Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - What would we do without Twitter? Read the newspaper more, I guess. While old media has been relegated to participating or even echoing narratives it used to monopolize, we here at Supreme would like to think of ourselves as both old and new, bridging the frontiers while blurring its borderlines. We believe discourse is something fluid, something that leads to further discourse, which, thrown in the 24/7 cycle of social media, blows up into an intercourse that becomes heated, loud, and at times, sloppy. This is still about Twitter, folks. Please focus.

It was not our intention to debut our “Trends of the week” during the most Twitter week ever, one that covers the full range of human consequence, from life-and-death situations to sports and beauty competitions. It was a week when Twitter finally exposed itself as the weird modern mutation that it is. As details of the typhoon Yolanda tragedy became increasingly gruesome and surreal, the usual food pics and inane tweets became increasingly trivial. We didn’t have Twitter yet when the 9/11 attacks happened. But now we could all say that we tweeted about Yolanda when it happened, for better or before or for worse. Here’s hoping that it’s mostly the former.

Without further ado, here was the week in hashtags:

#YolandaPH 

It was the most powerful typhoon in recorded history and the aftermath was equally unprecedented. We’ve all seen the images by now: communities devastated, buildings crumbled, the wretched living carrying the dead, the entire central Philippines looking like a post-nuclear war zone. Those who were spared from the disaster were left to express their shock and concern through social media. Yet, the venue in which we aired our thoughts on the tragedy was also the same venue being counted on for some concrete solutions. With communication lines obliterated in large parts of the country, hashtags became a matter of life and death: #RescuePH for urgent rescue needs, #TracingPH for missing persons, and #ReliefPH for resource coordination, among others.

In the natural chaos of Twitter, the purposeful spirit of these hashtags was diluted by the anarchy of self-expression, making searches a lot more difficult, what with all those “my thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of typhoon Yolanda #RescuePH” lodged in the mix (that’s what #PrayForThePhilippines is for). With all the hashtags going around on a daily basis, Twitter has always been prone to mob rule, but never before with this much influence in real-life chaos.

#PinoyPride

Nonito Donaire beat Vic Darchinyan via technical knockout in the ninth round hours after Ariella Arida eked out a third runner-up finish at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which still means that she’s supposedly the fourth most beautiful woman of her age bracket in the world. Social media predictably blinked its “Pinoy Pride” lights, which are always on, if not easily turned on.  Nothing’s really new here. Except perhaps for the amusing fact that our national bekis and barakos celebrated wins in their respective “pageants” within the same 12-hour span. United we stand.

#ac360

On Wednesday, a whole country already captivated by an endless news cycle, was given some semblance of newness when Anderson Cooper went live in Tacloban for CNN’s 360. It was a perfect Twitter storm: our need for foreign validation mingling with our ever-deepening sense of shock, “famous celebrity in The Philippines, talking about the Philippines!” combined with “Oh my God, I had no idea the relief efforts were this messed up!” Anderson Cooper is a familiar face, one that we have been used to seeing against the backdrop of calamity. But this is no longer Haiti, or post-Katrina, post-Sandy United States — he was in our backyard, telling us about our own government’s shortcomings after days of relatively kid-glove commentary from CNN. “The people in Tacloban have great dignity and deserve better than what they have gotten,” he said.

Because everything is argued over on Twitter, Anderson Cooper’s comments were taken as an insult to the relief efforts by some and a much-needed dose of truth by others. What we do know is that he is an outsider. He just got here. His perspective is limited. The local media’s perspective, on the other hand, is unlimited: they feel for the victims as countrymen and they are mostly focused on pulling resources for aid and helping survivors find their lost loved ones. But journalism is defined more by its boundaries, without which, objectivity cannot exist. Anderson Cooper can call out the Philippine government because he’s not one of us. He can still see relatively clearly.

#StrongerPH, #BangonPilipinas

“The Filipino Spirit is Stronger than any Typhoon.” This statement, along with its accompanying hashtags “StrongerPH” and #BangonPilipinas, attracted a lot of backlash in social media, especially after a commenter in the CNN website infamously said that Filipinos were “given this ‘privilege’ of bearing the burden of the strongest typhoon ever recorded” because “we are resilient, long-suffering, and good natured.” The dude, who’s not exactly the greatest of writers, obviously had a hard time expressing his praise of Filipinos’ resilience and just came off as an international sadist.

Hordes of people on social media ganged up on this anonymous person and pretty much the entire “stronger than typhoon” rhetoric. This same thinking breeds complacency, they said, which makes us perpetually prone to catastrophes as we perpetually congratulate ourselves for surviving. Everyone who says that we are resilient is automatically an enemy of permanent solutions to natural disasters that may even involve 340 kph winds that no man has ever figured out how to stop. As the absence of relief went on for days, the memes began losing its power. Human survival, after all, has its limits. The longer the survivors suffered, the longer the dead rot in the streets, the more apparent it became that the national government was the one most in need of resilience.

The word “resilience” took a lot of beating this week because a multitude of emotional people took varied routes to deal with their emotions. But resilience is a good thing. In fact, when you’ve already lost family members and you’re trying to keep the rest of your family alive in a situation where you have lost your home and your sources of food, you tell yourself that. You don’t care about any narrative battles on Twitter or about foreigners’ eternal condescension — you just want to get through the next 24 hours without anyone close to you dying. We all want our disaster preparedness to be better. These people need to live.

#PrayForJustinBieber

Yes, this trended. I don’t know what to tell you.

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What do you think of this week’s trends? Tweet us @PhilStarSUPREME.