Online

Image from We Support A******** Facebook page

The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 is upon us. I guess I can only make fun of myself now, but there is a limit to the number jokes I can make about my cellulite. I, who thrive on sarcasm, have become severely handicapped now that I do not have the option to throw jibes at seemingly lobotomized politicians.

The part on online libel is so scary, it makes Freddy Kreuger look like a friendly burger chain mascot. It is Batas horibilis at its best:

• You can be sued for libel even if you merely imply that an individual, dead or alive, has a real or imaginary defect. This part is so broad you might as well be sued for saying bad things about the man on the moon.

• The Act references a libel law so old, it’s original authors have already decomposed. Eighty years ago, they could not have imagined that toilets in the future would have auto flush much less conceived the free-wheeling nature of the internet.

• The mere act of joking about a person can get you in hot water even if there is no malicious intent. I bet the next bill our senators will file will propose striking out the word “joke” from the dictionary.

• Law enforcers can seize computer data even without a court order at the mere suspicion of your having violated the law. Think action movies where cops burst upon unsuspecting culprits. Why don’t you plaster your face on one of those characters to see what you’d look like in a similar situation so you can plan the perfect hair and makeup before a televised raid.

• You can go to prison for a maximum of 12 years and pay a fine of up to 1 million pesos. Good luck. Philippine prisons are meant to give people a preview of what hell is like.

With the passage of the law, I can envision several scenarios unfolding:

• Millions of Filipinos will be found guilty of libel. Prisons will be so congested it’ll be standing room only. A friend of mine, JL, says this might be the government’s secret strategy for population control. He may have a point. After all, when one inmate farts in a cell of hundreds, quite a handful will pass out. I see the beginning of modern gas chambers.

• To evade capture, Filipinos will invent a new language for Facebook use only to add to the hundreds of dialects our people already have. It’ll be based loosely on beki speak and jeje speak and will be indecipherable unless law enforecers are former bekis and jejemons.

• Virtual invisible ink will be invented. Either that or social media users will just have to learn to communicate meaningfully with ***** and %#@!/*.

• The only images that’ll be shared on Facebook moving forward will be pictures of babies, pets, food and grandmothers knitting. These will be interspersed with emo posts from hopeless lovers pouring their guts out and mixing them with molasses.

• There will be a mass exodus to Cebu where the naturally fun loving Filipinos prefer to be incarcerated. My blogger pal RR says that’s where she’d like to go to become part of the Cebu Dancing Inmates, who at least are allowed some form of fun in jail.

What makes everything doubly sad is that some of our senators apparently signed the bill without reading the revised version in full.

Here’s hoping they move quickly to amend. In the meantime, let’s all pray they have special jail cells for bloggers, posters, likers and tweeters.

A PERSONAL BLOG is like an exhibit no one wants to visit.

That may or may not be true. Your mom, brothers, sisters and maybe 20 other relatives can pack your gallery. It does, however, take a great deal of work to maintain readership even among those loyal to you because they had no choice in having you for a blood relation. So why blog at all?

This was originally a personal blog. Surprisingly, I once found a small audience for it outside of my family, a handful of individuals in varying shades of jadedness, with the same level of acidic insanity. I lost a lot of my readers when life got in the way. The realization dawned that money, not words, feed babies. For many online wordsmiths, money is hard to come by.

I don’t think I’ll ever really quit though. I like it here because I don’t have to struggle and give up who I am to survive. I don’t have to pretend to be anything and there is certainly no requirement to save the world.

Call me selfish. When every other blogger wants to make a difference, I want to keep this small space for my personal mental therapy. Anyone looking for a case subject for a psychology study is welcome to dive into this spontaneous morass from a self-confessed nut case.

Incidentally, during my bouts of lucidity, I do try to save the world too in other virtual spaces not in danger of getting tainted by my cerebral drippings.

I’m a blog addict. The invisible player in my head starts playing “Singin’ in the Rain” when I start customizing themes, widgetizing sidebars and activating plugins, but navigating blogging platforms is the farthest I can go. When techies start going on about PHP, JavaScript, Pearl, MySQL and such, my eyes glaze over. Computer was, after all, one of my subjects of doom in high school.

