Verbs

THE VERB for my year in 2019 is “share”. I hope to make “reflect” my choice in the coming 2020.

The digital portal leaves nothing unchanged, not even a Luddite like me. A Luddite is a technophobe in contemporary times. The term was first used for early 19th-century British workers protesting their displacement by labor-saving industrial machines and shortcuts in safety procedures.

According to a Mar. 2011 “Smithsonian Magazine” article by Richard Conniff, Ned Ludd was an apprentice in Leicester who, after he was reprimanded for producing shoddy textile on a weaving machine, chose to bludgeon the equipment.

From this act of rebellion was born a mythical leader known as Captain, General or King Ludd, who supposedly rallied workers clashing with capitalists and government troops to protest against machines causing widespread poverty and hunger among working families.

What does a more than 200-year-old failed protest have to do with my choice of Verb of the Year, an idiosyncratic practice I intend to shape the next 365 days?

As Conniff points out, Luddism endures because it symbolizes less a romanticized ideal of pretechnological life than an inducement to reflect on technology’s effects. From Thomas Carlyle’s essay in 1829 on the mechanical age, Conniff quotes how technology causes a “mighty change” in our “modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”

Instead of content or the “message,” circulation is the real driver of online dissemination. Political and media theorist Jodi Dean argues that only the “addition to the pool” matters in communicative capitalism, with everything else being “irrelevant”: what it is all about, who sends it, who responds.

In the digital stream of data commodities, ready to be harvested and traded, the electronic act of “sharing” captures the hardening of minds and hearts. Do I recall the messages liked and shared in the year that was? In the neverending streaming, swiping and clicking replaces the human reflexes of pausing and reflecting.

Ironically, in the age where everyone leaves digital cookies for tracking and tracing, the extent and depth of digital engagement is a somber, anemic harvest.

So my choice to focus on the analog stems from this frustration that the ephemerality of digital engagement is embedded in my failure to sift, reflect, and write—activities that come spontaneously with the predigital activities of experiencing, relating face-to-face, even turning a physical page in a physical book and writing by hand in a journal.

Unlike “share,” “verb” is a word not yet co-opted by or transliterated in the digital platform. So is “reflect”.


Photo source: seekpng.com


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 29, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Analog

THE PLANNER I chose for next year disconcerts. It marches the months in a row before inserting the weekly pages. The journal plots 2020 but begins in December 2019.

Then I remember why I liked this journal, its simple lay-out, almost bare except for fine lines and grey print. I am seduced by all that expanse of unmarked paper inviting contact with a pen’s nib or the gossamer brush of daydreams.

Yet, choosing a planner these days has become a chore. Do you need one for goals, exploration or inspiration? Will it be a-page-a-day, a weekly spread, monthly, five years, or a lifetime?

The word “planner” itself is a giveaway. Do I “plan” each day, let alone 365 days? While I live with some intentionality, productivity is a grid that I chafe at rather than welcome.

Perhaps this mindset has something to do with my start in keeping a journal. In grade school, my father passed on to me the diary given away by pharmaceutical companies. I could doodle in it and buy with my savings a book instead of a sketch pad, he suggested.

Later, my maternal grandmother gave me the journal a bank gave at yearend to clients.

How would I fill all those pages? Nothing much happens to a seven-year-old.

I did not know then the effect paper has on imagination. I tore out and cut up the medical ads inserted in the journals. Purple intestines, blue hearts, and rainbow organs became paper mosaics. I drew cartoons in the readymade panels of the corporate diary.

And I experimented with my handwriting, trying and discarding attempts to copy my classmates’ admirable cursives before settling down with the scrawl that is no one else’s but mine.

Even though I compose now with a keyboard, I think there is no better way than holding a pen and letting it flow on paper to hear myself better.

Keeping a journal is like taking a walk. Why one does, where one goes are minutiae; what matters is keeping the conversation running.

The bead of ink from the ballpoint becomes a trickle, a gush, then a slipstream widening into a channel where the unknown tempts and daunts.

Ever the good listener, paper receives everything unspooled by the pen, absorbs confidences, makes omissions palpable, nudging the voice to move on to the next recall, coax the lurking insight, claim the orphaned memory at the fringes of self-conceit.

In these digital times, when each is hell-bent on talking to all, writing to oneself, an attentive, thoughtful audience of one is not just another analog anachronism, not a trend in communicating in bullet form, not a selfie in long form. If we cannot hear ourselves, who can?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 24, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Put to bed

ONCE upon a time, to “put to bed” in publishing meant to make content ready for printing.

