Spell "trouble": S-T-A-T-U-S U-P-D-A-T-E-S

I know that you're only reading this entry because my amazing work of art has caught your attention, so I won't keep you long. Anti-Facebook blog sickfacebook.com quoted Australian psychologist Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg as saying that people who post status updates (and tweets) "could be suffering from insecurity... [they're] sending a message out to everybody that rather than just quietly getting on with what [they're] doing [they] need external recognition.” OUCH! I didn't see that one coming. As if it weren't enough, he went on to explain further that status updates crying or implying depression shows attention-deficit behavior.“This is a digital SOS. They can be very, very upsetting when you send out something and you get absolutely nothing back," he said.

I know that the guy means well. In fact, I totally understand how dangerous status updates get. Perverts and players can get the wrong (or right) signals, as singles put themselves at risk of sounding desperate for a little romance--which is pretty much like handing your house keys to a thief, with your address attached. Employees getting sacked, cheating husbands busted, and a soldier botching a raid by unwittingly leaking information via his Facebook status update are only a few examples. Not only that. Status updates destroy friendships, too. I know someone who knows someone who thought that a friend's status was directed at him. I can't blame him for overreacting, though, as many use tweets and statuses for cyber bullying or "flaming." (In Dr. Carr-Gregg's book Real Wired Child, he provides practical tips for parents in guiding their teens' online communications, social networking, web surfing, downloading, and gaming activities to ensure their well-being in cyberspace.)

Anyway, Dr. Carr-Gregg's study found that our status updates reveal more about us than we think, even more than all the things we write in our profiles combined. Affected yet? I wouldn't be too bothered, if I were you. He also said, "You could be forgiven for thinking no one cares [about you], but not everybody is online or checking their phone all the time.” It's just you, you insecure, attention-deficit, danger-hungry addict! See? You should really feel better now. lol

Facebook is selling WHAT?!

Take a good look at this picture:
 

Is this what you see?

 

If online dating is the new singles bar, then Facebook is open bar 24/7, what with over 400 million ACTIVE users. From the soft-light profile photos to the catchy status updates (not to mention the ubiquitous "Like" thumbs up icon), Facebook has the particular charm that online dating sites SHOULD have but, unfortunately, don't. And what's that? It leaves you enough room to maneuver and tell people that you're in the market without having to BE IN THE MARKET. So what, Facebook is not a dating site, right? At least, not officially. Even if you're actually looking, you no longer have to hunch over the monitor the way a football carrier would. With Facebook, you also get more opportunities to do an in-depth survey before the buy-in. Best of all, it's free. But then, again, Facebook can't solve all of life's problems (what?!)--meaning, it's not cheat-proof and perv-proof, as there's no way that Facebook can verify each of the profiles. At least, for now.

So, if you've been on Facebook long enough to have gone through that phase, when you suddenly feel the urge to type your exes' names into the search field--assuming that they're using their real names--or to "Like" every one of your Facebook crush's posts (and spend an entire hour waiting for the red notification flag to pop up), don't beat yourself up. Blame it on the subliminal message on Facebook's log-in page instead.  

Who the Filipina Is

Of the Earth's creatures, only humans are fond of confining each other in boxes and sticking labels all over them. If there's one thing I feel  really sad about, it's that some people believe they can look down their nose at others. I am tired of Filipinas being typecasted as nothing more than domestic helpers and mail-order brides. Sure, many pinays aspire for better lives for their families by taking these paths, but they are more than just servants and marriage-for-convenience transactions. They are daughters and sisters. Women. Persons. For this alone, they deserve respect.

The average pinay is a woman of great value. She is someone who prizes family and loyalty--sometimes, even to the detriment of her personal dream. Yet, she is capable of opening her heart to new dreams, going beyond her comfort zone, and growing more resilient with each challenge. She is capable of rising above the stereotype, and this is what empowering the Filipina is all about.

"Over the years, Filipinas working overseas have been greatly stereotyped and put in a negative light. This documentary follows a collective group of global Filipinas who have been deeply affected by these issues and how they chose to respond by sharing the positivity, and the advocacy of a common mission -- uplifting the morale of Filipinas everywhere."

