Filipino Voices (http://www.filipinovoices.com) is the first attempt by Filipino bloggers to unite and share their views on raging issues in Philippine politics and news. It is a collaborative political blog, plain and simple. For me, it represented a fresh start particularly in raising political consciousness.
However, lately, it is getting old and boring, according to some readers. Well, that's their opinion. And some even commented that its losing its relevance. What's relevant anyway in the blogosphere?
I think the problem arose when every blogger who wants to get known goes into useless commenting. Comments are welcome. Yet, when a commenter goes there just to hijack a post or feels like waging ad hominem attacks or worse, just wanted to defend the undefensible, this spoils the good broth.
As more people read Filipinovoices, more bloggers want a slice of the action. And since the philosophy behind Filipinovoices is a Filipinized version of a Western concept of the Wisdom of the Crowd, things are getting sillier, more mundane and more irrelevant by the day. The direction of Filipinovoices is beginning to border between academic mumbo jumbo to plain and simple political opinions of stupid proportions. Those who don't even know what politics is,share opinions that confuse instead of clarify certain political actions.
I think the reason behind this is simple---there is no wisdom of the Filipino crowd. There is, always, a set of leading thought. Since the dawn of human civilization, every group, every gathering, every collective, and every crowd has leaders. This a requirement for any rational organisation to survive. If everybody boasts of having an IQ of 180 or everyone claims to be the genius, there can never be a resolution of anything. The result is mush, and political at that.
Hence, the fate of the site is turning into the direction of an infected site, being slowly destroyed by Malacanang online operators and silly paid hacks. Those who favor the present dispensation is destroying the site by using the very concept of its existence and turning it into its head. Nick of www.tingog.com, the editor-in-chief tried to cure the intellectual hemorrhage by imposing a post policy. Good. However, rather than cure the wound, Nick, unwittingly, created another wound, worse than the former.
" The Wisdom of the Crowd" will never work in a society which is as confused as those who claim to know the politics and the goings-on in this amorphous system. We are now yet ready to operationalize this philosophical concept. For as long as we, ourselves, have differing viewpoints especially of our history and there is no collective consciousness to speak of, there can never be a time when the wisdom of every individual Filipino will reach critical synthesis. It will always create chaos. Everything will always lead to confusion which, to my mind, harms the building of a national consciousness more than helping create a Filipino intelligentsia.
What am I saying? There can never be 1,000 voices shouting or saying something in a site bordered and limited by space. Filipinovoices should recognize that there is no congruency with the number of voices with delimitations of space-time. If we want to build a national consciousness, we must set the parameters, the platform and from there, let others share what they want to share, rather than attempting the impossibility of synthesizing elements which, in essence, and by their nature, cannot be synthesized. Hegel is not needed here because there is nothing to synthesize. The negative of the negatives over at FilipinoVoices.com is not the true negative, but a branch sprouting maliciously created by the devilish and philistinistic crowd.
What am I saying? Filipinovoices.com, unfortunately, is not, and will never be a microcosm of the collective debate. Nick should be reminded that those who first wrote there help build the FV brandname, hence, deserve more liberty than others. What liberty? The liberty of posting their opinions than making them equal with the new invited ones. Likewise, it's time to prune and have the courage to tell those who want to join that we're close already. We are brimming with intellectuals already, with their own weird streaks of grey hair. Time for Nick to consider closing FV from other bloggers. Doing that means not just limiting posts. Its like telling others, hey, your voice is good, but there's no mike left for you to use. Just build your own, will you?
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ReplyDeletehttp://johnsilvosa.wordpress.com/
It is good for everybody to vent
ReplyDeletetheir opinion. We will always
disagree. We dont think the same.
However, we will try to find a
common ground to agree. We want
that the truth will come out from the government.
This is the reason why anomalies
are many.People who steal and receive bribes. And find good ways
to hide their corrupt practices .
Will surely repeat their corrupt
acts again and again. Since no one
is complaining.