In my 11-year career in the campus press, and in my three years in blogging, I’ve never been that far from libel.  Back in high school, I came close to being suspended for stopping short of calling the Principal “corrupt” in a series of ironical statements in my columns and editorials back then.  In college, not only did I face libel threats from my schoolmates and some of my teachers, but also from my own colleagues.  Not only was I wrongfully accused of slander in a wall statement, but I was also accused of outright libel in an article I wrote that was never published (never mind that they almost received a libel charge in an article they published to “replace” my “libelous” article.)

   In Original TMX, there are many entries that are, admittedly, treading the line between satire and libel.  Shari Cruz of Misteryosa.com, an avid reader of my blog (and arguably one of the best bloggers in the Philippines today), apparently got in a bit of trouble when she “put herself in my shoes” in “Manny Pacquiao’s Asshole” (dated 19 November 2006).  In PinoyBlogosphere.com, I was supposed to be the first to write about the word “Slut” scrawled on a picture of Cory Aquino in “The Daily Show,” until I pulled out the entry 15 seconds later, wrote a sort of “public apology,” and subsequently wrote “I Can’t Believe I’m Editing” (dated 05 October 2007).

   Libel is now making headlines in national broadsheets: Joey de Venecia III, Lolit Solis versus Piolo Pascual and Sam Milby, and GMA-7 versus ABS-CBN.  Malu Fernandez made headlines in her “defamatory statements” against OFW’s in her Manila Standard column (and in her blog), which subsequently forced her to publicly apologize, and otherwise destroyed her reputation.

   For all that short history lesson is worth, libel is a very dangerous thing.  Now for a law lesson: in Justice Garcia’s opinion in GMA Network, Inc. and Vidal vs. Bustos et. al (GR 146848, 17 October 2006, sourced from http://www.chanrobles.com/cralawgrno146848october172006.html), the Supreme Court of the Philippines defined “libel” as:

…the public and malicious imputation to another of a discreditable act or condition tending to cause the dishonor, discredit, or contempt of a natural or juridical person (Article 353, Revised Penal Code).

   As such, the Supreme Court set four elements for libel, where the following constitute a liability for libel:

1.  
   1. An allegation or imputation of a discreditable act or condition concerning another;
   2. Publication of the imputation;
   3. Identity of the person defamed, and;
   4. Existence of malice (Daez vs. Court of Appeals, GR 47971, 31 October 1990, 191 SCRA 61).

   I’m not a lawyer: it is not clear to me if electronic publishing falls well within libel laws.  Enlighten me.

   “Free knowledge” in the Internet has gotten my proverbial goat as a passing “researcher” on the matter of virtual environments.  My goat, baa-ing (or is it meeh-ing) across the field of topics I want to deal with in the future, is begging for a push.  Or a slaughter, depending on my mood.

   For example, the UP Baguio Wikipedia entry lists my friends and acquaintances Sloan, Joma, Jahzeel, Wilzen and Det as “notable UP Baguio people.”  I would give props to Det, who won the 2006 Palanca Award for Children’s Fiction for a story that centers around lesbians (don’t get anything in your head).  Jahzeel is indeed the (some say disputed) first summa cum laude of UP Baguio.  I would say that Sloan is a very intelligent young man, that Joma is one tall dude, and Wilzen is a conflicted (not closet) gay person.

   (I dare to ask: where the hell am I?)

   Another example: in Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” video, he edited the Atlantic Records page and wrote “YOU SUCK!”  And then there’s Conservapedia: where the “liberal bias” of Wikipedia is ditched in favor of a pro-American, conservative Republican stance.

   This brings to mind the paradox of (online) freedom: while the best things in life are free, you know what they say about free stuff.  I’ve written earlier about how I forsee myself in Wikipedia, and it just goes to show how easy it is not only to access information, but also to create it.  With someone like Joey de Leon invoking YouTube videos to be the absolute truth, it’s easy to see that there is a good argument for “digital anarchy,” as opposed to “digital democracy.”

   While Wikipedia was supposed to mean the death of the door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, it seems to me that it isn’t: basically, Wikipedia is Childcraft that comes for free.  There’s something postmodern about Wikipedia, in that “whose knowledge” is no longer a prime question, as opposed to, “Is it even knowledge?”  By what terms do we define “knowledge?”  And so, a series of questions emerge.

   I use Wikipedia, but I take everything in it with more than the usual grain of salt.  Stephen Colbert calls it “Wikiality:” truth by consensus.  Which brings to mind a series of more questions: whose consensus, whose truth…

   Dammit, I’m going to make a paper on this.