To those in Dubai, do catch the full length premiere on 27th March, Godolphin Ballroom, Emirates Towers. To my fabulously pinay readers and visitors, let's help this video go viral. You may tweet and link it on Facebook: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4j6Z1htZi0 or get its embedding code from YouTube


The Empowered Filipina: A Woman of Substance


A Timonera Grafik Production
Produced by Lalaine Chu-Benitez, Ramon Benitez
Director: Kamil Roxas
Director of Photography: Kahlil A. de Pio
Gaffer: Franzty Magsakay
Sound: Ed Aquino
Art Director: Ramon Benitez
Production Assistants: Choi Dalocanog, Rony Aquino
Make-up: Ginno Alducente

Confessions of a Facebook Addict

(Photo credit: http://www.symbianize.com)

I can’t say exactly which came first: the desire to test my unofficial hypothesis or the mania caused by my 289 class to fit everything, including fb, into a framework. All I know is what my Internet log tells me—I have doubled, sometimes even tripled, the frequency and duration of my Internet use, specifically logging into one site: fb. Not that I don’t have a life, but it seems that lately, it’s my life which I have been unsuspectingly working around fb.

Here’s what happened, anyway. My hypothesis was—and still is—that fb is addictive, because it’s a venue for validation in every sense of the word: to confirm if something was true, to declare an official statement, to make something officially acceptable.

My friend and neighbor B told me about her friend who happens to be a social researcher. She said that her friend used her skills on something which she herself (the friend, not B) could actually benefit from: she searched her ex’s current girlfriend to find out how long they’ve been together, suspecting that the ex cheated on B’s friend while they were still together. I’m citing this only as an example, but in case you were wondering, he didn’t. Thank God!

Not long ago, I had asked Ms. G if she thinks we would still be on fb by the time we’re, say, 50. “Maybe. But what would we be posting then? Scanned images of our graduate certificates?” She replied with a laugh. I got what she meant, so I teased her back with, “Maybe pictures to show how good a catch our son or daughter would be marrying.” After all, these are what usually make mamas proud, right?

Also, there are a variety of people I don’t personally know but whose loud conversations in the train have made me a reluctant-only-at-first eavesdropper. They were talking about going somewhere really cool with people, who, in their opinion, are equally cool. They said to take pictures of themselves and go on a tagging spree on fb to cause someone they all know (but don’t particularly like) to feel “they’re cool by association, and I’m not.” Their words, not mine.

So my hypothesis makes sense, I thought and left it at that. If people care that much about themselves, especially using online social networks, then, I wanted to make sure that they get credit for who they really are.

Whenever I Compare friends, I hit “skip” each time one friend I know very, very well is matched against someone I don’t know that much. Who am I to judge whether my friend is smarter than my acquaintance? What do I really know about my college roommate being more likely to be successful than my high school classmate?  Things change through the years, and besides, who defines “success”? Or how do I perceive a person’s “happiness”? By his/her job, the relationship he/she has, the family he/she is raising? I’ve made sure to poke back the person who poked me, especially if he/she did not just Mass Superpoke. This person took his/her time, even if only out of boredom, to buy me a margarita and taser Mr. G.  Also, I’ve learned to save my comments for people who welcome them. Enough said. In the end, changing my settings and walking on eggshells not to flood the News Feed, I realized that I had tested my fb hypothesis on myself. While I was, in a way, validating people, I was also validating myself—as someone who doesn’t want to offend and be judgmental of people.

If you’re still with me, reading up to this paragraph, then I would take consolation in the possibility that I’m not alone in my fb addiction. Indeed, I’m not. D called me one night, and we spent more than an hour on the phone, talking about fb and stopping only when she got to the train station. We talked about being reunited with old friends (Aw, Y and Z ended up together pala), finding new ones (W is so talented, you should see his cartoons minsan), and losing some—at least online (V deleted her fb account all of a sudden, why kaya?). I told her that I’ve been reading everything I could find on Mark Zuckerberg—his Harvard issues, ethical and intellectual property violations—because you can only find the answer to a question about something when you know who the creator is and how he thinks.

In the meantime, I set my phone to ring exactly 30 minutes after I log into fb, and when it does, I log out immediately. It’s been working beautifully so far.

Thanks for dropping by on my blog!

My Facebook Hypothesis (as published in HerWord.com)

Last semester, I submitted a paper for my Conflict Resolution class in which I particularly focused on the Change Management part of the syllabus. It was an overview of Social Network Analysis (SNA) as an empirical tool in change management. Well, just to describe SNA, it’s a fusion of psychology, sociology, and mathematics, wherein SNA software can measure the interpersonal relations of the organization at the informal level, draw a graph of these relations, and help the organization identify the real power source of the organization. Simply put, SNA assumes that power and influence does not belong to the boss but to the informal leader: the person whose friendship and opinion is valued by the majority, the “sociometric star,” as Jacob Moreno calls it. I wrote that 

“At the organizational level, identifying informal networks and determining the types and strength of existing relationships would inevitably lead to the detection of the legitimate change agent. Perhaps, empowering the sociometric star to function as a linking pin would intensify Likert and Likert’s concept of interaction-influence network and improve organizational effectiveness in general.”

