I was reading my undergraduate thesis last night, when it suddenly occurred to me that I should have something more to say about this whole debate about “blogging ethics.”  (My thesis, by the way, is a 366-page tome on Friendster.com: check Original TMX for details.)  A lot of bloggers are PO’ed over critical (?) statements made by the likes of Luis Teodoro, Malu Fernandez, Tim Yap, and Korina Sanchez regarding blogging.  Their statements can be conveniently summarized in two bullet-points:

• That some bloggers are “irresponsible” and the blogging community is in need of a “code of ethics,” and;
• That the lot of bloggers who blog anonymously reduce, if not destroy, credibility in opinion-sharing in New Media.

Then I figured that I didn’t make a 366-page thesis on the “sociology” of virtual environments for nothing.  Rather than posture as an “academic expert” on this matter, let me try to make some sense of it using my own background as a “social anthropologist.”

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Let me begin by asking a rather inane question: what is blogging?

Hmmm… it isn’t all that inane after all.  Every blogger has a definition of what blogging is.  If you asked me, blogging is the act of writing extended to the medium of cyberspace.  I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record every time I refer to Marshall McLuhan’s quote, “The medium is the message.”  Most critics of blogging grapple with the content of blogs, but fail to recognize that the “message” of blogging is not what’s written in the blog, but the blog itself.  Blogging is like every medium of communication: it is an extension of ourselves.   Hence the term “mediation.”

As a “social anthropologist” (always note the quotation marks when I use that term), I don’t necessarily subscribe to a setting where the medium is “in between” elements in the communication process.  There is always delay.  Whatever means we employ to communicate, there will always be a spatial and temporal distance that alters the messages and actions we convey.  At the same time, there is always production.  We constantly produce stuff, which includes communicative messages; at the same time, we are constantly produced by stuff.  Both delay and production lead to that all-important term that characterizes the communication process: interpretation.

So what do we analyze when it comes to blogs: the content of the blogs, or the blog itself?

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Now that Mainstream Media has conveniently wasted time making these human-interest stories about Brian Gorrell, I personally think that they have conveniently missed the point.  We should “beware” the blog not because people like Brian Gorrell use it to air their grievances, but because we are coming to a point in history where delay and production - and subsequently, interpretation - take whole new meanings when applied to a situation like cyberspace.  Note:

• Delay is present - and at the same time absent - in blogging;
• Information is constantly produced in blogging.

Anyone familiar with Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes would be familiar with delay.  For Derrida, delay is a paradox: something is “first” because of a “second” that follows it, and because of this, the “first” is always a repetition, a copy.  Because I have problems understanding Derrida, I would use Barthes.  Blogging is writing: every text is committed in the here-and-now.  No matter how many times I will tell you that I wrote this sentence on May 10, 2008 at 1:40 PM, this sentence will outlive that point in time.  In the case of both journalists and bloggers, they commit themselves into the text.  The text will outlive them, and therefore no text is “owned.”  It is there, and that’s all that matters.  It is there because it is the medium.  What I say afterwards won’t matter to this particular instance of text.

More importantly, information is constantly produced and reproduced.  There is no “source” of information, nor is there a “gatekeeper” of it.  Information, like text, is there.  A blogger, a journalist, and even the neighborhood chismosa is not the infallible”source” of a collection of information.  Anyone who uses media is in effect a scriptor, an aggregator, an interpreter, a person engaged in a commitment and a practice.  So a Mainstream Media reporter covers a police report on an exploding banana that killed an errant pedicab driver pedaling through EDSA at the wrong lane, is he/she the source of the information?  No.  He/she produced the information that came from an information that preceded it, that came with it, so the information is merely a copy.

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So here’s the thing: whatever a Mainstream Media practitioner swipes at a blogger is technically a swipe a blogger could make against a Mainstream Media practitioner.  Blogging is consequential of information, just like Gutenberg’s printing press.  Deal with it.

Yesterday, I attended the 4th Philippine Blogging Summit - iBlog 4 - even with a bout of rage-induced depression.  One of the highlights of iBlog, on a more personal note, was exchanging small-talk with Mr. Manuel Quezon III, who was rather surprised to meet me in person for the first time.

(If you were in iBlog 4, I was the guy in the t-shirt with a fiery skull design who doesn’t talk to anybody.  I have issues with crowds.  No, I’m not emo.  And yes, I sound like Satan whenever I talk through a microphone.)

An important insight I learned from iBlog 4 is the growing importance of blogging as a means towards genuine social change.  As Luz Rimban, Manolo Quezon, and Jeanette Toral pointed out in their talks at iBlog 4, there are few political bloggers in the Philippines.  The few political bloggers that we have, given the number of blogs - or “blogs” - that there are in the Philippines would mean that the “growing importance” of blogging is still on the embryonic stage.