That’s why when my host started emailing me about backing up my own databases, I dismissed him as a relic from the Tower of Babel. Unfortunately, my inability to decipher tech speak led to me nearly getting killed by a virtual tsunami.

Over the weekend, my sites were stripped clean, hundreds of pages, thousands of visitors, thousands in income, gone with a click of a mouse. The perpetrator who took away three years worth of hard work left his calling card on one of my homepages with the obvious advice, “You must be better next time.”

A thousand thoughts raced through my numb neurons, most of them gibberish, but I had the energy to at least wonder why hackers do what they do. My friend says there are white hats who stick warning notes on poorly secured servers. The black hats are the ones with motivations that are harder to figure out.

Caesar had a reason for crossing the Rubicon. Superman had a reason for going against good judgement and wearing briefs like a highlighter over tights. Heck, even Robert Pattinson probably had a reason for agreeing to portray a one dimensional character in perpetual need of a bath. So why, why, why are there black hats who just break things?

I was a kid who lost a lollipop over the weekend. I wonder if the one who took it is happy now.

My trip to the Cebu Blog Camp 2011 gave me the chance to stretch my limbs and introduce some movement into the rippling folds of fat I’ve accumulated through my stationary work situation. What did I think of it (the camp, not the exercise)? Was it worth the monumental effort of using a crowbar to pry my existence from the computer chair?

The Sugbuanons did not fall below expectations. They delivered exactly what they promised. There was little room for drastic last minute program digressions that would have made visiting bloggers appear polite and pleasant only to leave trails of virtual discontent.

When they said they’d offer insights into photography and travel for bloggers, they did just that. By the end of the day, I was again entertaining the grand delusion that I could ride a bus into the sunset to the distress of my paranoid blood relations, discover hidden retreats where there are no Jollibee outlets, learn to ask “Where is the toilet?” in 101 dialects and add my voice into the teeming mix of Filipino travel bloggers.

I must say though that I did entertain other hopes (a.k.a. ulterior motives) when I attended the camp. Since I work for a foreign internet-based company, I needed to find out if any of the speakers would mention the words internet marketing in the same sentence.

In the various blogging events I’ve attended, the Filipino bloggers I’d met were schooled in the belief that one should blog just because of one’s passions and interests. I’ve never attended an event in Vis-Min that taught bloggers to treat blogging as a real world business. That sometimes makes me think real Filipino internet marketers prefer to stay under the woodwork where they can secretly burp to the tune of five figure dollar incomes, away from the all seeing eye of the internet’s version of Big Brother.

Is internet marketing (IM) a forbidden topic in blogging events? Is IM the equivalent of horror stories told  around campfires? No one really wants to hear them and have nightmares of Big Brother taking away blog page ranks and contextual advertising accounts.

The last two speakers, Coy Caballes and Reuben Licera, social media management experts, came closest to approaching the topic that must not be named. Licera in particular was perhaps the father I never knew and would have given me the right guidance to taking baby steps in the traffic laden streets of Facebook, where crazy virtual drivers on steroids can run you over and cause death by social media, if he had more time.

By the end of the day, I could not resist the itch to ask why no one had yet said anything about future plans of teaching Pinoy bloggers IM that I made an effort to overcome my fear of men in shades and approached Philippine Blog Awards top man Juned Sonido to ask. He said plans for IM seminars might be in the works and that they have not consciously been avoiding the niche at all.

For the record, there are ethical ways of marketing online so future blog campers perhaps do not need to fear getting raided and rounded by Big Brother’s agents in ninja suites. I’m looking forward to those seminars Mr. Sonido.

It felt like I was the last person standing. While the world around me succumbed to the siren song of the curly-haired demigod of geekiness Mark Zuckerberg, I built an anti Facebook fortress where the mere mention of Join, Like or Connect were punishable by beheading.

Last week, a small hole in my wall finally let the virus that is FB in and life as I knew it has never been the same. My former student, Bianca, says my being in FB is the equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling.

The first few days seemed almost like standing trial for crimes against humanity. Those who knew me well enough expressed such great surprise that I was convinced I committed murder. I killed my image… er… principles, I meant my principles.

