Social Media – Shiva – The Destroyer

              I spent the afternoon looking and studying the walls of the different keyboard warriors on both sides in Facebook.  For those who are not in the know, there is a civil war going on right now in social media in the Philippines in which the protagonists are the keyboards warriors of the different political personalities.   You would not believe the level of hate in the postings of some of them. It is as if their whole day or whole life revolves around the battle that they are forgetting that there is a world outside for them to explore.

                I’ve used social media since 2006 and I am not saying that I am an expert but I had used it successfully to achieve a certain objective.  At that time people were using social media as a tool for development but today social media has evolved into something much sinister and there are times that I believed that it has transform itself to Shiva – the Destroyer of the World.

                Social media relies on the people that are using it.  People are the ones who provide the content and people rely on trust that the content uploaded is true and correct.  In 2006, internet penetration in the country was only 5.6% out of the total 82 million Filipinos (http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/philippines/). It was difficult to access the internet in the Philippines. One has to go to the internet café and pay a hefty sum to access the World Wide Web.

 Now it’s a different story, Internet penetration now stands at 43.5% out of a total population of 102 million people. A person with a cellphone and a mobile connection can be a couch expert, upload and share unverified information to an audience who is gullible enough to believe that it is the truth.  The truth now a day is dependent on which side of the story in which you believe in and not based on facts and evidences. Now Filipinos tends to rely more on social media for their information rather than basing it on traditional resources. Politics the Filipinos favorite past time takes on center stage and Shiva the Destroyer is at play.

At the end of it all no matter what happens to the Philippines with all of this very emotional involvement in social media the question will be “Who would accept responsibility for everything that’s been done to the common Filipino?”