The Philippine Online Chronicles

I was asked by Adam David to write a critical discussion of a series of Facebook photos that is being posted by someone who is in our common friends list. This person, who for the purposes of this analysis shall remain unnamed, has been posting photographs of himself in various stages of undress.

These photographs, regularly posted as profile pictures, have irked quite a number of people due to their nature. They always show the person half-naked (or more) and on a number of occasions have featured the person to a state of undress that displays his pubic hair. Given that Facebook is such a public space, this has inspired a number of vehement reactions, one of the most memorable I heard being, “P*%#@$ina, hindi ako naglo-log in sa Facebook sa umaga para makita ang bulbol ni_________.(I don’t log into Facebook in the morning to see ______’s pubes.)” Previous to witnessing this behavior, these people did not know how to block updates from specific people on the home page, but this has led to their learning how to do this.

One is left wondering, why would someone impose this behavior on other people? Why would one subject others to such images? The “friendship” implicit in being a Facebook friend is tenuous, with our making friends left and right with old friends, former classmates, and friends of friends. But shouldn’t that mean that we are more careful of the things we say and post, because we are subjecting people to ourselves?

On the contrary, the internet has enabled all kinds of impositions. From SPAM filling our inboxes (mine regularly selling me those little blue pills) links leading us to porn sites, to pop-up boxes (which have thankfully been generally blocked by newer browsers) directing us to porn sites, to all kinds of other racy NSFW content. Just as an example, I was surfing the net in my teenage sister’s room and reading an article when an ad popped up showing a busty woman removing her top. While I am no saint and do rather enjoy watching busty women taking off their tops, this isn’t the content that I would like to partake in when in front of my sister.

These kinds of impositions though, aren’t user-created content. The SPAM, the pop-ups and misleading links, and the things we don’t want to click into but get directed to when we click-through are created for a different reason though. Obviously we draw a line between these things and the kinds of things that fellow users post online.

When observing user-created content, what we see is the proliferation of content that makes one question the dividing lines between what is personal and what is public. One can recall a time when people would have second thoughts about taking sexually explicit photos because one would have to get them developed. But in the digital age this content goes well beyond, as we have witnessed the various “sex scandals” caught on various kinds of recording media, from the Paris Hilton handycam night-vid shots, to the grainy Katrina Halili / Hayden Kho, to the unknown call center cellphone camera-captured sex scenes that are easily accessible online.

With the “democratization” of technology one witnesses a deluge of content. In this deluge the Sturgeon Law holds true, 90% of everything is crap. At this point I would like to make clear that “democratization,” as used here is in quotation marks to acknowledge the limited nature of this democratization. Of course the majority of people in this country have limited access to the internet, to digital media, to regular updates or Facebook. But within these limited parameters, we see that technology has enabled a more than exponential and phenomenal increase in the production of user-created content. Of course people start out with sex, (and can’t you hear someone singing, “The Internet is for Porn” right now?) but inevitably it would be used as a way to connect with people and attempt to share one’s life and happenings with them, thus the popularity of our social networking sites, Facebook being today’s dominant.

Well before Facebook and Friendster people were already sharing what was happening in their lives. People were writing in blogs or live journals. Also, people started posting their pictures online through various clients, prior to social networking. We see the near simultaneous democratizations of writing, through the blog, and photography, through digital photography. One sees here a crucial shift in photography in terms of availability, as a roll of film which once cost between PhP 200-400 for a roll of film and somewhere around PhP 250-300 to develop was prohibitive and would cause one to take careful consideration of the pictures that one would take. With digital cameras and the ever-expanding space available for pictures, one could literally take hundreds of pictures at comparatively little cost and upload these directly to the internet.

With such a movement, with the modes of production suddenly open to pretty much anyone who could create an account in a blogging service or take a snapshot with their camera-phones, we were suddenly overwhelmed with content. How many people’s blogs did we follow at first? How many people could we link in our own blogs? How much of all those pictures were really worth looking at? How much of what people were writing was actually worth reading, if that person wasn’t your friend?

Further, what one could observe from the great amount of content, was, well, the content of the content. What were these people really writing about? What were they saying? How much of it meant anything beyond the inconsequential musing or the angsty ranting?

