SOCIAL MEDIA WAR OF EGOS AND THE BREAKDOWN OF ‘KAPWA’
IWILL probably be bashed again because of this article. But it has to be said.
Social media is supposed to be a venue where kinship and bonds are tightened, and long-lost friends and high- school batchmates found. But at the rate we are going, it is becoming the battleground for sense of community.
The very term “social” evokes a positive feeling where even physical breakthrough has made people reestablish or build new connections. Virtual bridges are constructed to add, befriend, chat and follow.
It is this structured embeddedness of the ethos of community that made lives of so many Filipinos anywhere in the world. We who suffer snail-paced internet connections are in fact one of the most socially wired people. People go to malls to enjoy the free wireless internet connections to be able to chat with relatives and friends abroad, even as internet service providers and mobile companies are outdoing each other in providing cheaper, even free, social media access.
This is because Filipinos have a natural predisposition towards a sense of community. From among the people from different countries, it is us who make instant connections with other Filipinos whom we meet in any place. We make a pained effort to encounter in other places, no matter how remote and contrived, such as having visited his or her hometown, or having a “yaya,” or an uncle marrying someone with the same surname.
Social scientists, particularly those espousing Sikolohiyang Pilipino, “kapwa” or shared self. We celebrate a kind of attitude that looks at people not in a hierarchical sense, but as persons that we need to deal with accordingly, depending on whether they are one of us, or are other people. Unlike Western cultures, where people are individualistic and where boundaries of privacy are well-entrenched and are inviolable, our ethos subsists on community bonds. We live in a culture where a forced imposition of a standard of privacy is interpreted as alienation. We make it our business to intrude into the lives of our friends and neighbors. In our culture, it is not the intrusion that is offensive, but rather when friends and neighbors no longer care about you. Being told that “Wala na akong pakialam sa iyo” (“I simply no longer care”) is almost worldview, for it signals the end of a social relationship.
It is in this social landscape that social media thrived among us. We share memories and bonds through pictures of ourselves and our families, and the food we eat, and the places we visit. Facebook is the new domain upon which we cemented these bonds.
Unfortunately, the technology of social media has also become the domain for political contestations.