I’VE been talking a lot the past weeks, maybe because of the Davao Media Freedom Day that we organized for the seventh year, or maybe because it’s the start of a new semester. But students are coming, asking questions, especially about social media.
The presidential campaign and eventual win of President Rodrigo Duterte has brought to fore social media and its relationship to what is called the mainstream media, which VoxPop is part of.
Surprising, however, is how many a journalist see social media as a threat that is manned by the uncouth. While many are sharpening their claws on how to take over the Internet or shut up the netizens, I see prospective readers, engagements, audience and this is where the fun part comes. The learning on how to harness and engage the social media while still upholding the tenets of journalism.
Looking back through a lifetime in journalism and the technologies present through the three decades, we see a rambunctious crowd that is virtually the whole world at your doorsteps, praising, chiding, sneering, jeering, sharing. It’s a palengke, it’s loud, it’s dirty, but despite the dirt and the noise, there is freshness, there is variety, and there are interactions between the suki and the buyer, the stall owner and the market administration, the vendor and the supplier, and yes, the ubiquitous caritonero.
And because this is Davao City where those in the upper crust do not live by strict standards where they can only mingle with their ilk, it’s not surprising to bump into a billionaire or two, bantering with their suki. Now, guess what the English word for palengke is? Market. It’s the same market, actually that we are trying to reach out in journalism: The uncouth, the unwashed, the rich, the wage earners, the middle class, the poor, and a smattering of the criminals.
Thus, saying we can take back the Internet because it no longer abides by our own personal standards of how Internet should be is actually sticking up your nose to the audience that you have spent so much to gather and engage.
I still love the print media just as much as I love books, but I know that those who are not picking newspapers and books these days will never be converted to return to print just because you said so or just because you’ve spent so much in advertising to entice them.
While you are reading the newspaper on your hands, there is a new generation of digital natives being born, those who will reach out for their mobiles and their tabs for all information, connection, network, communication, and entertainment that they need.
As I told a group of Mass Communication students who dropped by for some enlightenment last Friday, “We are witnessing a change in the Age of Communication, how it will turn out to be, I don’t have any idea, all I know is that these are exciting times and you, the young, should be on top of this.”
But then comes the realization. Mass Communication and Communication Arts being a regular baccalaureate course is made up of course subjects and textbooks all designed for something that is already in the past. How can a course that is right in the middle of all this revolution that is rapidly changing evolving into something we cannot fully grasp cope up? That will be for the academe to discover.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, we were happy about getting interactions, less than a decade later, the word interactive has become a vague memory that is now rarely used as we are called on for engagements. What buzzword will be coming up next? I don’t know yet. But I just know that it can only get more exciting.
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saestremera@yahoo.com
