“(Cyberspace) is a non-space that is everywhere and yet nowhere.” — Companion to Postmodernism, ‘Cyberspace’ entry, p. 219
“Everybody’s clever nowadays.” — Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
If we believe Socrates’ assertion that, “the unexamined life is not worth living” then we must spend most of it in introspection, pondering the big questions like the meaning or purpose of our existence, or make sense of the stuff that’s marked our passage on this Earth so far. The question, of course, is why would or should we do that? After all, the accumulation of wisdom does not necessarily bring happiness. Even philosophers would admit that. (Montaigne wrote, “I have seen in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred plowmen wiser and happier than the rectors of the university.”) And, really, who has the time for all that these days? Or, even more important, what’s the fun in that?
In fact, our lives today are far from being unexamined. We’ve invited everyone else to scrutinize us as well. We update our status messages and upload our vacation pictures on social networking sites like Facebook, describe what we ate for breakfast or the other minutiae of our lives as “tweets” on others like Twitter (in 140 characters or less, of course) and pour out perhaps at greater length our thoughts on politics, fashion, food or even just our broken hearts on blogs. If we’re pissed off, we can rant as much as we want and, more often than not, provoke a reaction. In cyberspace, everyone can (potentially) hear you scream.
Unlike wisdom and the study of philosophy, the accumulation of comments on your posts and the online traffic it generates on our sites does bring—if not happiness—some measure of comfort. Think of it like a group hug—no matter if it’s from friends or strangers, it’s the validation and assuagement that counts. It’s also supposedly more fun. Why else would everyone from your 12-year old brother to your mom be on it as well? (Wouldn’t most family reunions be better off as well if we only needed to face the rest of our brood as avatars?)
To gain a better understanding of just how much the Internet and social media has had an impact on our ever increasingly examined lives, we asked the folks in charge of convergent communications at Globe Telecom about their observations on the phenomenon. They’ve actually coined a term for it: “Generation Share”. According to their Social Media Manager Carla Jimenez, it’s markedly different from previous youth groupings like Gen X or Y in that technology has given the current crop more power in getting their say in. It’s not that anyone can stop them anyway. “We find ourselves more as observers more than anything,” says Jimenez, citing that they do keep a close eye on the conversations that occur on their fan pages on various online social media/forums. “We listen and try to figure out ways to talk to them.” (By “them” that means us — consumers or “subs” in the parlance of the telecommunication corporate community.)
“It’s more dynamic because of the interaction. The messages evolve because (we) directly engage our consumers,” says Jas Eusebio of Globe’s Digital Marketing team. “We always try to figure out ways to talk…and relate to them.” Of course, this means of course that the “they” are more demanding, can’t be bothered to look up something as dated as a Frequently-Asked-Questions or “FAQ” sheet, and require individual responses to all their queries. But it also means that they are more active in shaping the services offered to them. “Anybody can be heard. Anybody can be a critic. And we listen to all of them, and we do what we can to keep up and make sure that we are putting out there is meaningful to them, because that’s the only way to have a real conversation.”
Which leads to the question about the meaning of value in cyberspace. “We are now living, we are told, in a knowledge economy. In the past, the key to wealth was a plentiful supply of labor and control of natural resources,” writes Kieran O’Hara, a senior research fellow in the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group at the University of Southhampton and co-scriptwriter of the game Tomb Raider 4. “In this new world, the important source of competitive advantage for a developed country is no longer raw materials or labor, but knowledge: bright ideas, smart designs, clever organization…. The new economy demands knowledge workers who create value and wealth, not with traditional money capital, but with intellectual capital…” But in countries in the latter category like ours, wherein most of the population is not yet wired to the Internet, it remains to be seen if it’s not a mobocracy that’s emerging but rather a new aristocracy—one equipped with little more than a digital camera, a computer with an Internet connection and whole lotta opinions (if not familiarity with the grammatical concept of the subject-verb agreement).
However, as Jimenez and Eusebio have made clear, they’re not one to ignore what’s happening online, even if it may only be the opinions of select group in society. They simply can’t afford to. “Generation Share” may be comparatively few but they are influential even if we were just to examine their collective effect on traditional broadcast and print media and how they do business. To remain relevant one needs to have a strong online presence: to ignore this is risky business. It’s worth taking into consideration Manuel Quezon III’s assertion that the Internet will not help elect our next government leaders but it will surely be more effective in disparaging the reputations of candidates and perhaps derailing their bids.
The power of the Internet is still something yet to be determined. As Veca Villafuerte-Keeler, who handles Globe’s Brand PR, tells me: “The Internet is what people make it. It operates by a different set of standards than other media, and those standards can change at the drop of a hat. You start off by drawing a line in the sand and whichever side you choose to step on is the side you are on. But later on as opinions come in and views are aired, the line gets blurred and you may find yourself having to move it someplace else. I suppose that’s the nature of social media. It is shaped by those that speak out and use it. And for those of us who work to provide services to these people, it’s incumbent upon us to track those trends—no matter how whimsical they may appear to be. We want to listen, we want to hear. We want to know how to give you things you will really value.”
But far from being facetious, recent events abroad like the Tehran riots or locally like Typhoon Ondoy has proven “Generation Share” a force that has the potential for positive action. As the Philippine Star’s Audrey N. Carpio wrote for popular online site BoingBoing: “…many lives were undoubtedly saved through information dissemination, random, repeated and retweeted as they may be. Through a shotgun marriage of new and old media, all the streaming online updates and SMS messages were filtered through (RockEd’s) Gang Badoy, a social advocate, who took it upon herself to hit the FM airwaves and broadcast the news she was receiving: which places needed help, who was about to give birth, and whether crocodiles really escaped from the zoo.” Or even Globe’s Bangon Pinoy Twitter initiative, a first-of-its-kind social media fundraiser tied in with the telco’s massive program to help rehabilitate and rebuild stricken areas; through this effort Globe helped the online community reach out to typhoon victims, simply through use of a hashtag—a community-driven convention for adding additional context attached to a tweet—so that a donation would be made to a fund to help the victims.
Also, the recent nomination of the Internet for a Nobel Peace Prize was backed by the editors of Wired magazine as well luminaries such as 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and stylemaker Giorgio Armani. As the former says in her endorsement: “The spreading of the news about the Tehran riots, however— that raced at a pace of 220,000 tweets per hour—was way too overwhelming to make us doubt that it would have been possible without the internet. It is not a coincidence that during the first trials against the protesters, the attorney general accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of conspiring against the establishment.” Not faint praise for a medium that also gave us the “RickRoll” or popularized a keyboard-playing cat.
If there’s anything “Generation Share” has to offer, it’s everything. As writer/commentator Douglas Rushkoff has pointed out, the true commodity in cyberspace isn’t the stuff that’s on offer—it’s the users. Not even Warhol’s quip about how in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes is automatically applicable here just because who knows the exact value or measure of a minute is in a “non-place that is everywhere and yet nowhere.” We’re the superstars and we don’t need the patronage of Svengalis to create or re-create ourselves.
And, as even a cursory search through the web will demonstrate, there’s always a potential audience out that’s only too eager to examine our lives for us. Why? Well, that’s entertainment.