Tuesday, June 07, 2005

in just two straight days, i added almost 20 people in my ignore list in my yahoo messenger. and twice, i did it angrily. i don't really chat nowadays because i spend
most of my time either blogging, blog hopping or researching. i just talk to people i know or people who sends me private messages. if ever i do join a chatroom, i only enter so that my internet connection would have an activity while i am reading something. the other day, while reading teachersol's latest entry, i received a pm
from an educated 34 year old man from europe requesting for a chat. at first he sounded really interesting because he talked with so much sense not until he asked me where i was from. after learning that i was from the philippines, he asked how i looked and what my bra size was. grrrrrr!!!! he interrupted me from a very mind stimulating activity just to find out later that he was an a**?! ignore ko nga!

then today, it was a pinoy working in africa. he pmed me the other day too requesting to chat; since he was a kababayan in a far away country, after chatting for some 10 minutes about the latest news from home, i granted his request to be on my list. when i went online earlier, he said hello then started asking me if i was
in a cafe, who i was living with, where my computer was and if i was alone. hmmm... sounds fishy di ba? so i immediately cut him off and asked if our conversation was leading somewhere. deny to death pa ang lolo mo, asking lang daw sya. and that ticked me off! hello? hindi naman po ako tanga ano! and i told him so but did it nicely (my parents taught me to respect my elders - the hudas is 40 years old according to him). he apologized after that but sorry, he's just another name now on my ignore list.

i was introduced to the internet by my brother in 1998. during that time, i wasn't much into web surfing. i didn't even know that google existed. i spent most of my
time chatting online. however, i didn't really participate in chatroom discussions even if the topic interested me. i just chatted with the people who sent me private messeges. sometimes if an id interested me, i would muster enough courage and be the first to say hello privately. i met a lot of people thru chat although its sad that i lost touch with them already. back then, cybersex was already rampant but you can still find lots of people who you can talk to with sense online. i stayed away from the internet when i was reviewing for the medical boards then i came back months later but i became busy with residency training after that so i went online only to check my emails. in just a few years, the internet changed a lot.

today, the hopes of talking to people with sense online is nil. almost everyone wants to engage in cyber flirting & cybering (cyber sex as it is now called). people almost always talk about mundane things. fighting and cursing inside chat rooms is an ordinary occurrence. when you talk about socially relevant things, chances are, you will be left online. i am aware that you can be anybody online and that what you do online is no one else's business but yours. it just makes me sad that almost everybody now uses the internet not to add to their knowledge but to cheat, lie and pester people. i long for the time when going online meant meeting new people and learning about a different culture. i guess this is the price that we have to pay as technology advances. i just wish that we can be responsible enough not to abuse it.