Maria Ressa to ARC Young Leaders: ‘Change the world’

MANILA, Philippines - “The first thing you need to do in order to change anything  and I hope you want to change things because there’s so much that needs to be changed in our country  is to tell people the way you see the world, to communicate,” said veteran journalist Maria Ressa at a recent gathering of 40 youth leaders from various state universities and government-funded colleges.

Ressa, CEO and executive director of pioneering website Rappler.com, was one of the special guest speakers at the second ARC Young Leaders Camp held at the First Pacific Leadership Academy in Antipolo City.

The camp is the flagship corporate social responsibility program of Asiawide Refreshments Corp. (ARC), the Philippine licensed bottler of popular soft drink brand RC Cola in the Philippines.

With a journalism career highlighted by almost two decades with CNN, Ressa cited how technology has profoundly changed the way people communicate, and the impact that it’s had on public lives.

The young delegates, themselves part of the current digital generation, listened intently as Ressa recounted her experience delivering breaking news for CNN about the tumultuous birth of Timor Leste — she reported to the world from atop a cargo container using a battery-powered broadband unit because there was no electricity in the area that was “almost burned to the ground.”

Notwithstanding such triumphs in the news field, she had a nagging feeling she was just writing about what other people were doing. Although she found the stories fascinating and learned a lot from them, she felt she wasn’t making much of an impact anymore. So in 2005, she came back to the country, deciding that “the Philippines was home for me.” Ressa became head of ABS-CBN news and looks back on two momentous campaigns that the department initiated under her watch: citizen journalism and the election vigilance campaign “Ako ang Simula.”

After six years, she once again put her professional life at stake when she left the TV station and established the online news network Rappler, believing in the power of social media to create ripples of change. One of the well-received portions of her speech was when she introduced to the students the concept of the “superhuman organism.”

“Can you predict real world outcome based on human behavior on social media?” she asked. As she showed them social network maps of people’s behavior on Twitter that formed patterns similar to the Rorschach test, she explained that the resulting images were generated by Rappler’s proprietary program from Twitter hashtags during significant global and national events such as the Fukushima reactor incident, the US presidential elections, the Corona impeachment trial, and even Jessica Sanchez’s finals on American Idol. The graphs are visualizations of people transmitting information, forming little cells where other netizens gravitated for news updates.

According to Ressa, 33 million Filipinos are now hooked up to the web. “We are the social media capital network of the world,” she stated, predicting that the coming May polls will be the true first “social media elections.” Despite speed lags and limited technological access for a large part of the population, the journalist said that today, there are “many more of us [social media users]… bringing down dictators and spreading emotions, spreading courage.”

Ressa expressed hope that the ARC camp delegates would help change the world in positive ways. “It’s great that ARC has brought you together as young leaders — take advantage of it,” Ressa said, following her statement with a challenge that was also a plea: “You are the leaders of tomorrow. Please make this a better world than the one you inherited.”