Blogging and History

(I have a very important piece to write tomorrow so I'll have to release my post for Monday one day ahead. If you're reading this and it's still Sunday, pretend you didn't read anything, at least until tomorrow. article is labeled semi-serious)

I was scanning the referral information of visitors who go to this site earlier when I noticed a certain trend. A lot of people have been reaching my site because they were trying to look for details about Magellan and how he landed into Limasawa. Yeah, I know. The last place you'd want to get information on the subject is a site that is run by a mildly insane person, but they wouldn't really know, would they?

Incidentally I do have an article or two about Magellan and Limasawa. The only bad bit about it is that most of it is fictional and I have, multiple times in the article, mentioned that it's all fiction (nobody would believe for a second that Lapulapu and Magellan were beerbuds, for example).

Theoretically that's the end of the problem. However, we're talking about the a generation of students who grew up with txtspeak and tagalized everything. People are bound to misread things. Even I admit that I glance over certain "details" sometimes when I'm in a hurry to get the info I need for a report so I can go watch streaming porn (or whatever was available back when I was still a student) and masturbate furiously like a jungle monkey in heat. Assuming half of students are guys, yes, people will be bound to make mistakes.

If you're asking why I brought this up, it's because something like what I thought has already happened before. See, I also wrote about another historical Filipino character - Januario Galut, the supposedly traitor of Tirad Pass. The article appears as the third or fourth entry in google when you search for the name so people are bound to come across it. In the article, I just said Januario might not be a traitor after all. Two months after writing it, a guy contacted me if it was all true or not. I said it's just speculation on my part, and he in turn was surprised as hell, like what I had just said was bible truth.

And so I come to my point. For as long as some people assume that everything online is veritable, and for as long as there are people like me who haphazardly send info online without explicitly labeling things as true or false, people will start believing in whatever is placed online, even if they're wrong.

At least one kid who believes what I've written here will pass the knowledge on to people. While some of those people do not believe the new detail, if just one does, it could get passed on again. Information is passed on and history is changed bit by bit in the memories of people. And all because I thought it was fun to write something about Lapulapu one sunny day.

I had a friend once who planned to try and make a fictionalized historical hero in Wikipedia and see how long it would take for Filipinos to absorb it as truth. The friend may or may not have been me. In the end, the project was destroyed by laziness and the fear that it just might not work as planned, or worse, work as planned.

With this article comes the realization that the internet is now a very powerful tool for altering what would've been solid facts in books. The control over what gets passed on to the next generation is no longer in the hands of academics who are sometimes biased or just as misinformed as the people they try to educate. We're the authors now and the world is a better and worse place for it.

p.s. Don't fucking blame me if Lapu-lapu and Magellan start getting gay cowboy fanfiction stories. It's not my fucking fault people like to inject sick imaginative bullshit into every male-male friendship they see online.