The old notion that digital content does not reach the masses is no longer that clear-cut. This is an important thing to note in our campaign to find progressive alternatives to Big Media as a setter of trends and an originator of ideas in our chronically backward society. For it is not so much the poor masses as those who wield influence via their means to access the tools to publish and propagate ideas that constitute the most cost-effective target in our campaign to rid ourselves of the hold Big Media has on our minds. In our latest initiative, we encourage you, the Filipino, to vote with your remote.
That target influential sector in our society, which includes not only bloggers and active Facebook "activists" but even ordinary users of social-networking applications who regularly make "status updates" or "tweets" that constitute the bulk of the Filipino wired elite, are emerging as the most potent channel for distributing and propagating ideas. Most of the unwired poor have relatives working as overseas foreign workers (OFWs) abroad, most of whom regularly access the internet and use social networking sites to keep in touch. They are the conduits that channel ideas locked in digital content to the unwired masses using traditional methods (verbal, snail mail, etc).
The trouble is that if this sector of society remains in the grips of the influence of the sort of vacuous content and hearsay "news" routinely unleashed by Big Media (which for the most part acquired their "protector" and "hero" status as a result of the obsolete "laban" call of the 80's) via their capital-intensive channels (broadcast, print, well-funded websites, and cadre of Establishment Bloggers) then we end up with an otherwise clued-in sector of our society re-distributing the same crap.
The key to the transformation of the information dissemination landscape (the meme pool) of Philippine society lies in how we, the ordinary Filipinos, process information as individuals and amongst our immediate circles of family and friends.
As such, we need to:
- Encourage more original thinking and less of the blind regurgitations of the ill-thought-out "ideas" thrown out by Big Media, moron politicians, and Old Fart demagogues like Abe Margallo and Ellen Tordesillas.
- Encourage more thinking that is independent of the Jedi Mind Tricks that clever marketing unleashes on Filipino consumers -- the kinds of things that induce wasteful and often damaging levels of consumption in silly seasons like Valentine's Day and Christmas.
- Encourage a more deliberate approach to taking "action" to replace the passive-aggressive style that we have grown comfy with over the centuries. Filipinos are not exactly renowned for groundbreaking initiatives and ventures. That is because conformity rather than inquiry is ingrained deeply into our psyche from an early age. This is what makes Filipinos particularly susceptible to the mass hypnosis of marketers, politicians, and religious leaders.
Note how the above three imperatives directly address fundamental issues in our society that have served as formidable roadblocks in our tired march to prosperity.
Lack of imagination
Once an idea has been simplified, encapsulated, and institutionalised, it tends to entrench itself in the collective psyche so much so that even its slide into irrelevance does not reduce its efficacy as a tool for misguiding the public. A good example of this is the "Laban" (fight) rhetoric of whoever happens to be the "Opposition" camp of the moment that came into vogue in the Aquinoism of the 1980's.
Suffice to say, the concept of laban as a driver of politics has become more of a disruption than a true agent of productive change. Its proponents lead people to believe that there is some sort of "fight" to "continue" against the ill-defined bogeymen of "corruption" and "injustice". It encourages an emphasis on tired displays of hollow-headed "indignation" that often culminate in no-results "rallies" and "movements" that do not add to our already sparse social and cultural capital base.
We must be wary of ideas that are too-readily and too-easily expressed. Such ideas are irresistible to a one-dimensional mind devoid of imagination. When an idea has achieved a status where a mere hand gesture, simple symbol, or splash of colour evokes virulent emotion or fluffy but seductive poetry, beware. Those are the unmistakable signs that thinking around said idea has stagnated or stopped altogether and any action that is evoked by said idea can potentially contribute to no more than stagnation, degeneration, or even damage to an entire society.
Herd mentality
It doesn't take much to lead a herd of cattle into the slaughterhouse. Only two key ingredients need to be present -- loud noises (the shouting and galloping of mounted herdsmen), lack of options (the system of pens and corrales designed to funnel animals in single-file en masse into the killing facility). Everything from the celebrities we swoon over, the politicians we "take initiative" to support, down to our purchasing and consumption habits are influenced by the mind games of the clever marketer. It depends on which side of the economic equation you are. Producers provide the options and the stimulus, and consumers happily provide the meat that producers feed on.
Unlike cattle, however, people have the capacity to create new options for themselves. The only hindrance to this alternate life we could lead is our willingness to think. A credit to the animals we feed on is that they are physiologically unable to think and, as such, their ambling on to their own death can be excused. This highlights the outrage of our situation as a society of human beings. Despite our ability to think, we refuse to do so. In effect, whilst we routinely wax poetic and rhetoric about the "stranglehold" on our society enjoyed by the oligarchs, "imperialists", the wealthy, and other strawmen we've come up with to embody our collective excuses for our inability to prosper, the truth we are sadly unwilling to face is quite simple: we happily subject ourselves to their influence.
