HODGEPODGE JOURNALISM: WELCOME TO THE REAL POSTMODERNIST TAKE ON LOOKING AT THE WORLD
By: Iris P. Concepcion
I had been both meddling and middling on affairs transgressing my usual calls of unwritten duties.
First, I need to propagate the plentiful pictures in pixels as my citizen's obligation to patrol the discarded but more newsworthy stories from the underside of this planet.
News reporting has shed off its leopard tights and pumps for men who had been skeletized with awful fashion sense but who can quote both the rhythmically correct Proust and Frost.
Even the once and highly regarded quotation marks and proper indexing that had spawned off books on technical writing are relaxing their winking periods for a view of an elephant tusk spewing off spring water.
I am shuddering but is language being overtly democratic? Casting away the sights of board rooms, these witnesses to world news and stories are bringing home their market bags with prime ribs, jumping off an article about the unjudicious pricing of meat in meat shops.
These tales are reminiscent of Blairwitch Project, tracking down on the rejected, bullied, mocked, pilloried and horrored. It is alarming to note that this miscast, as the disciplined proponents of journalism had found out, have bigger flowers, tastier food, healthier hair and overtly cheerful disposition pegged below 100 baht. In effect, they have bigger stories to impart trending along their way of the opulent without the tagged retainer's fee for experts.
They are dump trucks waiting for sand and gravel to rain on them.
This breakthrough, I did not come upon hitting through team-building seminars in a caravan, getaway hive. Alas! I found it on Facebook.
I chatted with a member of a networking site whose members include a diverse and highly populous tribal groups discussing about food, legs and their neighbors' cattle inventory. Interspersed within though are haunting pictures of what is truly happening out THERE. Their quest for taste and smell of an environment that they had once inhabited.
The cache, to the discerning eye, are fit for a Victor Hugo plot. The once haughty controllers of the visual medium are seeing competitions from 11 to 13 year old high school students armed only with digital cameras worth one thousand pesos, on sale. No, they do not "fix" their pictures, except for comedic purposes. They do not even recycle old stories; they weave their own tales, using their own language, in a medium they are familiar with. It had shot up blood, wrung tears, instigated threats of colossal portions. What the participants had failed to recognize is this: this is no longer a setting from the past. This is an entirely new ballgame altogether and the ones with the upperhand do not know croissant even if it hits them hard. These are people who had plowed, towed, had fallen silent when men with twang pass by. I had one of them ate a pizza slice and was replied: "I ate the square thing."
They do not have names for what we gobble but they have names for their screws and bolts. I have seen some distraught faces expecting an area to be paradise but were alarmed by mirrors of themselves flashed heatingly under the cheeky cheeks of those who had often been pilloried as sick and greedy. Folks, if you haven't been inside Boys' Town, this is its equivalent: a reformist school for those who crave for participation instead of division; of productivity instead of endless whining.
I had been deflected too but only to strengthen my resolve. I had lived for social dichotomy of the aware instead of being bludgeoned by a mob spreading evil and bad tidings. My food is imperially made and I am not going to apologize for it. My benefactors are not even complaining so why must I refuse their huge vegetables, their well-packaged snacks, their nuts that are huge as my head, their farmyards with really edible fruits and veggies and their ultra sleek kitchen gallery? Let me tell you something: I had been known as a pastry hound but I never thought I'd be making my own in 30 minutes and less via a Sharp oven (18k) that I thought was unsexy back in the Philippines. Their beater sounds like a construction material thereby lending my fantasy realizable as I had always aspired to become a construction worker. Baking is my way of fulfilling one of these aspirations.
They had been discussing all about induction burners then while I was burning the midnight oil parrying some workers who are grumbling about increased wages. I never grasped their passionate sense to give comfort to cooking (why an oven must have both burners at the top and at the bottom; it is for perfect, even cooking). They could never understand the geophysical viability/feasibility of a microwave oven that just turns and turns and turns. They only use it to heat their coffee and nothing else. Invention springs from curiosity and these people are overtly curious. Like mad men.
Now I know the depth of these plans, the prototypes of gadgets, land usage and why all these should be exciting for a human being like myself. Their mission had always baffled me since I had been sitting on a chair with its quite rickety, unfunctioning balls: "Nothing Is Impossible."
They are making sense out of our Earth. And that is an awful lot of hard work. Even their taste for paintings I had severely misjudged. I never knew they could make better statues and buildings. If you had been hit by this realization too,consider yourself lucky. Like winning that lotto.
They do not get written about. They do not have enough money to finance experts on how they should spend their own money. Actually, they are poor.
Hence, they took photography as a hobby and invaded Facebook.
This is the much vouched post modernism theory in real time frame.
Throw away the marketing surveys pulsing the public to decipher whether or not your product clicks with the mass or not. Your respondents can answer beyond the Yes and No boxes and can even provide you pictures as reference. They are that giving. Read their networking sites and determine who had been shallow and who had been true to their hunt for pertinent news coverages. Passing through their administrators is tough though. I would like to believe that they are the "new" information gatekeepers.
I was inspired to mesh my divergent words together when I had read this group who had suddenly found a voice through the Internet. I stringed this as an idea that could provide a peek to future communication.
"Warad ti kapi hai ean waay lubi nagdulot sang tubig for a class amelioration dichotomy."
Loosely translated, it means: "We have no coffee since we could not find a coconut tree to provide us water for a class amelioration dichotomy."
The first words are Manobo, the next one, Hiligaynon, and the last words, a competent English composition.
Writers, this is the future.
Stop fidgeting on syntax and percentages. Stories are much more dynamic than what you had whittled down in print. If you care enough to know how they weave their clothes and why the electric shaver is more useful as a headboard ornament than the embroidered "Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness" tableau sitting beside it, you might be discovering a sleeping Pulitzer that you might not have noticed before.