Vasiliki, on the Island of Lefkada

In all I judge mine  a success. I felt it while I was on holidays (for no other reason than that it felt good to be where I was, doing what I was doing, being with the people I was with) despite the fact that objectively it was a pretty mediocre state of affairs, neither the place, nor the hotel or the entertainment, being “ideal” even by my own rather low standards.

But how can you actually prove this? How do you quantify the level of satisfaction you draw from your holidays if you can’t claim to have spent them on a zillion dollar yacht or on the beach in Bora-Bora? Until this past week I had no way of doing it.  But now I know. I have a measure and I am ready to share it with the world: it is the forgettometer.

How much do you remember when you come back? Do you remember your password? It took me 3 tries, so I will arbitrarily give me 3 points (out of, say, 10) for “forgetting your password”. Do you remember how to embed a video? It took me a couple of minutes, so I will even more arbitrarily award myself (or rather my holidays) another two. Do you remember how to find something in your office phone menu? I didn’t even remember my phone had a menu, so I think 10 points are in order, with another 10 added for forgetting to call a team meeting on Tuesday. And then the coup de grace… Do you remember how to tweet?

A big fail...

This will take some explaining. I do remember how to tweet and love doing it, but…

First of all I came back having forgotten that I have to tweet, but that’s so unprofessional I will actually deduct a point from my score. And then there was that most excellent site that allows you to handle twitter without actually using it. Now what was it called? It was, before the holidays my daily companion, my trusted lieutenant for all things Twitter. I used it every single day, all day to tweet in two languages. It was a little tricky sometimes but it certainly made my life a lot easier. I was so fond of it, I didn’t even bookmark it, I just typed the address every time. What a mistake!

... for a good reason

Yes… I came back having forgotten its existence, its name, its URL, everything. Then at some point the need arose and, after having tweeted some, I dimly remembered I had long stopped using Twitter.com. Slowly it dawned on me that there was some other site that did the job. Ah yes, that greyish site. Umm let’s see… no, not bookmarked (in case you hadn’t noticed, I belong to the AltaVista generation and will never, ever, say “favourite”), no recollection of its name whatsoever.

It was embarrassing. So embarrassing I didn’t even dare ask. I just wandered down the corridor hoping someone would be using it. Someone was. My holidays were certainly over but forgetting Hootsuite is a definite 10 out of 10.

So in aggregate I have unscientifically but fairly accurately awarded my holidays a nice 34 out of 50 or just a whisker short of 70% on the forgettometer, which sounds about right. Not bad… not bad at all.

Back to Eurovision…. Well, a good looking couple from Azerbaijan won and, if I remember well, some Italian pizzeria ensemble surged in the closing rounds to come second. There were others too… The Oompa-Loompas from Ireland, strange men in strange hats from Moldova, an improbable Greek hiphop outfit “featuring Stereo Mike”, the delectable Lena from the home side and for the first time in years (decades) a Britpop boy band that managed, as I heard on the BBC- to do 10 times better than the previous year’s Britpop offering: they finished 14th.

There was also a French boy who, embarrassingly, had entered for our grand Belgian institution of the “concours musical international Reine-Élisabeth-de-Belgique”, a staid classical music competition, but was misdirected on the road from Paris and ended up in Düsseldorf rather than Brussels. Obviously not fully realising something was amiss he sang his aria with some passion, collected his “zero points” and returned home none the wiser (he still ranked higher than the Brits).

Did I miss someone? Maybe… maybe not, I honestly can’t remember and that is my main grudge with this year’s competition: it was even more forgettable than Eurovision normally is. I missed “Lordi”, the Finnish musical parody act, Conan the Barbarian’s Ukrainian girlfriend, Russlana, the exquisite Dana International, Dita Von Teese making a show of herself during someone else’s song and so on…

Yes, aesthetically this was a very flat vintage. At this point I should make it clear that I will not touch upon the music. Eurovision isn’t about music after all. Surely three or more thousand years of European culture can’t have come to this.

And if you have your doubts, if you think that Eurovision is a music competition then try humming any one of the tunes, this year’s, last year’s, from 5, 10, or 20 years ago… Come on! No, I didn’t think so…

So what is it about? I have my own theory. It is about reinforcing national clichés and, most importantly about finding out who your friends are in this sad world. Politicians may say what they have to say, treaties may be signed and declarations made but there is only one certain way of knowing: the voting. So Germany and Austria, Greece and Cyprus, the UK and Ireland, the Nordics and the former Yugoslavs in all conceivable combinations, exchange 10s and 12s or whatever in an orgy of brotherly love.

