Speaking Your Mind: Do young Pinoys make sense of it?

“Speak Your Mind”.

Perhaps, most internet savvy Pinoys knew this phrase very well. This is the famous tagline from the leading online Filipino internet community portal – http://www.pinoyexchange.com/ where around 2 million Pinoys are registered users exchanging thoughts about almost every aspect of the society - from simple day to day living & spirituality, to showbiz buzz, politics, and up to the latest on technology. You can even look for jobs through the Classified ads forum.

Of all the forums it cater, the entertainment forum is the most popular. Most Pexers (the term coined to refer to the users and forumers) here are between age brackets of as early as 12 years old to 30 years old. But albeit, a 31~49 year-old is also present, mostly acting as either the elder of the sisterhood/brotherhood or as a motherly figure serving as a guide for the youngsters.

I’ve been a registered Pexer since 2004. I saw this from a Yahoogroups community and become curious about it. Since I am fond of watching teleseryes, I was drawn to join this online community to check any updates or future happenings in the local entertainment world from time to time. During the old days, I do not usually participate in discussion because its quite hard to make yourself immersed in the conversation unless you could talk sensibly about the topic. Despite of this, I could commend the Pexers I first recognize because they do not only post arguments with sense, but they know how to post responsibly with respect to other’s opinions, even if its all about showbiz and television. Perhaps, it is because these people are all in their 20s and 30s.

As years passed by, the emergence of teenage Pexers had been very noticeable as fast as how the young teenybop stars nowadays rise to fame. One fascinating thing about them is that, about half of them are not here in the Philippines (Thanks to TFC for bringing Filipino programs to our Kababayans who live almost all their lives outside the country.)

But for one who would crave for meaningful discussion as the forum’s essence implies, the rise of young forumers has been proportionate to the degradation of sensibility, maturity and usefulness of discussions. Moreover, the present manifestation of threads (or discussion topic) in Pinoyexchange Local TV and Movie Forum is like an amazing race to multiply the thread fast from Part 1 to as many as a couple of hundred.

Each thread should contain 5000 posts before it will be closed down and another thread of the same title or topic is created to be tagged as Part 2, 3 and so on. Prior to this format, threads could contain more than 5000 posts, however, the administrator decided to trim down the thread sizes for some technical reasons.

Particularly in the common zone, which is the TV and Movie program forums, fans from all corner of the showbizlandia are free to express their mind. It could be on how they praise the artists, how they praise the story of the teleseryes or movies, how they enjoyed the show, how they are dismayed on everything about the program extending it to the networks and many more. This forum had once been a meaningful source of suggestions and constructive criticisms on how Philippine entertainment is doing. However, with the bunch of youngsters present, disrespect, profanity and derogatory posts has been eminent. Impulsive, aggressive, disrespectful, and immature are what describes most of the youngsters, though it does not mean that all of them are like that. There are a number of those you can consider good and young, but they do not post or participate in the discussion at all, for reasons of they don’t want to get provoked and display disrespect, or maybe its just don't make any sense to them.

I wonder what could have affected the young generations’ minds, that most of them nowadays are so awful and lacks true sensibility. The alarming part is that, these kids are merely half of the visible forumers who are know to be residing in the Philippines. Somehow, this reflects how our manners and norms had been gradually changed by the current landscape of technological advancements in communications.

Because internet portals are virtual means of communication, you cannot see in person the people you get to talk to. Thus, it is the tendency of these generation to just speak whatever they like to blurt out without considering the word “respect”. Even if the site's administrator campaigned the shoutout “You are what you post”, it doesn't seem to make any improvement at all.

Parents should be aware of what their kids are doing with their desktops or laptops. You won’t know if you’re kids are one of those I’m referring to. Its time for us to help correct our deformed manners and go back to the basics.

IMHO only…