   I’m a bit flabbergasted that danah boyd, who is a foremost expert on social media analysis, added my thesis to her list of known researches on online social networking.

   One of the more poignant things about my thesis is that I analyzed 417 Friendster Profiles manually, in the span of five months.  I still have bad memories about sitting down in front of my computer poring over the Profiles (and their screen-captures) for 12 straight hours for a full week, just getting color categorization right.  Needless to say, most experts on the matter of Internet research would stop short of calling this “stupid.”

   I haven’t heard of technologies and tools dedicated to Internet research before, like “data mining” and “sentiment analysis.”  From what I’ve read on the matter, tools ranging from simple scripts to full-blown programs have taken the place of the manual method I used in my work.  Personally, I feel a bit bad.  Pissed, even.  Had I known of these tools beforehand, my thesis shouldn’t have been a pain in the ass to commit into writing.  But with these new tools at the disposal of new researchers, I expect the floodgates to be opened for students at my school to do more social research on the Internet.

   I’m still stuck in the “dark ages” of Internet research.  I’m not a computer scientist: I am not very well-versed in programming languages, and I would probably end up with better results doing manual data mining.

   The disadvantages of manual data mining come to the fore, in that a (scientifically) less-objective methodology surfaces as a primary criticism.  There is no way, as far as I’m concerned, to do a strict and committed random sampling method in an online social network if you’re going to do it manually.  I relied on a particular Friendster group, so questions may be laid on (a pretentious sort of) objectivity.

   But even then, large groups come with large samples.  With large samples come hard work, and hard work demands extreme commitment.  Dedicated programs cancel out hard work and extreme commitment, leaving you with interpreting the returned data (in terms of correlations, variances, and so on).

   There is also no escaping errors.  Manual data-collation, especially with large samples, would lead to errors.  While they were minor ones in the case of my thesis (rounding errors), I still can’t sleep at night knowing that the integrity of my thesis can be compromised by a single miscalculated element.

   But then again, you can’t do much with numbers alone, no matter how good you are in statistics.  In general, I’m a skeptic when it comes to statistics: correlations, for example, don’t show actual relationships between arrays of instances.  It is still important for any researcher in social network analysis to go through the tedious process of reading the site itself, because each element is unique.  Establishing personality information, to me, is the first step in establishing the network for purposes of analysis: the whole is the sum of its parts.

   In general, however, I am impressed with the possibilities brought about by computer-aided data mining, in terms of researches on social media.  Dammit, I should have had a tool.

   “Wasting taxpayer money” is a nuanced expression.  UP students like myself who overstayed their welcome in the premier state university of the country “waste taxpayer money.”  You can invent a problem out of “traffic congestion” and create a flyover to “address the issue.”  You can use surplus funds from the previous fiscal year to buy cars “for official purposes.”  You can spread cash gifts from the public coffers and pass them off as “incentives.”  As you can see, “wasting taxpayer money,” which is a form of “corruption,” can mean so many things.

   Batasan is undergoing renovations: as it seems, they have (literally) elevated the House Floor to allow for an “electronic voting system.”  At the mere push of a button, a member of the House can vote for a resolution or address a motion.  This is a P15-million project that, as with everything that suits the prefix “i,” will “revolutionize” Philippine parliamentary procedures.  And you have Joker Arroyo supporting it.

   On the upside, making Congress “high-tech” would give added incentives to frequent absentees to attend House deliberations because they have a voting system reminiscent of an iPod.  Because voting is speeded up, we who follow Filipino politics no longer have to stand for privilege speeches explaining votes sourced from “Land of Bondage” by Raul Manglapus.  I don’t have to be worried about the voting system being hacked: we are being run by a government that has no idea of what the Internet is (the ZTE hearings) and are still stuck in the age of vinyl records (when some Congressman asked for a “recording of the recording” in the “Hello Garci” hearing).  I’m also thinking about gambling on Congress votes: with our Representatives given a yes/no choice, this is a golden opportunity to play political jueteng.

   Yet it also begs some questions.  Fifteen million pesos for speeding up voting?  There are a lot of empty chairs in Batasan when the issue does not involve budget allocations.  Fifteen million pesos can make for the construction of an entire school in remote rural areas.  Fifteen million pesos can make for a decent bribe, even.  Why waste it on automating Congressional proceedings that inevitably end up in walkouts that involve throwing paper?

