Joel B. Belinan
If there is something that this Covid-19 pandemic would be best remembered by humans maybe 100 years from now, it’s how it pushed information technology into the hands and minds of the people especially the older generation. For a third-world country like ours (yes we are still far behind in terms of technology) looking at people in a virtual meeting or occasion is a leapfrog from where we were before this pandemic. Except for how we have been tagged as the most texting-savvy people in the entire world, we have not been able to maximize what the latest information technology can do in our day-to-day routines until this global health crisis came.
But that is not what I am driving at but how fast the world we knew has been changing in the blink of an eye. Every time I listen to music my first choice is the blended music called Country Songs Then and Now with the famous John Denver song “Country Road Take Me Home” and one of Mariah Carrie’s whose title I don’t know. While the makers of the blended song tried their best to align the old but still phenomenally popular Country Road song with that of the pop music song of Mariah Carrie, there remains a big difference.
Thirty-one years ago when I first saw the world outside of my sleepy motherland, I used to note important things that society seemed to be getting crazy about. My first travel abroad ironically was in Singapore, a small country with very advanced technology and that was in 1990. The biggest sign of such advancement was how CCTV was commonly used not only by the government but also by the private sector. That was apart from the very obvious difference of this small island state’s International Airport and its mass rapid transport system which those in Metro Manila and the NAIA looked like 70 years behind, not to mention many other things on how life goes on in both countries. One thing that stands out in my observation at that time was how Singaporeans were too dependent on bottled water. I was even more surprised when I went to India and saw that people were also very much into bottled water for their drinking needs and to think that this country was still undeveloped like ours at that time.
I told myself then that at least in the drinking water aspect of life, my country was better than the two countries although I surmised that eventually Filipinos would also be using bottled water like the others after two or three decades. But I was wrong, when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in June 1991 with ash that fell for several days polluting our tap water, our bottled water consumption jumped to maybe a hundred times compared to how it was before the eruption. Then we never let go of our dependence on purified and bottled drinking water. Maybe it’s also out of necessity due to pollution of our environment.
In the media, I started when the typewriter was on the verge of extinction and saw the agony on the faces of our senior media practitioners who could not adjust to the computerized age. For national and international correspondents, the favorite mode of transmission of their stories was through fax machines while photos were being sent still by bus. In the local scene, we handed over hard copies while press releases from the government offices were bundled and collected by various media outfits. Thus, in our Zigzag weekly during press nights (Fridays), we had four to six people encoding stories including editors working on the contents of the paper. Now it’s much more convenient with the IT advancement. Stories, photos, and videos are sent in seconds through email and other means. Even the printing system has been modernized.
One big jump in media technology is the advent of digital cameras and mobile phones with cameras. The digital camera started being used by the more affluent photographers and those big media companies at the turn of the 20th century. I happened to be one of those who might have been the last to part ways with the old Single Lensed Rotator (SLR) camera, not out of resistance to change but due to economic incapability to buy the new Digital SLR camera. In fact, when I went for a media-mentoring program of the South East Asian Press Alliance in Bangladesh, I was still using the old SLR system. In one event which we attended in Bangkok after my Bangladesh tour of duty, a Thai Journalist looking at my camera said “here is another fellow who refuse to be eaten by technology. So how many bags of films did you carry with you for your whole tour of duty?” Those who used the old camera can relate to the last part of the question.
Now it is so easy that almost all people can become photographers and without the need for the thorough training one should undertake to become one as we had during those days. For us at that time, we had to be choosy on our shots and careful not to waste our films. Now one can shoot as many as he can even on one subject. Then came the advent of the mobile phone with a camera which even makes it easier for many people to take photos wherever and whenever and could send or share these right there and then with a DSLR or other mobile phones. As to whose output is better, it’s hard to judge.
Let me continue on this topic next week due to space limitations. **
