I first wandered into the wild wild web a long time ago; before I became a government employee, before I even knew what I was getting into. I only understood the web to be a new frontier of sorts.
I started up my first blog after reading a Time Magazine article on Blogspot, before it was bought by Google (I tried searching the Time.com archives. Unfortunately, their ‘chives go back only to 2002). I remember being enthralled with the idea of publishing your thoughts online with only yourself as the Editor. It was hugely empowering, but as is usually the case with children being given great power, I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
I tried to keep an on-line journal like Doogie Howser, but I was no good as a diarist. Inevitably, my entries sounded like I was reciting a monologue on stage. Instead of being introspective, I was declaiming; instead of chronicling my days, I was editing for posterity. Either way, that didn’t feel – even to me – like the proper way of keeping a diary, let alone an on-line journal.
So, I left that early blog alone. Hopefully, it’s been deleted the way my gazillion Yahoo Geocities webpages have been. But that was the point of those early years, see? It was a time for exploring the web and for discovering how it was relevant to my life.
I refused to accept that the internet was only for homework – I grew up on Britannica and so vehemently distrusted Encarta – and pron. Heck. Considering that you needed to get a library pass to use the public internet stations, and had to wait upwards of ten minutes just to download one dismally lo-res picture via dial-up, internet pron was just not worth pursuing.
In any case, as I said, I thought that the internet had to have greater uses than those two. And that was when I discovered IRC. The near instant connectivity of Internet Relay Chat opened up an entirely new world for me: one of borderless communications and limitless friendships. It was the old pen-pal model, on steroids!
And it had smileys! Those emoticons we take for granted now provided endless opportunities for bragging back then. Only a relatively few nerds knew what smileys meant and we littered our letters and notes with those ASCII symbols. Yup, I said ASCII. Remember, these were the days before computers effortlessly converted text smileys into round yellow graphics.
IRC was obviously a powerful communications tool, hampered only by the lack of public infrastructure that would allow it to be easily accessible by ordinary people. Back then, most people had to go to web cafés just to get online. And when the office had it, it was rarely more than one workstation that had the connection, and in order to get on-line, you had to dial-up. What a racket that made!
In other words, the on-line world was pretty inaccessible to ordinary people, so IRC – and Yahoo Chat soon after – was pretty much a niche activity.
Cellphones, when they transformed into more truly portable devices approximately around the turn of the century, seemed to really herald the death of IRC as a vector for massive personal communication. Why dick around on the internet when you had a cellphone. The introduction of the GSM standard – and with it, texting – seemed only to reinforce the idea that internet chat would remain the domain of the socially inept.
Hindsight however, teaches us that the rapid rise of cellular phones served the internet chat paradigm very well indeed. Texting essentially prepared the wider public for the idea of sending short messages through the air without worrying about the accuracy of the received message. Of course, beepers played a role in generating acceptance for this concept, but beepers were essentially capable of third-party mediated communications, i.e., you had to talk to an operator. Not so with the cell-phone.
With the cell, you could send cuss words without worry of censorship. You could say sweet nothings without fear of ridicule by the operator. You could keep information confidential without having to worry about the operator revealing all your received messages to someone with a password. In other words, you became a self-publisher and self-editor, ultimately accountable only to yourself.
And that was exactly what blogs did. Except that with blogs, you weren’t just talking to one person – as with a cell phone – you were potentially talking to the entire world.
From the widespread acceptance and use of the cellphone as a mode of communication, as well as the proliferation of PCs and the increasing ease of use, it was inevitable that the general public would flock to the internet and begin using it as more than just a treasure trove of information, and more as a means of communication.
At that point, I was already blogging regularly, writing on a variety of mundane topics. And then I joined the COMELEC.
My entry into the COMELEC was an executive assistant of then Chairman Alfredo Benipayo. In that capacity, I pretty much did whatever he told me to do, and one of the things he asked me to look into was voter education.
My first instinct was, of course, to beef up the website. At that time, that meant making sure that the articles on the site were accurate and up-to-date. Even now, that’s one of the most crucial aspects of maintaining a web-site, isn’t it? Making sure that the content is accurate and relevant.
