November 17th, 2009 
Jojo Agot
Can you live without Facebook?
For some, this sounds like a ridiculous question. For the majority of the rest of the world, that is not an easy proposition. Social networking has been deeply ingrained in our daily lives that we’ve even coined words like Facebook addict, Facebooking and Friendstering. Phrases and words like “status updates,” “reply” and “live feeds” were never part of the casual Pinoy vocabulary in the past few years but today, anyone who has ever been online use these words when talking to friends.
We have technologically evolved. Even my neighbor’s eight-year old kids now surprise me with Facebook invitations. Eight years old! Where was I when I was that age? I probably didn’t even know of typewriter then. Kids today surf the internet before they can even read “Pepe and Pilar” in first grade.
Just recently, the New Oxford American Dictionary named UNFRIEND as its Word of the Year. This is obviously in reference to social networking sites’ option to delete a friend from your friend list. Other words that made it to the list are “hashtags” (obviously from Twitter), “intexticated” (a driver distracted from driving because of texting), “sexting,” and “freemium.”
How about in the Philippines? I’m not really sure if our local linguists “canonize” new words to be added to Filipino dictionary every year. I could just name a few awkward words that have made it into mainstream conversations like, “replayan mo naman ako,” “nagpi-friendster ka na naman,” “pini-facebook nga kita eh,” and the famous TV commercial “iti-twitter ko yan.
