Can we surive the @OfManila epidemic?
MANILA, Philippines - I’m writing this on a Wednesday, so I can’t really say what the situation is like now. Is it still ongoing? Did we survive? All I know is, since they appeared last week, those accounts started multiplying. It was a total outbreak. They kept springing up, rapidly eating up people’s Twitter feeds. I don’t know how much of them are currently out there. But if you’re reading this now, you already know more than I do.
The epidemic started innocently enough—with a single tweet from account zero, a one @TitasOfManila, on September 22. She asked, “Belinda, how do I use Twitter?” It was the first day, and none but four followers seemed to pay attention. It was on day two, when the retweets began, that things started picking up. By day four, her follower count boomed to over 4,000. Tita became viral, but why?
Perhaps it’s her online demeanor. She’s prim, polite, and has just the right amount of cluelessness and candor expected of a tita. One minute she’s telling you off for saying bad words, in the next, she’s parading her boobs in a gym locker room. Or maybe it’s because she’s the everywoman, or in this case, the everytita. She’s so familiar, we feel an instant kinship with her. Every tweet of hers reminds us of home, or at least one of those regrettable family reunion moments where our love lives and weight gain are shoved front and center. Whatever the case may be, @TitasOfManila discovered a formula. And once it went public, all hell broke loose.
Copycats started popping up. And without knowing it, Twitter became that family reunion you begrudgingly said you weren’t going to, but you’re forced into anyway. You had @DadsOfManila constantly embarrassing himself, and @MomsOfManila doing her best Susan Africa impression. Then there’s @AtesOfManila, @KuyasOfManila, two lolas, your annoying cousins from Canada, and seven different sexist titos to choose from. Heck, even your yayas, drivers, and two dogs had Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, unlike real-life family reunions where you can just fake a smile and eventually blend into your tita’s upholstery, your Twitterized relatives are all in your face, following you when you least expect it and cracking one sad joke after another.
SUBCULTURES
As if that weren’t bad enough, the trend started spreading out into subcultures. We had two indie girls, an indie boy, hipsters and hypekids, two film buffs, and stoners. Conyos congregated and then split up into chapters: two in Manila, one each in Alabang, Las Piñas, and Greenhills, and probably a few more I couldn’t be bothered scouting for. Rich kids tweeted from Cebu to Toronto. By the end of September, there were over 150 “Of Manila” accounts in existence.
Students from grade school to college were all represented; the working class as well. You had all the ad agency divisions: two AEs, a director, the planner, the artists, the clients. Blue-collar workers were everywhere: salesladies, cashiers, security guards, and the like. Even the pokpoks of Manila, who have the bragging rights of maintaining the oldest profession known to man, have an account dedicated to their daily lives. It’s become a free-for-all. Faceless people thrive behind random profile photos plucked from the Internet. They pander their audience regardless if they have zero or 9,168 followers. Some accounts are admittedly quite clever, while some are just blatantly mean.
For starters, how many Chinoy accounts should there be? For a time, four co-existed, each spewing borderline racist tweets with reckless abandon. Probinsyanos were made perpetually naïve, jologs and jejemons ridiculed, and the poor continuously marginalized. If you don’t believe me, ask pulubis and taong grasas of Manila, that is, if they still exist. The lifespan of these “Of Manila” Twitter accounts are pretty short. They last a day or two before they’re deleted or completely abandoned. By this time, you’d expect all of these accounts to die off, but the virus is strong. For every one abandoned account, an average of four new ones take its place.
This “Of Manila” trend has overstayed its welcome. What once was an amusing source of nostalgia has become a full-on plague. You know you’ve really reached the very bottom of the barrel when you not only have one but two accounts dedicated to chronicling the activities of the ipis of Manila. Dude, those are cockroaches. Really?
I guess that’s the problem with the bandwagon effect. Like an actual bandwagon, when there are too many musicians playing and no conductor to lead, all you get is noise, loud, rowdy, and unwelcome noise. For now, I’m tuning out, blocking every account that comes my way in hopes that I’d stay “Of Manila”-free. Well, maybe except for tita. I’ve got a soft spot for her.
