In the lens of social media

Today’s generation is more advanced compared to the era when social media has not yet been born. The dissemination of information for example might be done only through TV, radio, and newspaper before. Well now, everything is just one click away.

Many Filipinos get used to it and some still hate it that we are still eight months away from the 2022 election yet the running candidates as well as the supporters are already making their noise in social media --early campaign and politicking as they call it. However, we’ve been hearing this expression that today’s voters are also more knowledgeable compared to before. Does social media really play a big role with people’s know-how in politics and politicians?

Social media has become a tool for communication, to reconnect with friends, and a hub for entertainment. But now its use becomes more modernized. It has been used for business, for influence, for popularity, for flexing, for news as well as for education. Now speaking of the inculcation of ideas to all users, political truth now becomes more relative, unsure, revocable, changeable. With just one click away, we can already have access to the information which happened or did not truly happen in history. Social media becomes a technical evidence to revisit the past and to analyze it. The sharing of ideas has become more virtually evident and made easy to compare. Take for example the clash between the red and the yellow in connection with Martial Law and the EDSA Revolution. Some people say there was tyranny and oppression while some say there was an envy of power and politicking. Which is which?

Hate is most of the time a dangerous emotion. It buckles down our mind to think only of what we hate rather than to conceive of what we also need to appreciate. The more we develop this hate, the more we become comfortable with our reason to hate and the more we defend it by being unwelcoming and unforgetting. Our books in history might say about the evident facts in history but social media also shows the other side of those facts. Because of the easy access, there comes an avenue for easy comparison and reconsideration. With social media, a high school student this time could be more analytical than her barangay captain. In the lens of social media therefore, the past could appear different in the eyes of the youth.

Whatever happened in the past is already history but whatever will happen in the future depends on how narrowly we look at the past.

John Caballes

Cebu City