Facebook and the times of our lives

It used to be the forelips: lips pointed out, at a particular person, and then words whispered to another person’s ear. To peddle the latest gossip on who the married neighbor is sleeping with this time, how much that man has stolen from his government job, a woman with a “notoriety” that changed words from “paka” of the 1970s to “pokpok” of the 1990s to “pampam” of more recent vintage.

Words buzzing in the air were later captured in short, cryptic messages sent through the pager – that black or colored rectangular beeper of the 1990s. You dial a number, give a message to a live operator, who then sends the message to the number that you gave.

One day my friend, the director Soxie Topacio, called up the pager company to send this message: “Dear Oscar, I love you very much and I miss you.” However, the woman answering the machine told Soxie, “But sir, you are a man sending a message to another man.”

And Soxie said, quicker than lightning: “So? Are you going to send that message or am I going there to pull out your hair?” The atrevida one didn’t want to lose all her stringy, dry and brittle hair full of split ends – and promptly sent Soxie’s breathless greeting to his boyfriend.

After the pager came our cell phones. When I was working as an editor at the other top newspaper in town, I had an analogue cell phone so big and sturdy you could slap a hold-upper with it and it will remain intact. It was around this time that Friendster arrived, too, so we could post photos and messages for our friends and relatives, and those whom we think are our friends. The famous relationship mode in Friendster was “It’s complicated.”

“It’s complicated” sums up succinctly the relationship patterns of the 1990s and beyond. Those of us who studied in Western universities and came back had to re-calibrate the wirings of our brains.

Whereas in the West, a man could sleep with you today and sleep with another person tomorrow (with a woman or another man, does it matter still?) was no big deal. It used to bother me, when I just arrived in Scotland and later in New Jersey, to see my flatmates changing partners of all sexual persuasions  as if they were just changing the brand of their shampoos.

Thoroughly conservative and schooled in a Catholic university, at the back of your  mind ran this thought – What would my grandmother (or my mother) say? – when I saw two straight lovers French-kissing at a street corner of West End in London, or two gay lovers licking each other’s necks in Greenwich Village in New York.

But as they say, when you fall in love, your mind tilts at another angle and your heart booms only with his name.

And so when you come back in 1990s Philippines, everything becomes complicated. You meet a young Communist who becomes your boyfriend. He asks you for an “open relationship” because he would not fall in love with any other person anyway. He will just have his, uh, sessions with another person, but his heart belongs to you.

But when you go to Europe for two weeks you come back to find him in love with the person he is shagging. So you change your relationship status in Friendster, from “It’s complicated” because of the open relationship to “Single.” That. One. Word.

Friendster gave way to Multiply and later to Facebook, the oracle of our times. And yet, Facebook has retained “It’s complicated” as among the choices for your relationships.

It’s a complicated virtual world when trolls with no faces and ugly, invented names can report your post as violating community standards, in a strange echo of Article 220 of the Revised Penal Code that allegedly prohibits acts contrary to good customs as determined by the norms of the community.

But the Revised Penal Code is just a springboard  for an airtight legal process of judicial determination whether one, indeed, has violated “community norms.” In Facebook, you have an invisible yet all-seeing eye that judges your post as strong enough to tear the national fabric. And immediately takes out your post and unplugs you for 24 hours or more.

It’s a complicated virtual world when people can threaten you and bully you in cyberspace, apparently ignorant of the Anti-Cybercrime Law that is now operational in the country. I do not know what it is about the internet that unleashes the most venomous instincts amongst people. Maybe it is the anonymity of it all, the crab mentality amongst us, the call of the ignorant crowd to stone the one who seems most “sinful” lined up in the gallery?

In my middle age of between 50 and death, I am appalled at the uncivility, the boorishness, and the shallowness of many of the things I see or read. That is why I have pruned my list of so-called friends, which at one point reached the maximum limit of 5,000.

In my younger and more political days, I just agreed to be “friends” with many people in FB because they were all voters. The recent elections – and the vileness it has spawned – have made me more circumspect on whom to unfriend or accept in my FB account. It is, after all, my account, my party. No gatecrashers allowed here.

It’s also a complicated world when finally, you post photos of yourself with the man you’re dating, someone younger but wiser, someone funny and bright as hell. This is the first time you have done this since the Internet arrived.  But the green eyes of envy comes quickly in posts like this: “Where did you meet that boy toy?”

Most of those who sent messages like this have been into toxic relationships, jumping from one joyless bed to another. Or those who pay for sex (and I won’t make a judgment on that). Or straight people who have been into long, boring, relationships it seems their very matrimonial beds have shrivelled up and died.

I really don’t care if you are unhappy or now only feast on a steady diet of ampalaya (bitter gourd). There is life outside of Facebook, out there where the golden sun is shining, where a breeze blows past the smooth nape of one’s truly beloved.

Comments can be sent to [email protected]. “Remoto Control” airs every Monday at Radyo 5, 92.3 News FM, from 9-10 .m. with telecast at Aksyon TV channel 41. Livestream at www.news5.com.ph