UP Rizal 150 conference program

UP Rizal 150 The international conference on the Rizal sesquicentennary organized by the University of the Philippines, scheduled for June 22 to 24 at the newest building on the Diliman campus, has all sorts of treats for the Rizal student. The program (please click on the link to the PDF file) is a doozy.

Column: Escudero and Bonifacio, ilustrado

Published on November 30, 2010. It was a thrill to receive, a few days after the column came out, a letter from Jim Richardson (about whom, well, see below).

I don’t think there is any question that Senator Francis Escudero’s campaign support for the vice-presidential candidacy of Jejomar Binay proved pivotal in the May elections. One political ad of Escudero’s was especially well-timed and well done; it featured the popular first-term senator asking the simple question, Who is my vice president? against a backdrop of Binay images. His lengthy answer began this way: “Ang bise-presidente ko, hindi mayaman, hindi ilustrado, kulay Pilipino (My vice president is not rich, not an ilustrado, looks Filipino).”

Column: The end of “media” as we knew it

Published on November 23, 2010–the first anniversary of the Ampatuan, Maguindanao massacre.

I do not wish to add to the unbearable burden of the families of the victims of the Ampatuan, Maguindanao massacre, especially those who lost loved ones who were not media workers, with another reflection on the massacre’s implications on Philippine journalism. The horrific killings—57 bodies recovered, one still missing—reveal more about life in the Philippines than the state of the media: The Philippine polity as an anarchy of families (to borrow Alfred McCoy’s evocative book title); the role of violence in society; the wages of greed; the coopting of much of the country’s security forces; even (in the case of the unfortunate victims who
merely happened to be driving by) the very gratuity of life when you are poor
or not powerful.

Column: Paraprosdokian: Christian Monsod on the 2010 vote

Published on November 16, 2010.

Don’t look at me; I had to look up the meaning of the word too. I had stumbled on it in Christian Monsod’s “excellent lecture” on the 2010 automated elections (the phrase is Mahar Mangahas’, from his column on expert assessments last Saturday).

At first I thought it was a mistake; it seemed out of place in Monsod’s congenial English. Turns out it is an exact term in rhetoric, meaning a figure of speech, often
used for comic effect, in which the latter half of the line redefines the
meaning of the first. A classic example would be Henny Youngman’s famous joke,
which begins as though offering his wife as an example of something: “Take my
wife … please!” (Badaboom.) The end recasts the meaning of what comes before.

Entering “a new era of the Internet”

Speaking at Mashable Connect 2011, Steve Rubel proposed a third Internet era: After Commercialization (1994-2002) and Democratization (2002-2010), comes Validation (beginning, according to his non-Mayan calendar, in 2010).

With this shift in authority, Rubel proposes that as of 2010, the Internet has entered the Validation era, in which Internet users are beginning to “find the signal in the noise” and hold on to only those pieces of information and people that are most important to them online. The rise of intimate social networks such as Path, and group messaging apps such as GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society and Kik, is an indicator that “people want to be closer to people they care about and let all the riffraff set aside,” says Rubel.

A most interesting, if rather programmatic, read.

Journalist navel-gazing, continued

Joshua Benton’s presentation before the Canadian Journalism Foundation last January, especially the last paragraph of the seventh of “Eight trends for journalism in 2011” he posited, made me sit up and take notice.

One last element about this. This is the BBC’s iPad app, if you haven’t seen it. And I think one of the brilliant elements of it is that when you launch the app, it doesn’t present you with a menu of options. It doesn’t say, “Here are 17 options, choose one.” It’s not a choose-your-own-adventure. It immediately tells you, “This is where your adventure should start.” It puts you in a story right away. You don’t to have any action, you’re immediately pushed in. And then it becomes, “How do you navigate from story to story?” Instead of going to a story, hitting the back button, going to look over the other menu of options, then going back again. The metaphor that exists on a lot of iPad apps in the news world is swiping from story to story. Which is a very similar experience to what you traditionally had in newspapers — seeing stories and being able to dive in right there.

The return of the professional journalist as gatekeeper?