what does Finally Found Someone tell us about social media?

Yeah, so this isn't really a review of Finally Found Someone. If you want to know what I think of the film, it's basically a film that you've already seen before a dozen times. The ending, which sticks very closely to formula, ruins almost everything that came before it. If you're okay with that, congrats and more power to you.

There was one scene in the film that really got me thinking, and that's probably what I'll be talking about in this space. One could say it's a waste of time to try to gleam anything deeper from such a film, but it's my space and my time to waste. Fight me.

This scene happens early on in the film. When Sarah Geronimo's character, Aprilyn, takes a bunch of greeting cards by a fountain and writes on them, crying and wailing all the way, people are taking videos of her. 

I found this scene to be immensely disturbing. These people are complete strangers to Aprilyn, yet they are immortalizing this very personal event and spreading it around the world, without Aprilyn's consent. Filipinos are naturally usyoso; we make excellent bystanders. Social media takes that trait and multiplies it exponentially. Where formerly only celebrities can gain huge followings, anyone can be a celebrity in today's world. "Pasikatin" is now used in a differently compared to its original definition: it's now used to urge others to shame in the name of righteous indignation. Cyber-bullying is now a thing, and damage in the online world can extend into the real world as well.

Social media and its use (or misuse) is a topic that has been discussed a few times before in local and international cinema. We are now aware of our social presence in these types of media, and the degradation of that presence can result in negative consequences for everyone involved. In genre films, the consequences even reach the supernatural, like in the recent horror movie Unfriended. To its credit, Star Cinema has been integrating social media plot points in its movies perhaps to stay relevant or in tune with current trends, but it has mostly been a surface-level thing.

Normally, social media is a carefully curated snapshot of one's life, but sometimes things can happen to us that are beyond our control. People now extend their judgement towards complete strangers and that can destroy a person. The negative events that happen to Aprilyn are not the result of a targeted cyberattack like what happened to Sandra Bullock's character in 1995's The Net, this is damage done through the shaping of opinion by the collective societal hive mind. This is even more troubling in today's world, where fake news spread virally can ruin reputations even when said news is not true.

In this case, Aprilyn's reputation is fixed through a PR firm commissioned by Aprilyn's father in law to be, who is a mayor. This is a major plot point. Services like this exist in real life, though the modus operandi might be slightly different. The podcast Reply All discussed this in one of their past episodes, and it's evident in that podcast episode and in this film that repairing a damaged online reputation takes a lot of money. Without the monetary support of the father in law to be (who is a relatively well-connected mayor,) Aprilyn would never have fixed her rep. Even things like this are subject to class-based advantages, it seems. Sure, she could stay true to herself or wait for the public to forget her, but it's an uphill battle.

So what does Finally Found Someone tell us about social media? Well, nothing we don't already know, but it's still pretty chilling: we have less privacy than we've ever had, how we project ourselves to the outside world is important, one simple mistake can lead to horrible things and sometimes, we really don't have a choice in the matter.