Internet rumbles

The other week, Dr. Arsenio Nicolas, a Filipino who is now a visiting professor in Thailand, dropped by my class to say hi. Among other things, he wanted to tell me that now that he was living overseas, he was reading a lot more of local newspapers (and my column), courtesy of the Internet.

He liked the way the Internet allowed him to keep in touch with what was going on at home, but he also said he was quite disturbed by the exchanges on the Internet among Filipinos as they discussed the posted articles and issues.

An example he cited was the frenzied exchanges that erupted over Manila Bulletin columnist and Ateneo student James Soriano after his column “Filipino is not the language of the learned” came out, which the Inquirer featured last Sunday together with a critical but very sober commentary from Benjamin Pimentel. In contrast, the Internet exchanges have been quite vicious, as people hurl insults and invectives at the columnist, as well as with other people posting comments. It all sounds like rumbles or gang wars on the Internet.

I hadn’t realized until fairly recently that people could post comments to the Internet postings, with columns tending to attract more comments than regular articles.  As I began to look through the posted comments to various columns, I wasn’t surprised that the most rumbles occurred around reproductive health and, recently, the alleged blasphemy in an art exhibit.

What surprised me was that one of my columns on the UPCAT (UP College Admissions Test) had also set off a rumble.  It seems someone claiming to be from Ateneo posted some anti-UP comments and got people scolding him—or worse.  Also interesting was that there were people who said they were from Ateneo and were vehemently trying to “disown” the offender, even questioning whether he was a real Atenean or not.

Flaming

Internet rumbles are exactly like fraternity rumbles, which can start with the most trivial of incidents, for example, a dirty look or a snide comment from one frat member to a rival frat member (or his girlfriend).  The look triggers a small fight, like what you see with street dogs, first with the two protagonists (or antagonists), and then others jump into the fray. Intervention from the police ends the fight, but not the tension and in a few hours, the hurt frat kids would have called in his brods and more fights break out, involving more people, with escalating violence.

That’s what happens on the Internet and I am disturbed at what it all says about the Filipino. Is it possible that for all our congeniality and pleasantness and claims about being the happiest people on the planet, we have a lot of pent-up aggression waiting to erupt when we can put on a mask or hide behind a computer name (including “Anonymous”)?

Is it possible, too, that we have become a people conditioned to behave only when there is an authority figure, and the threat of getting caught and punished?

I do recognize that sometimes people need to speak out in very strong terms. Go to YouTube and look up “Zamboanga,” an old Filipino film starring Fernando Poe Sr., and you’ll find some very angry comments posted by Muslim Filipinos, who consider the film an insult to both Islam and to Filipinos. The language could have been more polite, but one can understand why there was so much fury.

Mind you, people in other countries can be vicious, too. I think all this is a function of the Internet’s anonymity. Just look at the comments posted in reaction to YouTube uploads, where people put each other down on the quality of the videos. In many sites though, especially those put up by media people, there are “Netiquette” guidelines posted and violators get their comments removed.

‘Diskarte’

But while the Internet seems universal, we Filipinos seem to be acquiring quite a reputation for being extra mean.  Some years back, there was at least one international site where moderators explicitly warned Filipinos to be more polite and to avoid “flaming,” the term coming from the flamethrowers used in warfare (you know, the soldier pulls the trigger of something that looks like a bazooka and flames shoot out).

But when we talk about flaming in the Philippines, what comes to my mind is more of theatrical showing-off, of what we call diskarte.  It’s people confusing arrogance with courage. I think of a fire-eating dancer sinking a torch into his throat while dancing. There’s applause, maybe occasional admiration, but not much more.

The flaming often comes from trolls, an Internet term used to refer to people who just enjoy going around the Internet and irritating other people by contradicting everyone else. To Filipinize them, I call them nuno sa Internet, inspired by a picture in an Aklat Adarna children’s book about the tikbalang and other supernatural creatures.  The book had a picture of a grumpy man inside an anthill, waiting to cause trouble to people who would pass by.  Now imagine electronic nuno lurking inside the computer screen.

I wonder too at times if our Internet rudeness comes from an inferiority complex. For several years now I’ve had my graduate classes in research methods analyze an American site with a “rumble” that’s been going on for five years now, all starting out with a young man being killed on a street in Oakland with the blame first pinned on Vietnamese gangs.  Then it became Filipino gangs, and now the debates are about whose gang is best (and most macho), interspersed with people castigating the gang members for bringing shame to the Filipino community.  Even more curiously, there are comments from local Filipinos claiming to be gang members and putting down the Fil-Am gang members as “soft.”  The Oakland Internet rumbles tell us of pent-up emotions around class, race, even of conflicts between the Filipino-American and the Filipinos here in the Philippines.

No one gets hurt physically, so why worry about these Internet rumbles? My concern, and I hope that with time I will be proven wrong, is that the Internet exchanges “habituate” us, especially the younger generation, to throw all civility out of the window. If we don’t “civilize” ourselves on the Internet, we just might see the Internet rumbles spilling over into the real world. I couldn’t help but think of how more and more Filipinos will be living in condominiums, with very crowded living conditions. Within the condominiums, cooped up with our computers, I shudder to think of how emboldened Filipinos will become, all too ready to insult and harass other people on the Internet.  What happens now when we step out of the condo unit and begin to deal with real people, in the real world?

I would like to see Filipinos becoming more direct, rather than challenging criticism through gossip and back-biting, but I also worry about the type of encounters we see on the Internet, which still hide behind a cloak of anonymity. If you think your views are worth anything, then be brave enough to say them in public, to a real audience, and be ready to defend those views with hard facts.