Lea Salonga believes online interaction can be 'fun,' 'informative'
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Lea Salonga believes online interaction can be 'fun,' 'informative'
By ROWENA JOY A. SANCHEZ
April 20, 2011, 1:10am
MANILA, Philippines – Although social networking sites seem to be a source of malicious controversies nowadays, international singer Lea Salonga believes online interaction is not all about negativity.
In an interview with ABS-CBN’s Push, the Tony Award winner said interaction in Twitter and Facebook can be valuable with the proper and responsible use of such sites.
“It can be fun and it can be informative in real time and it’s a really wonderful way for people [to] express themselves, as long as, [as] with other forms of communication, [they do it] without attacking anyone for fun, or [their] dignity,” she said.
Lea is one of the many celebrities who are active online. The singer-actress interacts with her 358,316 followers on Twitter and 109,920 “likers” on Facebook. Aside from touching base with them, Lea sometimes engages her followers in discussion. One of the constant topics that fill Lea’s Twitter dashboard is the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, which she fervently backs. She even re-tweets the various and sometimes contrasting opinions of her followers.
A few weeks back, Lea became one of the targets of Willie Revillame’s tirade, with the TV host accusing her---along with their showbiz colleagues Jim Paredes, Bianca Gonzales, Aiza Seguerra, Tuesday Vargas, K Brosas, Agot Isidro, Mylene Dizon and Leah Navarro---for maligning him in their respective Twitter accounts, following the furor that followed the appearance of a six-year-old boy who performed a “macho dance” routine on his show “Willing Willie.”
Despite Willie’s accusation and threat to sue them, Lea remained unruffled. As one of her tweets last April 9 read, “Nothing incendiary will be coming from me. No need for it.”
In her Facebook shoutout last April 15, meanwhile, Lea shared a realization:
“One thing I've learned about being in showbusiness in this: At no point will you be able to please everyone. No matter what you say or do, regardless of quality or intent, someone will always find something wrong with it.”
Revillame, in a recent interview, took back his earlier threat to sue his Twitter critics.
Like other celebrities, Lea related that she also had an imposter.
“I had a problem signing on for Twitter because there was somebody who was pretending to be Lea Salonga, so I wrote the management, and said okay I’m really Lea Salonga and whoever is using my name is not me. So if you are in the right, you have a way to actually stand up for yourself. There are ways to legally go about all of that,” said she.