Now, before I bore you with academic writing, let me proceed with my blog and tell you that I’ve created a Facebook account (but call it “fb;” otherwise, you’d be tagged as newbie) and somehow managed to get addicted to it. Although majority of fb users are non-Filipino, most of them tell me one thing: fb is addicting. I started monitoring my Internet logs and realized “Shoot. I’ve more-than-doubled my regular Internet indulgence” –not just in frequency (number of times I log in to fb) but in duration as well (number of hours I spend online). 

Because this really disturbed me, I started asking friends, who also have fb accounts, WHY IS fb ADDICTING? After all, Friendster has increased its photo limit, improved its blog base, and added applications, which made fb a unique online social network in the first place (The culprit, by the way, is Mark Elliot Zuckerberg; he created Facebook and became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 24). 

Then it hit me. Facebook takes online social networks to the extreme. Not only can you guess at your sociometric star quality via Social Profile and Superlatives. You may “suggest” friendship between people, give a margarita to a friend, and drop an elephant on another. It allows you to “eavesdrop,” because it tracks everything you do and say to friends. Let’s say A and B are friends, and B and C are also friends. Although A is not a friend of C, A can see what’s going on in C’s life (even when C sets his/her account to “private”) whenever B leaves a comment on C, which gets published in B’s “news feed.” If you guessed that this sounds like trouble, then your guess is as good as mine. I’ve had friends delete their accounts or delete some friends off their list because of some conflict arising from fb. I must say that, at one point—okay more than once, I got a bit affected by this same conflict, although I wouldn’t tell you what happened–in fairness to the other persons involved.

Weird? No. There’s nothing wrong with fb, because it DID say that it is a social network. It did not say that it IS a social network for friends only. A social network exists between enemies as well. I’ve had friends on fb (where else?) tell me that fb is a venue for us to gloat over those who’ve stepped on our toes. It makes sense. It’s saying, “Hello, Cheerleader! You broke my heart in high school, because I wore ugly braces and corduroy trousers. But look at me now! I’m Mr. ABC (I’m now known by initials, see) with a kick-ass car and weekends in Oahu.” Or, let’s say you’ve been a wallflower all your life and on your 25^th birthday, your pimples finally decided to take a retirement. All of a sudden your face is everywhere on fb, in a not-so-silent scream to vindicate you of aesthetic injustice in the past. What a validation!

Ergo, my hypothesis: fb is addicting, because each one of us has a need for validation in one way or another. Don’t hate me yet; I admit that I’d been there. And while you may indignantly argue against it, you would blog about how you don’t need validation, and that, my friend, is a validation in itself. Now, if you took all this time to read my lengthy blog about something so mundane and trivial, then it means that you and I share an affinity for understanding the vague. If you feel like doing your own little experiment, log in to Facebook.com. You won’t be disappointed.

Things I know about life I learned from the Web:

In the tradition of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten, I'm posting something that I wrote back in 2005. This was way before I got addicted to Facebook--for which I'm making a new list. (The pathos and conflict on my News Feed puts it in a class of its own. lol.)

Things I know about life I learned from the Web:

Always remember where to use which password

Your history can catch up with you. Delete cookies.

When you get too far from what you’re looking for, you can always hit Home

Too much of a good thing can be hazardous. Share too many files, and you’ll end up God-knows-where.net

Just as you’re updating your antivirus, someone else is coming up with a more dangerous one that can crash your hard drive

If you’re sure about what you don’t want or need, always remember to Empty Recycle Bin to reclaim disk space

Help/Support is not always on real time

If you happen to perform an illegal operation, system will shut down

If at times you find yourself looking at things that don’t seem to appear the way they should, Refresh

Defrag from time to time

The webcam can be positioned to show the best angles. You only see what you want to see

If you don’t have adequate bandwidth, expect some downtime

You have the power to create links, but there are times when your search leads to unavailable. . . and you may need to adjust your security settings

You get more hits from passersby

Your social network profile is sometimes more interesting to your enemies than it is to your friends :P

If you feel that you need an emotional or creative outlet and a place where your opinion matters, where YOU matter, create your own blog

If you need assurance that you’re not alone and that you’re normal, read THEIR blogs

*****

If in doubt, Google