I recently skimmed through noted Filipino blogger Manuel L Quezon III’s apology for an apparently ill-thought-out remark he published on his Facebook page that is related to this whole Chip Tsao triviality currently raging across the Philippine blogosphere. So armed with just a superficial knowledge of this little affair I might step up and throw in my two cents and express my categorical opinion that MLQ3 need not have apologised.

Of course me being normally bigger than most issues thrown around in the Philippine blogosphere, I shall take it upon myself to :

:D step back from the noise of the riffraff;

:D extend a hand to hold for those who want to accompany moi into the more insightful world of bigger pictures and bigger ideas; and,

:D simplify as only I can do.

[By the way, I hope all of us here have learned something from all the "debate" surrounding this trivial subject by recognising the satire in my being my biggest fan (things need to be spelled out to small minds).]

So yes, for me it’s quite simple:

MLQ3’s remark was made on a microblog functionality within that renowned coven of bright bulbs – the venerable social networking “utility” known as Facebook.

Posting a glib one-liner on a microblog facility such as Twitter and the equivalents of such thingies in social networking sites like Facebook (they’re called “status updates” over there) is the online equivalent of a half-processed mumble, quip, or shout out — what we sometimes call “thinking out loud” in the flesh-and-blood bricks-and-mortar world. Verbalisations that we make half-consciously, say, while hunched in front of our PC’s at work to break the din of keyboard clatter surrounding us follow (or rather originated) this principle. In the real world similarly (or, again, originally), we’d wait for a witty comeback, admonition, reality check, or an equally half-processed clarification from a workmate within earshot of said verbalisation. The Net is just another medium to propagate these very human communication reflexes, only it is one that vastly multiplies the scale of that “earshot”.

The “coolness” of typing 140-odd-character brainwaves on a text field upon which million-dollar Web brands are being built lies in the on-going democratisation of publication and syndication of one’s “ideas”. In the same way that the conventional “blog” has undercut the 500-year monopoly that edited and peer-reviewed work enjoyed over publication and afforded vast powers to a large slice of humanity who are able to cobble together a paragraph or two of the written word, microblogging now threatens to dilute the power of structured articulation in conventional blogs. Microblogging now makes publication stars of even the most inarticulate buffoons.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that global warming was an unforeseen effect of the democratisation of mechanised transport at the turn of the 20th Century. In the 1920’s, only the wealthiest of the lot could afford a car. Today $1000 motorised wheels “empower” the humblest of rags vendors in the streets of Mumbai.

For now, however, we can only speculate as to what the unforeseen effects that democratisation of idea propagation will unleash upon humanity. One thing’s for sure, even the most dimwitted of humanity’s lot will feel “empowered” by these new “technologies”. So my guess is that the effect will in principle be the same — pollution leading to environmental degradation. But the environment I refer to here is different from the environment that waste from the burning of petroleum is devastating today. The environment that will be the new frontier for human degradation will be our own minds – specifically those of our children who will be increasingly “empowered” to “express” without having to bother with the responsibility of exercising a bit of thinking and the application of a bit of substance in what is expressed.

So Manolo, you of all people should be given a break. After all, you played with a toy that by its very nature does not demand much evolutionary development in its users. Even Albert Einstein was entitled to a loud fart every now and then, wasn’t he? ;)

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