It wasn’t exactly the best time to discuss Facebook.

After all, it was the launch of a book about how Philippine institutions, harnessed properly, could effect meaningful change in a country famously desperate for reform.

But on August 4, the date of the book launch, Berthold Leimbach, the Philippine resident representative of the German foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), brought the matter up in any case.

“We only have a limited time on earth,” he said at the Sining Kamalig art gallery in Gateway Mall in Quezon City, surrounded by a few reporters. “Why waste all that time on Facebook?”

[See: NGO launches book about strengthening Philippine institutions]