Social media is
a powerful tool in shaping identities, it is evident in the TED talk video with
Siyanda Mohutsiwa, where she was able to bring together people from Africa
together through Twitter. She was able to create a community in Twitter that
brought together the many countries within Africa and through that they were
able to shape an identity that they shared as people of Africa, It is seen when
she says that “what was once a Burundian problem, is now an African problem” In
other words she implies here that the African people share a single identity
and that it is being African, She says this, because it is a common plight that
when Africans leave their country, they usually migrate to neighbouring countries in
Africa.
Social media is
indeed a very powerful tool, As of January 2019 according to statista.com the
Philippines has about 75 million Facebook users, and we have about 104.9
million people here in the Philippines, according to the worldometers.info,
Based on these we can say that social media has a very large influence on the
Philippine population. It has garnered a lot of influence and it has helped
shape our identity as a nation. One defining thing that I can say about our
identity as a nation is that we really like to make light of a lot of serious
situations, we turn those situations into parody videos, memes and the like.
For example, situations like the Joaquin Montes “bugbog o dignidad” situation,
or the criminals that we make fun of like “finish na guy” and the “advance
mag-isip” These situations are serious situations, because they deal with
bullying and drugs, but somehow Filipinos in social media, try to create memes
to generate a funny reaction from these situations. I think that an identity
that we created in social media is that we like to turn serious situations into
funny and sort of light hearted things. We turn these into memes and we get a
lot of laugh out of these things, which I think is one defining character of us
as Filipinos. Another identity we have created though social media, is our identity
for creating a lot of similarly funny, but more on things about love and “hugot”.
We like sharing things about crushes, love ships, and hugot lines. We can see
this a lot in Filipino social media, Just scroll through Facebook or some
Filipino twitter account and you will easily find these things there. An
example is that “jonel” meme floating around Facebook. Although it is similar
to the first case of our identity, it also shows our fondness for jokes and
making ships about love or something related to that. So for me I think that we
have been able to shape an identity online through these kinds of things, which
I can say is very Filipino, in that we like to make light of serious things and
we like to share cheesy things about love which I believe is indicative of us
as Filipinos.
Source for the statistics on Philippine
population and Philippine Facebook users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-based-on-number-of-facebook-users/
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