Of course my friends are all happy that they can now get updates of what I eat, think and the amount of fat I’ve put on since high school but I still feel like writing a ten-page defense.

I need to be in FB because online work is how I put food on the table, send my kid to school and keep the Bureau of Internal Revenue happy. Anyone who’s worked online for a living knows that lighting incense and offering baskets of eggs on the altar of FB’s creator is part of the gig. Competing services and products who already have one million Likes will kill you if you don’t have you’re own page to gather your friends and stalkers.

So how cool is a job that let’s you work in FB? At first it’s as cool as drinking tea in the middle of the Sahara. I don’t just interact with friends, I also create and manage Facebook pages. Finding out where all the buttons, features and functions are and what they do is like reading directions to the comfort room in hieroglyphics in the middle of a maze.

The first time I jumped into the morass of social media, I found myself screaming in the halls of a virtual sanitarium, “…Bleep… you Facebook! Go to …bleep… Facebook!”

My second attempt left me temporarily immobile after 8 hours of trying to decipher geek speak for Like boxes.

My third try killed the nerves in my eyes but not before I managed to create the first FB page I owned with enough bells and whistles to cause brain damage.

Now that that’s done, the next step for me is to figure out the delicate dynamics between Google and Facebook and why Mark Z doesn’t seem to be in speaking terms with the big G. I need to figure this out because some online properties have reportedly been caught between the exchange of bad blood and male bovine manure between the two giants.

Yay, it sure is fun to be in FB.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. I hate having to write for a living. It feels like having ethyl alcohol for breakfast (yes, I’ve tasted it) or having nosebleeds upside down. But I share the fate of Anakin Skywalker. The sequels of my life must have been written way before the prequels and I am doomed to take the form of the looming shadow behind me. Anywhere I go, I am taken seriously only when I parade an esoteric array of words that never cease to impress those who struggle to use cat and dog in the same sentence.

I find commercial writing the hardest to do. When I was still in school, I had a feeling that my papers got As because my teachers involuntarily rolled over and performed dog tricks every time they read words like “traverse,” “tribulation,” and “incontinence.” Business clients are not so easily tricked into parting with their juicy bones. Because their major interest is to sell, they prefer words that even real dogs can understand. When a composition is stripped of its gilded trappings there’s nothing left but either a really understandable paragraph or a naked fool of a sales pitch.

Somehow it helps to be Filipino. I suspect that my husband would rather dance the Can-can than sweat under the midday sun and my mom would rather join a Japanese game show than squeeze some sign of life out of students who are less enlightened than dead fish. But because we are Filipinos, we do what we have to do and just bite the bullet. So Luke, I really am your father.

I am not one given to human idol worship. It’s not because of my fear of being stricken dead by a bolt of lightning even if Sr._____ told me it will happen. I can’t bring myself to idolize anyone because I can’t get rid of the notion that all of us humans are equal when we sit on the toilet.

I came close to bowing in semi worship when I finally met Janette Toral last Friday. She was in CDO for a bloggers’ networking event and I skipped an hour of work just to see her.

Toral is who I want to be when I grow up (I expect to grow a few inches with all the nutrients my doctor has been shoving down my hatch). I admire her not just because she is earning legitimately online, is the veritable first lady of Philippine e-commerce and is devouring the sights and gustatory delights of the country in the course of her work. She’s one of those on top of my list because of her sense of ethics and social responsibility.

I wonder how she began her journey. After more than two years of virtual citizenship, I’m nowhere close to idol status.

*Photo by Chiq Montes

I’ve met them, the bloggers and NETrepreneurs who earn more than the manicured managers who dominate but turn with the wheels of corporate slavery. These virtual citizens who fan themselves with wads of green paper are around us and no one can tell, not even agent Smith of internal revenue.

But these folks didn’t get where they are overnight. It took most of them months and years of constipation, broken nails and bad breath (for not using their mouths often enough) to succeed online. That’s why it’s laughable when my spam box spills over with offers to teach me how to become an online millionaire in ten seconds for $49.

Fortunately, there are guys like Havi Gold who constantly remind us of reality. Every internet newbie should visit his page, itsjustaparody.com before even thinking in $ signs.