   I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the spirit of automating voting procedures in Congress: in fact, it is important that our antiquated electoral system - be it in Congress or in elections - be improved to address the need for prompt governance.  But after looking at 2,283 House Bills filed by the 14th Congress, I’m not so sure.

   Of course, reading 2,283 Bills is silly, and I just went through about 600 before I gave up.  However, I found some “interesting” laws that would make for a good argument for automating Congress voting.  Allow me to indulge in some copy-pasted capitalization:

• House Bill 00039, AN ACT CREATING THE POSITION OF BARANGAY POPULATION WORKER, GRANTING BENEFITS THERETO, AMENDING FOR THE PURPOSE THE “LOCAL GOVERNMENT CODE OF 1991,” AS AMENDED, AND APPROPRIATING FUNDS THEREFOR
• House Bill 00048, AN ACT RENAMING KAPITAN RAMON NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL IN BARANGAY KAPITAN RAMON IN THE CITY OF SILAY, PROVINCE OF NEGROS OCCIDENTAL TO DON FELIX T. LACSON MEMORIAL NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL
• House Bill 00136, AN ACT INSTITUTING REFORMS IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM BY ENHANCING DNA TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS AS A POTENT INVESTIGATIVE TOOL, CREATING THE DNA ADVISORY BOARD UNDER THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES
• House Bill 00166, AN ACT ESTABLISHING THE RULES FOR A COMPETITIVELY NEUTRAL GOVERNMENT, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES
• House Bill 00175, AN ACT DECLARING MAY 7 OF EVERY YEAR AS ‘HEALTH WORKERS’ DAY’
• House Bill 00206, AN ACT DECLARING SEPTEMBER 29 OF EVERY YEAR AS A SPECIAL NONWORKING PUBLIC HOLIDAY IN THE MUNICIPALITY OF BALILIHAN, PROVINCE OF BOHOL
• House Bill 00208, AN ACT CONVERTING THE CONGRESSMAN PABLO MALASARTE MEMORIAL HIGH SCHOOL IN BARANGAY CABAD, MUNICIPALITY OF BALILIHAN, PROVINCE OF BOHOL INTO A NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL TO BE KNOWN AS THE CONGRESSMAN PABLO MALASARTE NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL AND APPROPRIATING FUNDS THEREFOR
• House Bill 00338, AN ACT DECLARING THE PROVINCE OF CAVITE AS THE HISTORICAL CAPITAL OF THE PHILIPPINES
• House Bill 00413, AN ACT AMENDING THE SUBDIVISION AND CONDOMINIUM BUYERS’ PROTECTIVE DECREE
• House Bill 00601, AN ACT DECLARING AUGUST 10 OF EVERY YEAR A SPECIAL NON-WORKING HOLIDAY IN SAN JOSE CITY, PROVINCE OF NUEVA ECIJA

   After going through re-establishing roads as national roads and non-working holidays for different provinces, I figured that we really need to automate.  After all, this is just a small sample of the many laws that would require the general idea of “electronic voting.”

   Yup, the iCongress.  Did I mention that it holds a million songs and comes with a touch-screen?

   Because I wrote a thesis on this topic, I should know how to explain phenomena that take place in virtual environments.  Allow me to indulge…

   While Friendster remains to be the number one social networking site (SNS) in the Philippines, I’ve observed that more and more people “jump ship” to other SNS’s like Multiply, MySpace, and lately, Facebook.  Which begs the question: why?

   In my thesis, I wrote:

   Because the “self” created in the virtual environment – in this case Friendster – is completely devoid of cognition and of feeling and of other things that make an individual an individual, it has no recourse but to be articulated in terms of what is available to the thinking, practicing individual.  It is solely defined by the structures surrounding it: the limitations provided for by the layout of the Friendster profile, the limitations of one’s connection speed, the limitations of one’s knowledge of coding and programming, and so on.  But the most important limitation that should be noted is the limitation of the self in attempting to articulate itself: to concretize its abstractness, to make itself known.  (2007: 326)

   While I myself am a bit disillusioned by Friendster, you have to give credit where credit is due: Friendster “revolutionized” (using that term loosely) social networking.  But as a rejoinder to the “limits” I talked about, a service like Multiply offers an all-in-one solution for presumed “needs” like blogging and multimedia: you can’t share your favorite music in Friendster (yet) without using Imeem, for example.  Besides, more and more Friends are added to Friend Lists: a sort of “Friend overload.”

