The “empowerment” of dimwits
April 2nd, 2009 by benign0I 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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April 2, 2009 at 9:06 am
And *that* is the best photo of Einstein ever.
Benny, don’t you have a twitter account? ;)
April 3, 2009 at 1:05 am
It wasn’t that long ago when Benign0 disparaged blogs as a medium in comparison to websites.
April 3, 2009 at 1:29 am
cvj,
only shows that opinions do undergo evolutionary processes as well. give him a break.
April 3, 2009 at 2:40 am
Jon, I have neither a Twitter nor a Plurk account…
I once told a former boss of mine (back in the early days) how the quality (and value) of his emails deteriorated sharply since he got a Blackberry, though, on the other hand, the volume of his emails increased.
That’s kind of where I’m coming from. ;)
April 3, 2009 at 9:04 am
And as a tech frontliner, I *kinda* get what you mean.
I remember that when I first signed up for Twitter it all seemed kinda dumb. And then the early adopter people signed up, including some of the bigwigs in the Microsoft programming world (which is my world), and then being able to talk to them semi-personally became a great thing.
And then the emo kids came into it and all hell almost broke loose — Twitter was only saved by its own failure (e.g., downtimes) which convinced the emo kids that Plurk is the place to be.
April 3, 2009 at 11:32 am
Yeah, like any other communications technology, it is good when used for collaborating on productive stuff but a time-waster when used for exchanging meaningless banter. Just like the humble telephone — indispensible in the business world but a menace to a household of teenagers.
April 3, 2009 at 3:27 am
Aha! Getting old are you, benigs? Can’t cope with new tech already.
Actually, this is a non-issue. Why? Technology, once its made available to the public and gets adopted by the great unwashed is what the Profit and Loss is all about.
The cycle of new tech:
1. the early adapters -> very expensive.
2. the middle triers -> market it big time to recover the R & D costs.
3. the mass production -> Profit$$$ galore
To you, the empowering of the dimwits might be quite obnoxious. But to the developers, its harvest time!!!
April 3, 2009 at 4:59 am
The more dimwits the better.
The brilliance of supernovas wouldn’t be as appreciated in a dark sky as when it is surrounded by a cabbage patch of lesser stars.
April 3, 2009 at 7:38 pm
That’s a sentence muttered by those who are afraid to be alone.
April 3, 2009 at 11:56 pm
UP:
Doesn’t matter – alone or not, afraid or not, the supernova is still luminous.
April 4, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Supernova my eye, a luminous energy of destructive explosion akin to scattered brain, heheh.
April 3, 2009 at 5:45 am
Here’s a snippet of wisdom to live by:
Never buy Release 1.0. ;)
April 3, 2009 at 8:19 am
Scrolls were the best!
April 3, 2009 at 9:00 am
LOL, reminds me of that YouTube video where monks had to call “tech support” when they were moving from scrolls to books. :D
April 3, 2009 at 10:49 am
The medium does give room for misinterpretation given that one is limited to 140 characters.
April 3, 2009 at 7:45 pm
A handful of blogpost contributions to FV getting close to 140 words are badly a-twittered :roll: ; and this is as they argue against an extra year :neutral: for Pinas elementary school students.
April 3, 2009 at 11:39 am
I did not find his comment offensive in any way.
So why did MLQ have to apologize?
Didn’t like the negative publicity? Eager to please? Working on acquiring a certain demographic?
Okay. I get it.
Good Move. A donation to an OFW fund would have nailed it!
See you at Starbucks :)
April 9, 2009 at 11:28 am
MLQ only manifested another Filipino unique trait…. BALIMBING and SIGURISTA!
June 22, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I beg to differ, Syl. It is the concept of “balimbing” which is limiting by itself, and is frequently used by our culture to coerce someone to take sides…when there are no sides to be taken at all. The wider your grasp of things, the more you would realize that the whole of reality is a multi-faceted dimension. It is taking one side of it, which would cause you to lose your grasp of it entirely.
The narrow one, of course, since he/she could only achieve one side of it would hold-on to that side, and not only that, would encourage others as well to maintain that side because she, by her own self, is unsure too and insecure of her own position and can only achieve some measure of reassurance if she could convince another to remain in that angle.
This is easily done by namecalling (i.e. balimbing, coward, chicken etc.)
The encompassing one knows too well…there are no sides at all. Life and everything else you hold to be real would cease to exist if there was any “side” at all. We merely invented that as a postulate to a presupposed axiom so we could measure what is fundamentally unmeasurable.