'Wala pa nung iPod or mp3'

My enlightenment on the power of technology happened in a bus bound for Manila with the help of a portable VHS player. The bus conductor fed a B-movie to the VHS machine and soon, we were watching the obligatory R-rated sex scene. A mom stood up and complained to the conductor. “There are kids in the bus!” she said and added dramatically for everyone in the bus: “What kind of morals do we want our kids to grow up with?” The story is a bit dated, you'll note, since back then, as the song goes, “Wala pa nung iPod or MP3.” But it underlines how technology can affect us at the personal level, even to a point of evoking emotional reactions. VHS players used to be bulky and therefore limited in the privacy of our homes. VHS cassettes that contained movies were also bulky and expensive. This was good for movie distributors and moral crusaders because it gave them more control. For distributors, it meant less piracy. For moral crusaders, it meant easier censorship. But technology got smaller, more compact, cheaper, and digital. In particular, going digital meant that the VHS cassette was no longer needed. Now we just have to download movies and play them in personal digital players that could contain several movies and thousands of songs. This new digital process allowed us to bypass the gatekeepers. If the bus-VHS incident proved stressful for one moral crusader, what more when movies can be downloaded easily from the internet and played in personal media players like the iPod? Much has been said about how the iPod changed the way music and movies are distributed to consumers. But less has been about the way it changes our social norms, usually a tirade blaming the technology for further corruption of our morals. But I disagree. The iPod merely amplifies social problems. No matter how we define moral and immoral content, in the end, it is not the iPod that produced the content, but the fertile imagination of human minds. The iPod's ubiquity merely made the content easier to disseminate and therefore more difficult to control – a nightmare for officials and self-appointed censors. So what do we do? Should we ban all digital media players? I'd like to see lawmakers try that one. It will be a good case study on political suicide. --- In the next installments, we discuss further implications of digital technology on the family and social contexts. --- Ruben Canlas Jr. is currently based in Adelaide, Australia, finishing a postgraduate degree in science.