Vibal Publishing, in cooperation with Blog Watch and the Philippine Online Chronicles recently established the first Future of Media Conference in UP Technohub to discuss the state of media in a vastly digitizing world. It was an interesting eye-opener, and here are 8 things you can learn from it. Most of these synthesis points can be found here, but we went the extra mile and gave further analysis to these key points.

There seems to be an invisible chasm between “new” media and “traditional” media, despite the fact that both sides do interface with each other a lot and the lines get more and more blurred as time goes by. True, there are differences, but these differences should not be a cause for fear but a recognition of functionality. Each media platform serves a purpose, and in doing so, works for the betterment of everyone.

Bringing news in an age where we knew Osama Bin Laden was killed on Twitter long before it hits the papers is something traditional media may not have an advantage in anymore, but it remains capable of focusing the narrative, and should relish this role more, because traditional media is immediately ensconced as an opinion leader thanks to its tenure.

There are so many stupid things people can do in life. However, the internet immortalizes these moments. It would be in your best interest to minimize the odds of that happening by not acting like a complete asshat on the internet.

While advertising and marketing has always been a numbers game, when everyone offers the same numbers for nearly the same price, you now begin to look at the quality these quantities can offer. Social media is easy to “game” to an extent, but fakeness can easily be seen through, and immediately kills interest in what you have to say.

While people might say “nothing” happens despite the prevalence of social media, we have seen enough examples of internet justice to note otherwise. Everyone is “just” a voice on the internet, but that means even the most powerful person in the world is “just” a voice as well, and not “the” voice everyone has to believe in. Maria Ressa, in her keynote address, emphasized how empowering social media is by making that power completely equalized on nearly all fronts.

Did you know that promoting “awareness” about an issue has noticeably led to less action being taken on it? This is because people who share something about a cause feel that their “good deed” is enough excuse for them to stop helping. We need to change that. And we also need to push for causes that people might not be aware of. True, Kony 2012 was a big thing and fizzled out almost immediately after becoming a big thing, but that’s an example of something that was underadvocated for a while, and now, obviously underadvocated again. Everybody already knows about cancer. We can keep helping them, while also making people aware of other issues at the same time.

While this point was brought up during the lifestyle track, I genuinely feel that in reality, it is merely another mask people put on. It aids in understanding, true, but the truth is still fairly obfuscated. The challenge is for us to be more sensitive to this.

All this talk of the future wouldn’t mean squat if our internet penetration is still a mere 30% of the population and the Philippines has the 155th “fastest” internet connection speeds in the world. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs on a technological scale. We can’t talk about changing the world with the internet when the internet itself refuses to change in this country first.

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