That expression may fade away, in the wake of digital-led revolutions overtaking print. Recently, major academic publisher Pearson announced it will update more frequently the digital rather than the physical versions of its 1,500 academic titles.

A company official said this “digital tipping point” responds to the preference of the “Netflix and Spotify generation… to rent not own” their textbooks, reported the BBC.

Digital books are easier on the pocket and on the shoulders. Few students want to invest in an imported academic reference in paper format, which can command four or five figures in pesos. Students prefer to download free PDF copies of books or share e-copies within their networks.

Given the time it takes to write a book, submit to a publisher, review, and finally print and distribute the title, it makes more sense to consult journals, many of which are already on digital portals, rather than physical books for the latest in research. Digital books also have other add-ons not found in print, such as assessments for feedback, videos for a more interactive immersion into the subject, and other links.

A hybrid approach works best for now, with students using the resources at hand and making their own innovations. Borrowing physical books from the library but avoiding extra weight in their knapsacks, many students take photos of needed pages, an act of virtual self-service that is an advance from paying a vendor for photocopies.

When a reference I needed was not yet ready for circulation, I made the most of the room-use rights given by the librarian by taking photos of the pages with the smart phone I am still learning to use.

A linear manner of comprehension, nurtured by a lifetime of reading paper books, means I read from start to finish, turning a page from the right to the left side of the spread, and then flipping back the pages to reread. Add to these the marking of passages, jotting on the book’s margins, sticking of notes in the pages, and writing in a notebook with ruled lines.

These traditional survival skills are displaced in the flurry of scrolling, swiping, and metalink-clicking involved in ebook-reading. Persevering in reading the images of pages in a smart phone screen or an electronic tablet, I effectively put myself “to bed.”

Soft snores hardly herald a revolution. It will do for now as I cling for life to the coat- tails of the digital juggernaut.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 21, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Seeking Peter Pan

FAITH was not the only beneficiary during the recent papal visit. The news media did quite well in the scramble to follow every step taken by the well-loved pontiff in Manila and Tacloban during the historic four-day visit.

Every day, after the novena mass at the Basilica Minore del Sto. Niño, I looked for a copy of Sun.Star Cebu and the Philippine Daily Newspaper. In our household, my 75-year-old mother and I have to get our hands on the paper edition of these dailies.

Unlike my teenage sons and husband, who are true digital natives, trawling the Net for updates leaves us in a state of digital vertigo. The paper edition also makes a good keepsake, dog-eared pages, smudged thumbprints and all.

Yet, it was during the daily scouring for the papers that I noticed for the first time how newsboys have become scarce. The figure I remember spotting loitering at every stoplight and street corner or weaving agilely among idling motorists, hawking a pancake pile of “hot, just off the press” papers, was now nowhere to be seen downtown.

I walked three blocks to find a sidewalk newsstand. The grandmother sold me the national broadsheet for only P4 more than the cover price. I wondered if it was because she still had several copies of the dailies and it was mid-afternoon already.

During the Saturday procession that culminated the Sto. Niño novena, I walked down Jones and Gen. Maxilom Avenues before I came upon, as twilight fell, a small roadside store with a few dailies.

Exasperated by my sidewalk stalking, the older son pointed out the vendors selling peanuts, hats, fans, and bottled water due to demand. I must be the only person in a million looking for a newspaper in the middle of a solemn procession, he griped.

Yet, more than the scarcity of the dailies on the streets, the absence of newsboys is a telling sign of the times.

After my street search, I discovered that the newsboy mascot is no longer in this paper’s masthead. In the paper edition, the image of an actual sculpture of the Sun.Star newsboy is found on the first page of the opinion-editorial section.

Would someone belonging to my teenage sons’ generation recognize this kid, in his several-sizes-too-big shirt, a pile of newspapers clutched to his side, mouth frozen in his street patter to sell dailies as hot as pan de sal?

When I was a news intern, newsboys—the term shrugged off age, applied to grandfathers and grandsons—converged like pigeons outside the printers, sorting papers before hitting the streets early in the day.

During the waning days of the Marcos dictatorship, a newsboy carrying the alternative papers was a sign that democracy was far from tottering; it took courage to carry newspapers the authorities confiscated.

My poet and blogger friend Myke recalled that reading the newspapers he sold for school allowance ignited his love for words. It would be sentimentality to deduce from the absence of newsboys the end of child labor.

In J. M. Barrie’s tale, Peter Pan led a team of Lost Boys, who ended in Neverland after they fell off their prams while their nannies were looking away. As the digital versions outrace the paper editions of newspapers, what do boys now sell on the streets?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 25, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata