The Facebook meme, Taga-UP Diliman ka kung..., is, as of this writing, housing 25,010 members on the group page, all within a week of its creation. It's been featured on a mainstream news channel already. The threaded discussions keep getting longer, and the posts keep on coming.
Did I mention a comment every second? I've had to adjust the notifications settings for my email.
What is it about this near-phenomenal gathering of the best and the brightest online? I suppose one would hasten to compare it with the intellectual gatherings at Renaissance coffee houses, talking about art, politics and society. It is a virtual gathering indeed, but one with a less high-brow purpose.
This, I believe, is the first time members of a community are attempting to document a shared culture, outline personal and group histories, and build memory through crowd sourcing. Specifically, people are writing down their personal experiences on campus as students, completing the sentence of the meme, "Taga-UP Diliman ka kung." The idea is focused and clear: there is a certain student culture within the UP Diliman campus that merits such a targeted question. It is so unique that one had to be a part of the culture to know what the question is all about.
As proof, members begin talking about personalities, events, artifacts of "student life" in UP -- badges that authenticate their membership in the community. Members complete the meme with phrases like, "kilala mo kung sino si Zorro," "gumising ka ng madaling araw para pumila sa registration," "kumain ka ng isaw kay Mang Larry." In some instances, posts attempt to map the political and economic developments through the years -- from the cost of an IKOT jeepney ride to the rallies they joined.
It's both fun and interesting to share similar experiences with people twice your age or younger, but still claim common ground. It's also quite flattering to have people notice your own attempt to start a mini discussion on the wall itself. Within the day I posted this question, I got more than 200 responses!
Still, it's nothing compared to Bibeth Orpesa's post, which has, to date, more than 3,000 comments!
This simple activity is creating a bridge through time and space, putting together a mosaic of personal experiences and individual histories to create a whole picture of the campus culture, which, hitherto, has been difficult to really pin down and capture. To document a hundred years of experience among millions of graduates would be a crime if it was to be written from a select group's point of view. And how would one select that group? What criteria would one use? What aspects of that culture would remain invisible by their very act of choosing which items to write about?
The unexpected monstrous response became a crowdsourcing activity, and one that had complete buy in from the most important stakeholders in the phenomenon: all those who graduated from UP. What made this work was a compendium of many things. First, it happened on a platform that was open and available to the 25,000 members of the page. They were all on FB anyway, and they just needed a signal or trigger that would get them to "talk" online. The question was provocative in itself: it was focused enough to limit the space (UP Diliman) but vague and open enough to connect various aspects of the UP culture to. It also did not discriminate against personal experiences or opinions. And since every student's experience is personal it was easy to relate with the personal is someone else's meme, and connect. Memory is one of the most fragile forms of documentation but doing it in a group strengthens the validity of an event, person or artifact existing. Personal encounters become important and corroborating members plug into the memory as well.
What is similarly interesting is that the members openly exchange views and experiences that are both pleasant and unpleasant. The freedom of posting on FB allows them to practice being controversial again -- a given trait of UP students, members claim -- in case in their political present, they are prevented from being so.
Most of all it is a nostalgic trip down memory lane to a time of freedom -- artistic, political, sexual, social and cultural. It was a time pregnant with innovation and possibility. It was an environment kept alive by previous generations of graduates and professors, and is guarded carefully til now. I suppose this is why the meme is such a success too -- it offers a space that proves there are minds that believe in the possibility of a nation that can be this free, innovative and courageous.
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