite a President who seems to stand squarely for the people (if / when his pronouncements hold and given his pro-people appointees), or even just the continued verbal assault against free speech from the President and his men.

Instead Ressa – and this article – were referring to the death of democracy … in relation to fake news and people like Mocha.

Yes, I’m as stunned as you are. (more…)

komentaryo

Andanar, VP Leni, De Lima: Taking the public for fools

The aftermath of Vice President Leni Robredo’s resignation from President Duterte’s cabinet has proven to me – yet again! – that the strategy at this point of those in power, and I mean government and its Dutertrolls who believe the President is infallible, as well as the Liberal Party and its Daang Matuwid fanatics who believe the Vice President is santa-incarnate, is really only to make fools of the public.

The power struggle is real. And because none of those who are part of the struggle are in the least bit transparent, what is being revealed in all the confusion is the fact that there is little concern about what’s happening on the ground, and no sense at all of the bigger picture.

Basta sila mag-aaway, bahala na ang bayan sumalo ng kaguluhan. (more…)

komentaryo

From misinformation to confusion: Dysfunctional communications

Probably the worst thing about the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) as run by Secretary Martin Andanar is that it has dared ask Congress for a bigger 2017 budget.

This, despite the fact that it has no communications plan, no strategy for information dissemination, and on a most basic level, does not even have one working, credible, well-developed official government website, four months in.

Instead it’s working off three different Facebook pages – all of which do not cost a single cent – which are all generally devoid of the important information we need about government. Why should we spend more on this office that does nothing but make things worse: through its silences, and even given its articulations.

It might be said that all those who criticize government are temperamental brats. And yes, I’m taking that out of context. (more…)