What I wrote on June 13, 2013 for my first GUT FEEL column
“Why do we have that gut feeling, that intuition, that something is going wrong and still we remain mum about it? Often, we are simply intimidated by the lack of acceptable solution that we can offer. We refuse to become harbinger of doom.
“The prevalence of social media has significantly reduced the fear of castigation for spilling out alarming or unwanted information. In response, the traditional mass media are adjusting fast to the situation. The line that separates the tabloid from the mainstream is vanishing as e-media grows in dominance. Readers of print are fast becoming endangered species.
“Subscribers do not say what they are missing from the newspapers that they read. It is the online community that informs them what they are missing.”
And now
News now comes mainly from social media. In the country, both print and television have gone digital to get their share of the market audience of some 82 million smartphone and 74 million internet users. A Pisay graduate and activist, Obet Verzola, who is considered the father of Philippine e-mail was ahead of most in predicting that the internet would level the playing field of information to some degree but not entirely. State-protected ownership remains crucial. A new elite of application owners who design desired algorithms and data mining cookies have forced traditional advertising into their platforms and all these for the big-time business of manipulating wants for consumer products. This is the kind of money that now sustains both mainstream and tabloid news online. The pandemic restrictions have further strengthened this system with calculated innovation of applications and devices to suit the new normal that seems to be establishing permanence in our lives. Bloggers and vloggers of all colors and intent are collecting followers and making money while providing a wider selection of information sources and creating new role models for the younger generation.
While internet platforms enable mass consciousness, virtual interaction has provided individualism a convenient mask of false sense of social being. Slactivists triggered social upheavals but extremists were the more committed on the ground. Traditional social values are losing their value. In social media trolling is posited and defended as freedom of expression no matter how it ruins persons and avoids truth. In this kind of environment where information is disseminated in speed and range unequal in the history of civilization gut feeling is the most that digitally connected persons can rely on through the maze of understanding events, real and make-believe. This is GUT FEEL now.