Please disagree with me on this one: I think - and this is a completely subjective and personal observation - that most bloggers do not utilize their blogs enough as a vehicle to (at the very least) exact a political influence among their peers.  It’s not that people don’t see the importance of political blogging, it’s just that people do not exercise their political views and commit them to a blog entry.

I’m not saying that this practice is wrong, it’s just that blogging can mean so much more than a healthy dose of emo or psychological prostitution.  We, as bloggers, need to speak out more on issues.  Not personal ones, but social ones.  Or maybe social ones that we find personal affinities and empathies with.

I can personally vouch for the dangers and consequences of having a disagreeable view or an opinion.  I’m not talking about people who disagree with me online, but people who disagree with me offline.  I don’t have time to check spam messages or Google my own name to look for people who want to kill me.  Yet realities sink in all too often when you have to delete a threatening comment or an e-mail (thankfully, they are few-and-far-between), or hear about real-world slander.

Yet in effect, this is what resistance is all about.  Blogging is not about resistance, it is resistance.  Even in the embryonic stage of political and social blogging, The Media look upon us as, well, threats.  I myself am quite dissatisfied with the way The Media treats blogging, focusing more on the irrelevant non-issue that is Brian Gorrell vs. DJ Montano, instead of the growing social and political resistance in the blogosphere…

But that’s for another entry.

   I just came from my “lecture” at UP Baguio, where I got Best Thesis honors along with Rosanna, Cherry, and Danileen.  Somehow, the eager young minds of tomorrow really enjoyed my “presentation,” which came across more like the random rantings of a man who has spent too much time in an office cubicle.

   I enjoyed being around familiar ground and familiar people: Prof. Liezl Astudillo, Dr. Mark Calano, Dr. Ray Rovillos, Dr. Lorelei Mendoza, and young scholars working on their thesis proposals for Social Sciences 199.  I appreciated the receptiveness of my audience, some of whom were inspired to do study on virtual environments.

   During my presentation, I had to defend my post-structuralist take on Friendster.com, if only because there is still a lot of resistance against a “nothing outside-the-text” perspective in textual analysis.  One of the more interesting questions came from a young lady who asked if I was unduly influenced by that very perspective.  I wasn’t looking for “the truth” in my research as much as I was looking for patterns.  Another interesting question came from a young man who wanted to know how I analyzed 417 Friendster Profiles: I told him that it was a matter of staying up until the wee hours of the morning reading each and every single one of them.

   But it was nice to be back in UP Baguio, for a change.

   Like many people, I have a big problem with e-mail spam.  Compared to most people, however, I get more than my own fair share of penis-related spam.  Maybe it’s a consequence of penis jokes and sexually-charged blog entries.

   Here’s a short list of strange penis-related spam I got from my GMail account:

• This is your thingy… this is your thingy on meds.  Any questions?
• Bigger size means more masculinity!
• Don’t feel shy about your penis size anymore!
• A penis is a terrible thing to waste.
• Your new schlong will win more prizes!
• Reach out and bone someone!
• Lengthen your male device and become sex hero!
• Become a real man, increase your machine.
• Hear her scream your name in passion!

   I know that these shouldn’t be taken seriously, but come on!  Do I really have a sizeable problem that I deserve all these penis-related spam mails?

   Worse yet… how do they know? 

   Back in high school, we were processing spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3, typing documents in WordStar 7, and making databases in Foxrun.  Even having Windows 3.11 was a rarity in those days: the operating system of choice was MS-DOS 6.22.  This was at the turn of the 21st century: in the year 2000, the computers were upgraded to the earliest versions of Windows 95 and Microsoft Works.

   So you can understand my sense of relief, now that my alma mater - Baguio City National High School - has its own website (accessible here).  While I am disappointed with some bits and pieces of the website, I find it a bit weird: it took too long.

   Having been exposed to a more robust information infrastructure in college, I am of the belief that computer literacy is paramount in high school education.  The biggest universities of the Philippines - UP, Ateneo, de la Salle, and UST, among others - have information infrastructures that are integral to their other infrastructures.  For example, UP’s campuses all over the Philippines are connected to each other in one of the strongest connections in the country.  I am told that in UST, the wireless broadband grid goes well up into 1 GB of bandwidth, for a reasonable cost paid every semester.

   This was supposed to be the Department of Education’s “Cyber-Education” program.  However, the sad thing is that there are a lot of things about public schools that demand urgent attention more than computers and Internet connections, like classrooms, books, facilities, competent teachers, and reasonable teacher-to-student ratios.  But for urban schools, I think that strong information infrastructures are necessary for their graduates to stand a chance at university education.