   The difference is that there really isn’t any added responsibility for people to maintain close contacts, much less establish them.  In my correspondence with Andrew Feenberg of Simon Fraser University, one of his biggest disagreements with my thesis was that I seemed to take the term “friend” seriously.  “Friend,” as it seems, is a linguistic limitation.  But the way I saw it, I had to take it seriously: because Friend Lists in Friendster start with adding real friends and end up in the mere acceptance of invitations, the very definition of friendship is challenged.

   But every social networking site - be it Friendster or Facebook - comes with waiving responsibilities in establishing close contacts.  There really is no responsibility to maintain close associations in an SNS: the absence of this responsibility means that certain “responsibilities” come to the fore, like tricking out Profiles by adding widgets and embedded video.  The real, actual responsibility still lies outside the realm of the SNS.

   Regardless of jumping ship, however, the limit still exists.  You still don’t know who you are.

   I think that if I work hard enough, I’d probably be in Wikipedia.  It’s a pipe dream.  Nope, I’m not talking about editing Wikipedia: I’m talking about my own Wikipedia page.

   Allow me to indulge in ego boosting… after all, this is Wikipedia at work.

   Consider this sarcastic.

*   *   *

Marocharim

Marocharim (born Marck Ronald Rimorin, July 4, 1985) is a blogger and a writer who has significantly contributed to the development of Filipino online literature.

The Marocharim Experiment, 2004-present

Marocharim’s blog, The Marocharim Experiment (referred to as TMX on many occasions), is often argued to be the quintessental example of the development of Filipiñana in the global blogging community.

Writing style 

Marocharim primarily writes in English: while he insists that he writes in plain English, critics often vilify Marocharim’s writing style as “verbal taekwondo,” which causes “nosebleed” (an instance of confusion, which he calls an “epiphany”).

He consistently writes in long compound sentences, a style that has long since developed as a trademark.  On some occasions, Marocharim writes in Filipino: while he openly admits that it his not his primary language for writing, his entry “Pista ng Wikang Filipino” won acclaim in the Philippine blogosphere.

Marocharim calls his blog entries “experiments:” in the foreword to TMX II, he insists that he is a “mad scientist.”  He sees writing as a science that involves initial assumptions - the hypothesis - about ordinary life, which is subsequently tested through writing, and only then can conclusions be drawn.

Topics 

Characteristic of Marocharim’s writing style is the refusal to stay on topic: he claims that topics only serve to constrain both author and reader to understand implications.  Marocharim has a unique penchant to take an inane topic and transform it into something important.

Marocharim is known for his “tasteless,” “morally-bankrupt” metaphors that often involve analogies to anuses, fecal matter, hemorrhoids and herpes.  Marocharim insists that he is not paraphilic, and uses the analogies to challenge conventional notions of morality and good writing.

TMX is often understood to be a “political commentary” website, and is often referred to as a source of political opinions.  While often called a “Leftist,” Marocharim’s line of political thought is influenced very much by Niccolo Machiavelli, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, John Rawls, and French postmodernism.

Marocharim is also a “literary sadist” in poking fun at rich people, politicians, metrosexuals, the leisure class, and many others.  However, he insists that this is not “satire,” but is actually sarcasm.

Marocharim is also a personal blogger who writes about his life, particularly his “Quixotic” romantic exploits in a series he calls “romantic experiments.”

Praise and criticism

Marocharim’s writing style is a point of contention among many literary critics, in that his writing style has often been compared to that of the French thinker Roland Barthes, the Filipino columnist Jessica Zafra, and Filipino showbiz reporter Lolit Solis.  Still some claim that Marocharim’s style deserves a special place and distinction in Filipino literature, and some believe that Marocharim is a deduction to Filipino literature.

The “myth” that is Marocharim has led to many assumptions about his true identity, if only because he is open in saying that he is paranoid schizophrenic.  He is often accused of having homicidal tendencies and is bent on world domination.  He is also often thought of to subscribe to Satanism, which is completely false.  However, Marocharim is honest in saying that he is homophobic, is very sexist, and is very gender-insensitive.

However, readers say that Marocharim represents the repressed identity in every person, and is the future of Philippine literature.  His antagonism and subjectivity is, to many, a tableau of what people try to hide in presenting themselves.  Marocharim breaks stereotypical notions by engaging in the sterotype itself.

Important works

• Deus Ex Cybernetica: The Best of TMX
• TMX anthology, volumes 1 to 7
• The Marocharim Diaries (forthcoming)
• Revolutionary or Serial Killer: The Marocharim Story (forthcoming)
• Garrote: El govierno supremo de las Filipinas bajo nuevo Guardia Civil (graphic novel, forthcoming)