Likely unlikely

Imidnightregained my consciousness two hours before and found a different crowd. Still, the spirits have swayed the attendees to imagine intimate friendships – so much for a coffee to gin decision when you haven’t been inebriated for some time. Coffee shops are now a thing in Baguio and La Trinidad, but the old bars in Assumption where we spent our college lives have not lost its charm.

“So who do we believe now?” the younger millennial (or centennial) looked at me like a sage because maybe ten years made the difference on our outlook in life. Believe me, we can sub-categorize millennials further; the ‘Xennials’, or the older millennials who must have breached 35 by now, the “90s kids” like us who had the best childhood, and the “centennials” or the postmillennial generation.

“Definitely not fake news” it hit me that I have spent the last two hours explaining how media works, and how online-trolls become weapons for propaganda – the ‘like-generating-system’ to a web-content which gives the impression that a certain post is popular and therefore publiclyaccepted. The teenagers which must have been tailing us for hours, expressed their distrust to the ‘traditional media’, and felt that the alternative/new media is more organic and tells the real stories. If it wasn’t a face-to-face conversation, we would have bashed each other like cyber-trolls do – but, ‘personal dialogues’ will forever humanize us.

From our conversations, I could clearly imagine the alarming extent of social media as part of their lives. Although I do check my facebook a lot, these teenagers confessed of much worse tendencies like; deleting an uploaded photo when nobody hits a ‘like’ button in ten minutes, choosing a boyfriend who has a good camera “so he could take great FB/Instagram perfect shots”, and even joining a certain Facebook ‘FAME’