As Typhoon ?Ondoy? hit, the scrawny, fund-short disaster management systems of a VAT-rich government crumbled. Laborer Muelmar Magallanes drowned after rescuing his 31st victim, a six-month-old infant. This is a country where each congressmen burns P1 million for travel but can?t buy rubber boats. Onli in da Pilipins?
Flood, fire and looters ignore legal city limits. Yet, petty turf-guarding by local mayors gut crafting needed metro-wide program. This is true whether in Manila or Cebu. Private citizens, meanwhile, mustered cell phones and Facebook to patch Ondoy rescue and relief projects.
?Let a thousand cell phones bloom? urged an unlikely coalition of trapos (traditional politicians) and rebels in July 2005. Phones would send People Power boiling into streets after the President?s State of the Nation Address.
?They did that to oust Joseph Estrada? in 2001, ?Viewpoint? recalled then. ?But cell phones didn?t ring twice this time.?
First generation cell phones appeared six years after People Power I. Underground radio, a samizdat press and tele-women formed the 1986 Edsa uprising?s network. Foreign TV and radio broadcast the peaceful rebellion. Czechoslovakia?s Velvet Revolution and Ukraine?s Orange Uprising cloned the EDSA revolution.
Today?s phones have built-in SMS, Internet, and video cameras. Iranians broadcast the Revolutionary Guards? brutal suppression of demonstrators. Japanese use the phones as ?electronic wallets? mainly to shop. Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus linked Bangladesh?s poorest families to credit by pooled cell phones. Grameenphone now has 10 million subscribers.
Seven million Chinese hefted cell phones in 1996. A 38-fold explosion resulted in 269 million subscribers by 2003, Worldwatch Institute notes. Today, over 600 million Chinese?approximately six Philippines?text or call.
Phones morphed into cultural symbols. Chinese funerals feature paper cell phones, so in the afterlife the deceased can call. ?The phone is a metaphor of cultural practices,? notes anthropologist Genevieve Bell.
Mobile cellular subscribers are scattered from Sao Paulo to Manila and Johannesburg. They exceeded four billion this year, International Telecommunications Union records show. ?Every second a person in the world today, in theory at least, could be using a mobile phone.?
Year-on-year growth in cell-phone subscribers never dipped below double digits since the century?s turn. In 2000, mobile phone penetration reached 12 percent. By early 2008, it breached the 50 percent mark.
Filipinos became the first in the world to wage a revolution with cell phones in 2001. They ?provided the first real test of text messaging,? Howard Rheingold writes in ?Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.?
Minutes after Juan Ponce Enrile and 10 other senators sealed the second envelop in the Estrada impeachment trial, text messages exploded. Black-clad protesters (were) summoned together by a single texted line: ?Go 2 Edsa. Wear black.? Cell phones ringing twice sent Erap packing.
Lebanese cloned Filipino tactics to whip up rallies that ?resembled Edsa?s human waves,? wrote Christian Science Monitor?s Cathy Hong. Beirut?s Cedar Revolution forced Syria to end its 29-year occupation.
Numbers and technology have boosted the Filipino?s communication reach. The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. tallied 35.2 million subscribers last year, disclosure statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal. Smart Communications accounts for 20.9 million subscribers and Pilipino Telephone Corp. (Piltel), another 14.3 million.
What do those numbers mean? Can media, this time around, ?stop another martial law debacle?? asked Cebu Press Freedom Week panels. Marcos padlocked centralized facilities like the Manila Times and jailed journalists. And Malacańang?s shifting of PMA Class ?78 favorites into command positions is causing jitters.
The 1987 Constitution has features designed to block a president from cloning Ferdinand Marcos? dictatorship. The president, for example, must immediately convene Congress to review the imposition of martial law.
Unlike 1972, there would be ?instant public resistance to any attempt to impose martial law,? University of the Philippines professor Randy David said. For an answer, look beyond Internet and the cell phone, he said.
Track instead the phenomenal rise of new media, Inquirer?s Manuel Quezon suggested.
Worldwide, eight out of every 10 persons on social networks like YouTube or Multiply are Filipinos, Jane Paredes of Smart Communications said. And 2.47 million Filipinos use Facebook. Pinoys account for half of the two million photos uploaded daily. One out of five Friendster users is a Filipino. On average, Filipinos spend 19 minutes daily in the ?networked surreally flattened world of social media.?
The new media are dispersed. How do you seize 70.4 million cell phones? Not even President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?s former security chief can firewall the Internet, let alone Twitter which emerged this year.
Dictatorships straitjacket the consensus world view of those they rule, Time magazine notes. ?Tyranny, is a monologue.? And Twitter?s 140-character bursts shoved Iran?s President Ahmadinejad into ?a court of world opinion where even Khrushchev never had to stand trial.?
President Arroyo doesn?t want to become an Asian President Ahmadinejad. She should welcome Filipinos who opt to ?tweet? Malacańang: ?Let 1, 000 celfones bloom.?
(E-mail: juanlmercado@gmail.com)
