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The Year 2015: Under The Ever-Engulfing Virtual Spotlight
Has it really been another year? Thatâs pretty scary
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Has it really been another year? That's pretty scary. It's even scarier when your ups and downs throughout the year are played out under the spotlight. And in these days of a 24/7 news cycle on digital media ' reverberated enthusiastically by social media ' that's an ever-engulfing virtual spotlight alright.
Now what if, instead of celebrities' follies being recycled by the vicious netizens, the first salvo into the gossip foray was actually fired by the celebrities themselves through their social media handles? Then holy hell would perpetually break loose like a short-circuited firework machine on New Year's Eve. Scary? Merry.
The merriness certainly comes in varying degrees, depending on the magnitude of the salvo itself.
Chico Hakim, former husband of actress-turned-politician Wanda Hamidah, got infotainment shows spinning after posting on Instagram a backside shot of him holding hands with singer Yuni Shara.
Both are recently single again, so there was no scandal per se and the only big thing that gossip shows were fixated on was the fact that the new couple had coupled before with another man and woman who, at some point, were a couple themselves.
If Hollywood has 'Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon', perhaps Indonesia should have 'Six Degrees of Separation from Yuni Shara' ' and I do mean it in a nice way (We're still friends, yes, Chico? Best of luck for the new romance!).
Yet, when a salacious scandal is the major potion in the mix, all kinds of demons would come out of the woodwork to play. Take the affair between Riana Rara Kalsum and Zulfikar Rakita Dewa that Riana announced unapologetically, almost gleefully, through the blog that she launched at about the same time she filed complaints against the military.
The military, indeed, for the beau in question was in service, with a supposedly promising career, stationed overseas in the prestigious UN Peacekeepers unit no less. It certainly made it spicier that not only was the man supposedly seriously dating another woman back home, but he is also the prideful son of a famous-actor-turned-deputy-governor.
The affair reportedly had started off last year as flirtatious banters on semi-private social media platform Path and chat app Line and was later was taken to the next level during romantic European getaways. Riana spared almost none of the juicy details and tale-telling pictures of their sexcapade on her blogposts, sending all kinds of media in Indonesia into a wild tailspin that made corruption news pale in comparison.
Almost everyone nationwide got sucked into the scandal ' following, commenting, opining and everything in between. Riana brazenly rode on the hullabaloo by further employing Twitter and Instagram, sending both her fans and haters into just a notch short of indecent hysteria.
As if refusing to be overshadowed, Zulfikar's supposedly official girlfriend decided to fire back by posting their own lovey-dovey snapshots on her social media pages ' refueling the already heated rumor mill, prompting snaps from Riana and snazzier comments from the spectators.
I'm not sure what progress the supposed military investigation has made in response to Riana's report, but what I observe astutely is the drama the scandal has steadily supplied to the public discourse that even some of the levelheaded people I know were reduced to good ol' gossipy grandmas over this mess.
Not to be outdone by romance in social media wars, was commerce. Earlier this year a man sent Indonesian Facebookers and Twitterati into a fizz by claiming that the prominent online retailer Lazada sent him a boxed soap instead of the fancy smartphone he'd ordered and paid for.
As Lazada was scrambling to provide a proper response and I must say they did seem rather unprepared in the PR department at that time, somebody decided to search around and discovered on LinkedIn that the claimant was working for Lazada's competitor Elevenia.
Soon everyone, who'd just been wagging their tongues at Lazada, started wagging tongues back at the man. Initiated, spread, rebuked and closed, all on social media, in such an efficient spinning cycle that honestly not many remember how the dispute was settled, just that it was eventually settled.
Scandals unfurled on social media have also given room to the rise of a creative expression called a 'meme'. Within hours of something, sometimes mere minutes, somebody puts together a visual and text appropriate to cast a light upon it, usually in humorous tone, which would travel virtually alongside the news and often, depending on its accuracy and wittiness, might boast a longer lifespan than the actual scandal.
We're all gradually moving into a digital lifestyle whether we like it or not, whether we're ready for it or not. Once we or someone else put an issue out there in the digital realm, it's practically unstoppable until it runs its course and becomes technically un-retrievable forever.
The challenge for individuals is to maintain a semblance of willpower on allowing one's own life to be parlayed into our social media presence. The challenge for corporations and PR firms is to prepare media-savvy responses to produce in a lightning-time manner before a snag brews into some uncontainable maelstrom. The challenge for mainstream media is to prove that beyond speed, journalistic accuracy and ethics remain in the delivery of news reporting.
Gird your loins for 2016, baby! It's a braver, ever-engulfing, all-consuming world out there by every histrionic digital minute of it.
