Y4iT 2008

Prof. Cherrie Joy Billedo

Dept. of Psychology, UP Diliman

The youth of today is undoubtedly inclined with the latest social networking websites that the Internet has to offer. But what exactly is the meaning of social networking and how do the youth of today view relationships that were formed over the net? Prof. Cherrie Joy Billedo of the UP Department of Psychology answered such questions during her Y4IT talk about Social Networking last September 3, at the UP Film Institute.

“Psychology is the scientific study of human while Cyber-social psychology is psychology in the context of cyberspace” Prof. Billedo said as she started her talk. She explained the Cyberworld or the Internet is a form of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), meaning any form of human interaction across two or more networked computers. However, CMCs do not stop on networked computers. She added that the simple text messaging is now considered as part of the CMC. These CMSs made it easier for people to be drawn together for a common interest. This connection between people forms a Social Network.

Prof. Billedo discussed that the rich and wide variety of content of the Internet makes the socila network to evolve and everyone to fully express themselves. For instance, one can use Emoticons (smileys), Emotes (verbalization of actions e.g. *hugs*), the use of capitalization to express anger, Paralinguistic markers (e.g. hmmm’s and oooooh’s), Acronyms and Misspellings are tolerated.

Anonimity and The Self

The Internet makes it easy for everyone to create identity. However, Prof. Billedo warns us about the “fakesters”. As the word implies, “fakester” is a person who creates a hideous profiles just to fool and trick other people. But still, there are many honest person who gave their profiles true self-description, picture or avatar that depicts their true selves and an honest nickname. Prof. Billedo thinks that there is nothing wrong with people who uses only good pictures for their profiles. “We call it selective self penetration” she said, “it is basically maintaining a good image. Nagsisinungaling ba sila? Hindi. Just preparing to present oneself in a desirable manner”.

Why go online?

Prof. Billedo pointed out that in the context of social networking, there are two reasons to go online: 1) to establish new relationships and 2) to maintain existing relationships. She explained that the latter is more common because it was in 2004 that most of the new relationships were formed. Presently, the only thing that most people do is maintain relationships that were already existing. She also gave a trivia that Carmen Leilani de Jesus, the 91^st member of Friendster, is the 1^st Filipino to join Friendster.

“Human nature does not change drastically because of the Internet”, she said . She mentioned that the core values of human in a social network still remains the same regardless of proximity or the medium or technology that is used. “Evaluate your Internet relationship if it is complete and not if it is ‘real‘ ”, she concluded.