Dispatches by Adrian Conoza

I came down from a bus one Wednesday afternoon, arriving in Walter Mart here in Santa Rosa, Laguna right from Manila. As usual, I welcomed the coldness of the small mall, walked on the clean, white-tiled floor, and went right away to my favorite place there—Booksale. I did my usual peeking into the shelves. I started amusing myself with the books at the front (which are mostly Christian literature). I continued with looking into the pocketbooks at the box beside the shelves. Then, I entered inside the stall, towards the books inside a skimpy spot there, where I bent my knees to see the spines of those books piled together at one side. These have been the usual things I do whenever I arrive at Walter—to look into Booksale, to saunter and take a break inside that secondhand bookstore. Even a cashier there has known me for a long time. We usually converse, and at those times—of course—he begins the talking. But at that particular time, he informed me of something that I almost thought of ...

In these times where the the World Wide Web—particularly the social media—is the main medium, Facebook's news feed is our most accessible newspaper. The News Feed has become one of our windows to what's happening or has happened within our circles (family and relatives, friends, communities) and around the world. Image credit: personneltoday.com With our scrolling ( which often becomes too tedious ), we see a plethora of posts, either they may be statuses, photos, or links. And along with these posts, Facebook introduced us to three functions we could use to respond to posts and to reactions to those posts, as well as to see whether our posts are well-received or not. These are the like , the comment , and the share . Among these three, the like is what Facebook is mostly known for; it even has taken its place on contemporary language and culture. But what does a like mean these days? As I have observed in my daily practice of logging on to Facebook,  that blue "thumbs-up...