I felt the need for more, however. More interactivity. The way I saw it, people wouldn’t stay on the site for long if all they did was to copy articles from it. Think of it as a library. If all you did in a library was come to borrow and return books, then your benefit from the library would only be to that extent. But if you stayed and read your books there, an entire world of cross-references would be available to you and you’d get more benefit from the library then, wouldn’t you.
Unfortunately, Chairman Benipayo was ultimately let go and replaced by Chairman Benjamin Abalos. I was out of the COMELEC, but the idea of interactivity never disappeared. On the contrary, it kinda gestated.
October 2004, I was back in the COMELEC and still working on the interactivity problem. By that time, I’d heard of Facebook and knew only that it was a cooler version of Friendster because it was exclusive for people with harvard.edu email addresses.
Late 2006, I got the news that Facebook had opened its ranks to the general public. Always an early adopter, I immediately signed up even though I still hadn’t wrapped my brain around what Facebook could do.
The year following that, my department – the Education and Information Department – went live with bagongbotante.com. It was an experiment with a different kind of COMELEC website. bagongbotante.com focused on the youth by offering things like galleries and downloads. What we were most proud of, however, was a chatbox that we included on the site.
We used my Facebook account to some extent to publicize the site, but that was a disappointment. So we used the conventional media to get the word out. During the election period that year, we also opened up a bunch of blogs that pretty much talked about life in the elections, as well as giving relative information about the elections. Of those blogs, the one that is still going strong is comelec.wordpress.com. Initially conceptualized as an on-line press-room, the wordpress site quickly became an on-line library of COMELEC Resolutions.
In 2009, Twitter quietly crept into my universe as one of those things that I sign up for without really knowing what for. At first, I couldn’t get Twitter. I was honestly confused by it since it seemed to me that I could only see my own tweets. Then, I realized that I could see the tweets of the people I followed, but only if I was tethered to a PC.
Twitter exploded into usefulness for me when I finally found a way to tweet from my cellphone and from my laptop. On the day I realized that, it felt like IRC had finally got married to the cellphone after a long and tempestuous engagement.
All i had to figure out after that was how to make Twitter a productive tool rather than just a novelty.
In 2009, we tried opening up a Twitter account that carried the official branding of our voter education effort. It’s still there, but we felt that people weren’t warming up to it and so were ignoring it. Heck, we even went on Plurk.
Analysing the response to the bagongbotante Twitter and Plurk accounts, it appeared to us that people were simply distrustful of “official” entities in a region of cyberspace that was considered “private” for the natives. In other words, the official COMELEC accounts were eyed with suspicion. Some even said that it was creepy to think that COMELEC was being big-brotherish. I easily understood that sentiment since the account monitors inevitably felt the urge to respond whenever someone criticized the COMELEC.
These responses were considered too defensive and had two immediate effects. It shut people up, thereby defeating the whole idea of encouraging interactivity; and – since these are invitation based networks – we never got invited, thereby leaving us out in the cold wastelands of ineffectiveness.
Fortunately, it was noticed that my personal Twitter account was getting a better response from people. @jabjimenez was my original account from the early days of twitter and it contained mostly personal ruminations about my responsibilities as a spokesman. But I had more followers than the @bagongbotante account. So, by default, I began tweeting public service info through @jabjimenez as well, especially when applications like Hootsuite made it easier to manage multiple accounts.
By now, “official” accounts seem to have shaken off the public discomfort the COMELEC’s “official” account suffered under. Maybe it’s because Twitter has inevitably metamorphosed from a purely “social” network to a good source of publicly relevant information. Whatever the reason is, I now find myself in a weird place.
My personal account has become the de facto Twitter account of the COMELEC. If I were to jump on the “official” twitter account bandwagon, will my followers come with me? Will the official account generate the kind of following that will make it relevant – after all, it’s pretty stupid to have an official account with only 15 followers, right? I mean, what’s the point? Add to this, the Guidelines being talked about. How will those Guidelines affect the way we use social networks?
I need answers to those questions, and I need them soon. We will be launching information campaigns for the ARMM elections and the 2013 Automated Elections either by the end of this year, or early next. Mislangs notwithstanding, social networks will remain a significant facet of voter education; if anything, in fact, I expect it to become even more significant. So we need to get our act together soon.
In the meantime, follow me.