Why for example are Valentine's Day and Christmas such strong motivators to buy? Step back and look around at the blatant mind tricks played on willing cows by the great herdsmen of our society:
We are bad sons, daughters, wives and husbands whenever we fail to give "gifts" during these "special" occassions.
These occassions are seasons of "love" and "giving".
Love is best expressed through giving.
It doesn't take a degree in nuclear physics in order to see the stupidity of the above memes and to challenge them by asking the right questions:
Haven't I been good in many other ways?
Can't we be loving and giving the rest of the 363 days in the year?
If I don't give you chocolates in a red box that is made in China, does that mean I do not love you?
And of course this one:
Who is it really that stands to profit mightily from the propagation of the above hare-brained ideas?
The behaviour of the popular news program Bandila during the Christmas season presents a good example of the routine insult to our collective intelligence that Big Media delivers. Bandila can on one instant run a segment on a sobering story about tragic loss of life involving, say, the most recent mudslide or politically-motivated civilian massacre then, and in the next second play the unmistakable jingling of bells that backdrop the moronic countdown to Christmas Day that becomes part of the news team's closing script at the end of every edition of the show during the silly seasons. It doesn't really take much to put two-and-two together. Christmas is the annual bonanza that retailers and their marketers salivate over during the other 10 months of the year. The advertising minutes they buy are a key contribution to ABS-CBN's billions in annual revenues. And of course, their taipan owners are routine golf buddies of our Media emperors. Christmas is good business and, indeed, what is good for ABS-CBN's advertisers is good for ABS-CBN's shareholders.
How "independent" is the Philippine Media -- those self-described "heroes" of the laban "revolution" in the heady days of the 1980's? Consider that question and think.
Mediocrity of purpose
Filipinos are the Xerox machines of humanity. If the Energizer Bunny were a photocopier, he'd be branded tatak Pinoy. Filipinos copy and copy and copy. In fact we make copies of copies and copies of those copies as well. The sad thing is that despite being the Energizer Bunny of copycats, that volume does not necessarily translate into quality.
Whereas the Japanese knock-offs of guns captured or acquired from Dutch would-be colonists eventually became superior to the originals and went on to arm the fighting men of the first modern imperial power in the Far East, the most renowned knock-off of the Filipino -- the jeepney -- stands today as a sad testament to the "ingenuity" it once symbolised. So too have we all but perverted many relics of nationalist sentiment that once drove us across what at the time seemed to be significant milestones in our history. Next time you find yourself standing in the middle of Ayala Avenue waving a fist or chanting a slogan you picked up from a friend's Facebook status update, think to yourself, "What is it exactly that I am doing?" and "What am I doing this for?".
The thing with copying (specially when it involves habitual copying of copies) is that small errors accumulate at every iteration. This is the kind of progressive and steady degeneration that plowed the jeepney way below the bottom-most layer of automotive engineering standards and reduced our politics of heroes, bread, and circuses to, well, the amusing side show that it is today. You'd think our "free press" would have stepped up at some point to stand tall as the reality check on the degeneration of the Pinoy's thinking faculties, a-la "wisdom of the crowd". It didn't. Instead, the Media community themselves hopped onto the various bandwagons of dysfunctional thinking that characterised much of what drove Philippine history in the last two decades since that seminal "revolution". Rather than taking an outside independent perspective, the Media early on became an insider, enmeshing itself in the vast network of mutual back-scratching that is today's Establishment.
Instead of stepping up to being a key contributor to enriching the national "debate", the Philippine Media facilitated its further degeneration into a cesspool of regurgitated inbred ideas delivered by mutual-high-fiving Noli de Castro knock-offs.
* * *
Transformation in our sad society necessarily involves the extraction and destruction of the malignant cancer that imprisons the collective intellect. The Philippine Media forms a large part of the information dissemination infrastructure of Philippine society. The good news is that like political power, its influence is hinged upon its constituency's vote. Indeed, the forces that shape the powers that control minds is far more subject to democratic mandate than the forces that shape politics. With political power we vote only a fixed number of times over a decade. On the other hand with the powers that shape our Media, we can vote from our living rooms everyday. And all it takes is a flick on our remotes or a click on our mice -- powerful gestures that consume far less energy and deliver more bang towards progress than a wave of the fist (or an "L"-shaped hand) in the next Manila street rally. With every turn we make away from the vacuous content of Big Philippine Media, we grow a bit smarter.
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