These final few weeks before graduating - of course with the help of my kind and wonderful professors (read: oh, please let me and the rest of the people graduate) – I suddenly feel nostalgic. And it appears so have my classmates back in high school. By some twist of fate someone in my batch (batch 1999, Manila Science High School) thought of putting up a forum. It’s only a few weeks old but its been a blast! We’ve had two batch e-groups currently running but they never reached the level of activity that our new forum has reached.
The excitement may be attributed to the fact that its new, but I really think it goes beyond that. In our e-groups, only a number of people dominate it – people composing 3 or 4 sections (out of 8) of our batch, with people from the rest of the sections posting only every once in a while. I was one of the latter. The reason, I feel is that a new message seemed to be out of place whenever it did not respond to the current topic. Of course we could have made a separate topic for it, but it seems that nobody really bothered with it. Some were really active posters so being lazy can’t account for the whole reason.
In any case, we suddenly realized that a forum is much less linear, much more anything goes. Its like having a bigger room where you can pull people aside and have more intimacy and yet still having the opportunity to meet up and join the bigger crowd. The e-groups, in contrast, felt like a hall-cum-waiting-room, either you sat quietly or you engaged people in the current topic. Doing otherwise appeared impolite.
With this more relaxed atmosphere, suddenly, we had posters who we never heard from the last 8 years (almost). Those outside the country have suddenly come alive again. Suddenly, we’re talking of mini-reunions, practice reunions and grand reunions. Even those abroad have said they would come – amazing!
I think, in the end information technology should give us this feeling – a great and happy feeling.
-by Stanley Cabrera