The Construct

Facebook has been abuzz lately with the jejemon phenomenon. It appears that someone has finally decided to label those who use a local variety of leetspeak as “jejemons,” which, I believe is a blend of “jeje” (the variety’s phonologically-conditioned orthographic representation of the laugh “hehe”) and Pokemon (itself a blend of “pocket” and “monster”).

Since traditional media has now found social network trends newsworthy, the jejemon phenomenon (jejemonon?) warranted a writeup from Inquirer.net calling the so-called jejemons the new jologs.

So who are these jejemons anyway? I’d hate to cite UrbanDictionary.com but based on what appears to be Facebook consensus, the jejemons are the breed of computer-mediated communicators who use a hybrid code which draws from jologspeak, leetspeak, textese, and gamer language. The code is manifested through their use of media such as SMS and the Internet.

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My previous post on the Loverage 3 aftermath surely got some mileage. Thanks to the people who linked to it via Plurk and their blogs. Quite interesting reads too from Manolo and Marocharim.

I surely left some blurred and unexplained details in that one which now leads to an inevitable misinterpretation of my intentions. Oh yes, and it’s labeled as classism at its best. (Quite a detailed analysis, I might add, and I honestly appreciate such efforts.)

Now those hazy details, I think, led some readers to misinterpret parts of it. For one, the “versus” in “us versus them” isn’t simply defined by the barricades of the fair grounds. The “us” and “them” applies to many levels of reference which, in my laziness last Saturday, I didn’t bother to clarify. Tricky, actually, since one of the levels I was initially operating on was that mutual jolog-hating consensus of the UP crowd (which included friends, students, and colleagues) that night. Then I went on to jump at more general conclusions and that probably caused the confusion especially with Smoke‘s interpretation of my second to the last paragraph as rage. (Consider this blog as a continuous stream of consciousness that doesn’t get clipped at the end of each blog post.)

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I have always been critical of class distinctions in this blog. For the longest time, I evaded any real critical words particularly for those who hail from a social class less fortunate than my petty bourgeoisie. I still remember that playful post of mine that got some pretty amusing jests from the rest of the blogosphere.

But because of what happened last night until early this morning I will play the bias card and condemn the jologs. We were there when Loverage 3 happened, expecting to reminisce the good old UP Fair days that we enjoyed back when we were undergrads. But they spoiled it. They spoiled what could’ve also been a reunion of our college barkada, some of whom we have not seen for two years.

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Author’s Note: In the light of what I’d call a series of unfortunate misunderstandings between me and some of the Man Blog Editors regarding a previous article, I still write this. I’d like to thank Peter Juan for the very level-headed (intellectually mindf*cking) discussion on straightening out some crooks in our lines of communication that led to such brouhaha.

And here’s Ade Magnaye’s Part II of his gut-busting series on the jologs.

As I’ve outed my pretenses in a previous post, I won’t try and side by these guys. Plus, Ade’s not targeting rock aficionados anyway. I leave you with my take.

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I’ve got no witty commentaries for this one. My brain’s fried from doing my side researches to expound on Mike Villar’s post. Anyway, here you go. I hope you’re not included in the pictures!

Read Mike Villar’s Know your Jologs: Jologry through fashion.