The game has changed. With this whole Golf Course affair, local Politicians have learned the power of Blogs and by extension, a taste of the possibilities that New Media as a whole has to offer. The general public’s awareness of blogs and the power of the internet has likewise changed. Pretty soon, it won’t be just Mar Roxas vying for bloggers’ attention. So, “Are Filipinos Ready for Mar Roxas?”

I digress.

With this new found attention, quite naturally, misconceptions, fear, uncertainty and doubt come into the fray. People are naturally afraid of things they’ve no understanding of. The last time there was an explosion of content was when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.

New Media— the entirety of digital communications from blogs to podcasts and everything in between has transformed every single person to be a vector of creativity and information. All made possible by the coming of the Internet. The bar to become published has been put so low that everyone can say, do and publish anything to their hearts content and open to a global audience. Limited only of course by their ability to go online.

Yes, that includes that Sex video you have stashed, which may already be on your friendly neighborhood porn site and makes the US$5 Billion dollar bailout the Porn Industry “wants” quite humorous.

The new world order has changed everything. Comments on a blog for example can affect and even change a blogger’s opinion. It can shape opinion as much as a blogger’s. Comments can facilitate a meeting of the minds too. The rapid response is meant to open communication and debate.

That’s part of the game.

YOU can dispute the blogger, just as freely HE or SHE can refute you. Your work, both blogger’s and comment’s is exposed to the world and they can all equally call on you for being stupid or hail you as a genius. All in a matter of minutes, probably both.

The zen part is that there is no control and everyone is in control. In a word: Laissez-faire.

One good post came from Bencard recently in his Thoughts On The Gaza Crisis and The Mindanao Conflict. And I’m sure Sparks is fuming somewhere, ready to argue.

Are you afraid now? Governments and others too timid or too scared to be without the old generally accepted rule book, they naturally fight this new order.

On the other hand this whole Golf affair is a birth pain for bloggers. How do we interact with a low tech universe? How do we converse with the Real World when seemingly we both are talking different things and naturally both are misunderstood? How do we make them understand, that on the Interwebs, Credibility is the Coin by which we converse?

Ding over at midfield makes an excellent point:

My own sources inside VGCC now tell me that not a few Club members feel the Dela Pazes, while “being fast on the draw to report their side in the blogosphere, and thus gained immediate public sympathy cannot now escape the reality of their own provocative misbehaviour.”

Truth does always emerge and the Pangandamans may really have “acted in self defense.”
The question that the courts will now have to decide IS how valid the self defense argument really is and when such action became excessive to the point of how gravely Bino Dela Paz and his 56-year-old father were mauled.

One past president of VGCC told me: “Nakatagpo sila ng katapat (They found their match).”

Perhaps.

Secretary Pangandaman found it necessary to directly appeal to bloggers to stop condemning him and his sons, even intimating that his own aging father “was upset by the scandal.”
This writer grants the Pangandamans their bruised feelings, if not anger at bloggers.

But such is the public arena, the Filipino public in particular, that personages of rank in the government serving are expected to hold to higher standard of proper conduct in due respect to their exalted stations.

Let hatchets be buried with everyone drawing the necessary lessons in that basic school subject called Good Manners and Right Conduct.

[update-2: fixed link to Ding's Midfield. My apologies, just noticed it.]

There has been a LOT of “I told you so” comments on this whole golf issue. Maybe they haven’t heard of Sun Tzu who wrote a military treatise and argued that “Therefore one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful.”

Anybody can raise an issue and anybody can respond appropriately for or against that issue. Anybody can discern crap. A blogger’s post can readily be judged wrong or hailed right. Inevitably, facts come out as the issue is discussed and the reader can easily discern the right from the wrong. The aggrieved party is already given justice if he proves the other party wrong.

People do this all the time.

A few days ago, on Big Mango, I sarcastically blogged against a silly little issue that Panay Times posted saying, “Congress should regulate Use of the Internet”. @sofimi in a comment to that post, was of course correct. We shouldn’t waste brain power on stuff like that. I’d like to share the video that @sofimi directed to my attention to:

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

And you know what? Blogs and New Media calls for good old fashioned thinking, reasoning and reading. That’s another power of New Media. It requires people to think and to discern.

updated added link to above cartoon: xkcd’s “duty calls“.

Most apt, wouldn’t you say?

If you’ve gotten this far, I’m sure you’ve read ”Ilustrados Bravos!“ from DJB that came out a few days back, he wrote:

We are the carriers of mental virii. The kind that infect the brains of readers and listeners such that they cannot but think the thing their own and gladly, if secretly, surrender to the logic of being convinced, of being inspired and energized to act, to think, to feel. Or to violently disagree. But do it well, Blogger. Do it beautifully! For there is precious little bandwidth here for the trivial, the banal, the boring, the vain, the boorish, the abusive, the automatic. It is the fittest meme that will inherit the earth. Make yours so, give us your best, as we all plunge back into the common dream…

Most elegant and spot on, wouldn’t you say?

If you want more good stuff, go on to Smoke, (if you haven’t already), Rom wrote “It’s Your Blog” and makes a very good point on what makes this whole blogging scene so much smarter and so much better.

UPDATE-3: Click here to download this post in PDF format.

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