Dispatches by Adrian Conoza

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...

Last year, in my final year in high school, I successfully became a part of our school paper, being a contributor. I wrote much pieces enough for the people in-charge to include or exclude. The next year, I finally had a copy of the paper in my hands, and I found my name on print on the features section. That was already a success to me. And in this blessed day the Lord gave to me, and to my family in year 1997, let the following piece be my offering to you, dear reader. Compared to the piece on print, this is an updated edition. —◘— Picture credit: www.cartoonaday.com Models aren't only the ones with lots of pictures. Even the youth of today, especially our modern-day Filipinas, have lots of them, even tons and tons of them. They're lucky they don't have to use film after film. Thanks to digital camera—no, wait—to touchscreen cellphones, anyone can picture anything, anytime, and anywhere more efficiently. And what do we get? Multitudes of photos uploaded in social media an...

Being a radio enthusiast, I found out a radio station in New York, U.S.A. which is one of the pioneers of the all-news format since 1965. It is 1010 WINS in the amplitude modulation (AM). Unlike stations here in the Philippines where news and talk combine, 1010 WINS delivers news non-stop, dividing an hour into three 20-minute newscasts. In each slot almost everything is filled in: national and world items, sports, business, weather and traffic. It almost "give[s] you the world" through those broadcasts. When you need the news or other information, just turn your radio on, then go to 1010 AM, and there's the information. You don't have to stay long, I assume. You can simply consume and digest information in 20 minutes or less than that, and also listen to it "2, 3, 4 times a day" . With that, I see some similarity with Internet.  From: http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/ files/styles/picture_this/public/2011/06/21/ 117486-charlie-loves-his-pc.jpg In...

At one unexpected time I clicked on my profile on Facebook, and a different kind of profile appeared. What I saw was the timeline that was known to many of the site's users several months earlier. Good thing my original profile was still seen while I saw the all-new timeline, but all would change on May 9. I preferred to wait until that day the timeline goes live, yet on that day—Wednesday—my profile was already changed. After I disregarded timeline for many months when people went on timelines and regretted later on, I came to realize that timeline is not bad. In fact, it is really a good upgrade for my profile. It is even a more organized view of my profile as well as a good appearance of it. But let's go back when timeline was something new on the World Wide Web. I first saw how timeline looks through an article on Yahoo. Upon reading it and peeking in at some photos I thought it wouldn't appear nice to me, and I'm content with my plain profile with the profile pict...