The tendency then, was the movement of these things to be inward, for people to talk about themselves, their issues, and their lives. People were, given the freedom and space to write, chronicling their lives. Where previously we read memoirs and biographies of heads of state, celebrities, accomplished people, we were now reading what friends and friends of friends were thinking or doing. Indeed not only had the mode of production been democratized, but the content had been so too, as we were no longer reading about “big” people, but we were reading the memoirs of people just like us.

This would have been well and good, if the people just like us were writing well, writing intelligently about their lives and providing insight into our own lives through their writing and ruminations. But one found that there was more often than not, again in adherence to the Sturgeon Law, the writing on the internet was drivel.

What one witnesses in reading through a lot of blogs and journals is the collapse of the sense of private and public. Whereas in older times we had journals and diaries which we kept to ourselves, texts that were written only for us, on the internet anything published was for everyone. And instead of people self-editing and selecting what they would share and what they would keep to themselves, what happened was suddenly there was no dividing line and all content was public content. People would post their most intimate thoughts on the internet, because, hey, other people had the choice not to read you. Suddenly the choice shifted from the writer, to select what aspects of his or her life should be written about and shared, to the reader, and what the reader was willing to read.

This kind of thinking would lead to a glorification of the Spectacle of Me. In a self-centered bid for attention, users would create content that would rarely reach beyond the writer’s own thinking and life. Similarly, we would see the development of “vain pics” where people would turn the cameras on themselves and snap a series of pictures of themselves and post these online. A funny thing to come out of this trend is the once-common act of taking pictures of oneself in the mirror to achieve a pseudo-artsy vain pic effect.

For as long as this behavior remained in the realms of personal blogs and journals, then one could generally avoid these things. But with the coming of Facebook, and with almost everyone who was online joining Facebook we would see this transferred to the new medium.

Facebook utilized the Twitter-innovated microblogging by applying status updates. And wouldn’t you know it, these status updates often blurred the lines of private and public, with people describing what they were doing to such detail at times that the term over-sharing has now become a regular word. Similarly, within the bounds of user-content agreements banning pornography, people would post their photos without regard to their quality, what was being shown in them, or any real aesthetic considerations. In much the same way that because it happened, it would be written about, because the shot was taken then it would be posted.

And, unless you’ve blocked the person from appearing on your homepage, you will have to see these things.

Another irritating and rather obtrusive thing that people can do is tag you in a photo which you are not in. And then when people start making comments on the photo, if you haven’t configured your settings then email notifications will start going into your inbox. While this can be easily remedied by adjusting settings, what I am trying to point to here is that there are consistently a number of ways which the social networking content can become intrusive and imposing.

In returning then to the original idea that launched these various observations, what are we supposed to do about the person who poses distastefully revealing pictures and uses them as profile photos, so that any interaction with him would mean having to see those photos?

The quick and easy answer is just to erase the person, to block the person, to get rid of the person. But one questions not only that person, but the kind of medium that allows for such behavior. This is not a request for internet policing. Far from it, as I believe that the internet is a wonderful medium and the freedom that it offers makes it probably the freest space on Earth.

But rather, it asks us as users and creators of content to question the kinds of content that we are posting. Are we enhancing discourse, are we really adding to anything significant? One can always say that this is not their concern, that they want to just have fun, or that’s just what they like. But in much the same way that the internet is still a young medium, we as users are juvenile too, and it is reflected in the user-created content. To see whether and when our maturity will come will be something to watch out for in the coming years as we see people pushing the bounds of the internet and what can be posted there.

Will it continue to be used for posting sex? Will it progress as a weapon as seen in the various cases of cyber-bullying? Will it continue its current pace as marketing tool? Or will it enable a greater global consciousness, allowing a sharing of ideas as many thinkers dream of it doing? At least at this point, for me and for my attempts here to talk about it and to push discourse through Metakritiko, I hope that we progress towards turning it into a medium where great ideas are shared and a more communal sense of developing ideas and thinking can happen.

There have to be better things to see and talk about. I’m not saying that I’m not guilty of posting similar status messages and photos, for I surely am (though I have managed to keep my clothes on). What I’m saying is that as we learn this medium and understand it and develop it then we can build it and make it better than it is at the moment. Let’s prove the Sturgeon Law wrong and make a conscious effort to push things online into more challenging and intelligent and meaningful territory.

Photo: “Facebook” by Mike Stimpson, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.