Let us build a community that chooses kindness
“I’ve been on Facebook for so long, I remember when it was all farmland.”
Many students might not know or remember this, but there was a time in Facebook’s history where it hosted a number of games you could play – among them the infamous FarmVille,
The objective of the game was to successfully and regularly tend to your crops and livestock on your virtual farmland, with each harvest earning you points you could use to level up and grow even more.
At the time, the CEO of Zynga, the company that created FarmVille, says that the game was created for people to be able to do something together on social media, rather than just check in for updates as if you were looking at the weather.
Ironically, social media as a whole was designed to bring people closer, but is now being used as a tool to drive people apart.
Cyberbullying is too much of a common occurrence to be ignored. A 2015 study reported that roughly 80% of Filipino teenagers between the ages of 13 and 16 have experienced cyberbullying (Takumi, 2016). Having dump accounts and take profiles are normal occurrences among students, lending feelings of power and control to those who seek to take advantage of others.
It used to be a widely accepted rule of social interaction that if you couldn’t say something unpleasant directly to someone’s face, you were probably better off just not saying anything at all. But there seems to be a magic spell that suddenly emboldens people to be able to say mean and rude things once they’re safely behind a screen or keyboard.
This is not the kind of world we want for our students.
We don’t want our learners to be surrounded by people who find joy in making other people miserable. More importantly, we don’t want our learners to BE the people who take pride in people’s pain.
In a world that is dark and bleak, we hope that the MWAl student will be the light that gives comfort, relief, and hope.
This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, I hope that the members of our school community embrace their authentic selves and dispel of their fake profiles and dump accounts. I pray that we stop using the internet to publicly shame people for their mistakes, and instead use it to celebrate the unique greatness of people.
In FarmVille, you advanced when you were more diligent about caring for your crops and cattle, and when you had friends to visit and exchange gifts with. You were rewarded for caring, for being responsible, and for being a good neighbor.
I hope that we as a community can go back to the original purpose of social media -to celebrate togetherness. And ultimately, I hope that we can use the power of cyberspace to further the vision of the school, to empower the youth to move forward with character and courage to make a positive difference in the world.
Margaret Kaitlin S. McRae-Daniel
High School Principal
S.Y. 2022-2023
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