❤ Mindanáo!!! (FILIPINO eSCRIBBLES’ 4th anniversary special)

I think I have overused the word AWESOME since Sunday. 🙂

But to begin with, my apologies to Dennis Dolojan for using the title of his soon-to-be-iconic website as my blogpost article. I couldn’t help it because it’s catchy, it’s hip, and “LOVE MINDANÁO” are the only fitting words (aside from AWESOME) that I could utter upon visiting and touring that beautiful island for the first time in my life!

Although I don’t exactly tag myself as a travel blogger (because I really am not), I had the privilege to be invited by the Allah Valley Landscape Development Alliance to help promote the region’s ecotourism potential. Also invited are more renowned travel bloggers (such as “prim-and-proper” Gael Hilotin and “oozing-with-sexiness” Gay Miriel Mitra-Emami), members of the media, officers from the Department of Tourism, my boss Ronald Yu (of In-Frame Media Works), and world-renowned photographer George Tapan.

With world-famous and award-winning travel photographer George Tapan somewhere on the heights of Mt. Lambilâ, Lake Sebú, Cotabato del Sur (07/16/2013). Tito George also happens to be a distant relative of mine (he’s from Unisan, Quezon). We just couldn’t figure out how exactly; for all we know, he could be my nephew, haha! 😀

Unfortunately, it’s getting late. And because of the week’s activities, I’m now exhausted and spent. So I better hit the sack and leave you guys hanging for a while, hehe! But don’t worry; in the coming weeks, I will definitely serialize on this blog the fun (mis)adventures that I experienced in that promising land in the south that has been unfairly tagged by the media as a dangerous place to visit. For now, all I can say is that “Muslim Mindanáo” is a dirty myth.  And it is NOT TRUE that the whole island of Mindanáo is dangerous. During my brief stay there, I have never felt so secure (and even carefree) for a long time. I even had to be more alert in the asphalt jungles of Metro Manila than in the rough roads leading to the jungles of the Allah Valley. Simply put, Mindanáo is REEKING of FUN and ADVENTURE! So far, my brief Mindanáo sojourn has been the most AWESOME birthday week I ever had!

And happy 4th anniversary to this blog which still has more or less six or seven clueless fans, LOL! Cheers, everyone! 🙂

A digital camera this Christmas — my latest toy!

At long last, I can now fulfill my travels and blogging with much photography ease… and splendor!

My wife recently purchased a digital camera –our first digital camera, wouldja believe that?!– as a Christmas gift for the whole family. It’s a silver-colored Sony Cyber-Shot® Digital Camera W220 with a 12.1 megapixel resolution coupled to a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar branded 4x optical zoom lens! At last, I won’t have to rely on my wife’s ageing Motorola RAZR V3i clamshell mobile camera phone which she bought more than three years ago. Since 2007, I’ve been using her Motorola cellphone in taking pictures and recording videos for ALAS FILIPINAS, SKIRMISHER, and for my social networking accounts: YouTube, Friendster, and more recently, the phenomenon known as Facebook. The quality of the photos aren’t that good. Understandable, since RAZR V3i is just a cellphone (with just 1.23 megapixels). Through the years, however, the quality deteriorated mainly because of overuse (and perhaps mishandling every now and then). Nowadays, the phone always has a motion blur (this can be observed in many of my photos in Facebook). And for a photographer, you really can’t rely on such a device.

We do have another camera, but it’s a classic one which requires film — definitely a no-no for a traveling blogger/historian. I can’t always have the films developed and the pictures scanned. That’s too cumbersome.

Our Sony Cyber-Shot® may not be as expensive nor as “techie” as what other people have. But it doesn’t really matter. As long as it has all the features that I need, then that is enough. Now, ALAS FILIPINAS and this website will have more focus, more vibrant colors, and more quality. And less of me, hehe!

Tomorrow, if conditions will permit me, I’ll resume my traveling to expose our true Filipino Identity which is extant in old Philippine towns. I’ll start where I currently live — San Pedro Tunasán, La Laguna.

The Underlying Order: Us

To my fellow bloggers…

A fractal structure. Whatever that is.

I once read a book which dealt mainly on evolution. The book made a bold theory that behavior, and not giant meteors, climate change, and the like, is mainly responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs. Such cataclysmic event naturally gave rise to a domino effect on the earth’s ecological equilibrium millions of years ago. The effects of mass extinction which happened during that time are, most likely, still extant in our era.

Behavior (and this pertains not only to human or animal behavior, but to other inanimate behavioral systems as well), scientists say, is crucial to survival and the orderliness of different organizational systems, be they natural or man-made. That is why mathematics, which is perhaps the most orderly and perfect of all sciences, deemed it necessary to put behavior under one of its spheres of duty: chaos theory.

Chaos theory deals with the study of calculating, analyzing, and interpreting turbulent and unpredictable systems such as the current of river assemblages, the stock market, rioting crowds, rage-crazed student rockers who ruin a concert (guilty…), and weather disturbances to name a few. As such, nonlinear mathematics is used since chaotic systems have irregular patterns unlike the regular ones that we have been studying since the advent of mathematics and logic.

But we’re communication brats, (i.e., bloggers). So let’s scrap mathematics from here.

The reason why I try to emphasize some of the nuances and idiosyncrasy of behavior is that we, the so-called “modern” or “online” journalists, have a very significant role in channeling the course of human behavior.

In whatever field a blogger (as mass communicator) must specialize in the acreage of mass media, he/she must always bear in mind the expansive responsibility one would encounter in dealing with mass communication. Information is gold. Therefore, we should inculcate in our minds what Peter Parker had learned from his Uncle Ben when everybody’s friendly neighborhood college kid noticed that he could stick his butt into walls and ceilings after being bitten by a radioactive arachnid: “with great power comes great responsibilities.”

So if a blogger prefers to barge directly into the world of information dissemination, i.e., news, then he/she must be as responsible as a public servant (I think that’s too much to hope for, LOL!!!). But having a role in the realm of the Fourth Estate is more prestigious than landing a spot in the doddering world of politics. News content tends to become hazy and distorted, thus losing much of its credibility. A communications practitioner should be very much aware of this circumstance, of course. In addition, one must possess intelligent views and discreet public opinion.

Oftentimes, a blogger has to deal with advertising (AdSense, anyone?). And when bloggers do enter this colorful world of online advertising, they should take notice of that field’s powerful influence towards the buying public. Responsibility and good taste (if morality is “too strong” a word for some people) must be in line with the goal of profitability. If this is not so, then expect to see more ads in the same tune as those explicit, sexually suggestive, and sometimes sadistic deodorant commercials (and they sell very well, unfortunately).

And so it is, too, with public relations. It would be very helpful to have an overview, as well as a review, of human socialization and the sociological processes that could help understand human behavior much better. That would help PR men in dealing with people of different behaviors. It might even help us understand why some Fil-Italians fall prey to congressional cretins (but I think psychoanalysis should be the one to handle that, if not parapsychology, LOL!!!).

In conclusion, let me share to you that it’s not all chaos in chaos theory. Scientists say that in every turbulent system, there is an underlying order affixed to it so as to keep it in a natural balance. That is why nature is perfect (an earthquake is even dubbed as a “natural” disaster).

So to all bloggers serving as mass communicators, I wish you all good luck in steering the course of human history through the intelligent management of human behaviorism.

See you ‘round the net. =)