Even more important are the smaller scores… If someone gives you a 12 then either they are blood relatives or your song is trending and set for glory before the singing even started. But if someone gives you a 3, a 4 or a 7 then they really like you (or they have lots of immigrants from your country, but that’s a different matter)… Then you know you can count on them to stick with you through thick and thin. You have friends in this world.

As for the music… Still waiting for you to hum a tune…. Hmmm no, of course not

In good old days of the Mac the situation was fairly simple. Macs were desirable, PCs were not, but you only entered Macland at grave personal peril. Cost put aside as blindingly obvious, it was equally obvious that on the whole they had missed the train. When everything that is everything is made-for-PC, spending your hard-earned (or in the case of the impecunious teenager hard-begged) money on a Mac meant shutting yourself out of 90%, maybe more, of all software (we didn’t speak of applications back then, remember?) including the one clear, indisputable reason for buying a computer: gaming.

Not to mention the fact that despite everything the fanboys will tell you, there is nothing inherently more complicated in Windows than in OSwhatever. Both set you on a learning curve and both reward you amply once you have learnt their more basic tricks. No, I’m sorry, OSX is no more clever or easy to use than Windows XP or 7 are, at least from the perspective of the simple home/office user. And don’t even mention battery life…

Times have changed and boot camp certainly guided this consumer to the nearest Mac outlet a few years ago, at the very dawn of the i-age when Apple was still “Apple Computers” and the only other product was the early iPods.

Back then Apple was re-emerging as a credible choice for anyone seeking a home computer and iPods were just beginning to make their mark. Then it exploded: i-this, i-that, i-everything. These “i”s are all wonderful gadgets. Yes, I want an iPhone and a (new) iPod and an iPad. But I also don’t and have yet to succumb and go out and buy them all.

Why? Well if you ask me they have a fatal flaw. First of all they are too expensive (at least here, in the European capital of “you-will-pay-more-than-anywhere-else”). They are not just objectively expensive, which they probably are. Their flaw runs deeper: they are so wonderful that buying some i-wonder that will be last year’s news in a few months, buy a “1″ when a “2″is around the corner and a “3″ a year or so away just doesn’t bear thinking. Buy any other piece of electronic equipment and even two or three years down the road you are ok, the total lack of personality making it easy to survive having an “old” model for just that much longer.

But how anyone can survive having a “1″ when the “2″ is out I don’t know. I’m sure I couldn’t and can I barely even look at my old, very “1″ Touch any longer. It’s just too painful.

That then, brings me to the nub of the matter. The “i”s are too depressingly cute. Yes, they are not exactly “handsome” and not simply beautiful. They are cute. The iPad doesn’t just attract you, it overwhelms you. They are, in other words maybe a bit too much of a good thing. Perfection can be painful, especially when it is so short lived, when you know that your little bit of perfection will be dead and buried as the “it” thing in a matter of months. It will still be beautiful but it will be the beauty of your long gone great-grandmother in those old sepia photos of her Belle-Époque youth.

And they are a little girly too, but I won’t delve into that matter. What I do want to say just now is that I still love my Mac.  A true antique in this, its 4th birthday it was the first generation to come with an Intel processor and, battery life aside, it still works perfectly well. (XP has never looked better by the way… But thats just me being mean)

And yet, I wince every time I see one of the newer models. Not because their processors are faster or their LCDs brighter but because they are newer, they look just different enough for me (and everyone else, but especially me) to know that I have an old model. And when you have only recently purchased perfection that hurts. A lot.

For it is a little too perfect: the silvery curve of the aluminium is not exactly a feast for the senses. It is too austere for that, in a Bauhausian sort of way, but a beauty it is. So much so that it doesn’t just tell you it’s a beautiful thing, but that it’s too beautiful for you… You can respect such exquisite beauty, even lust after it, but can you love it? I cannot, for love needs warmth and warmth is not what Apple is all about.

Familiarity breeds contempt and we have reached an uneasy truce with my Mac, treating each other as more or less equals. On the other hand whenever I visit a Mac store I feel diminished. The “i”s are looking down at me, contempt emanating from every pore in their tiny, lithe, desirable aluminium bodies.

Take my digicam, a small pocket Cannon. It’s even older but you would never know and indeed it doesn’t matter… What are a few megapixels more or less in this day and age… the pictures that come out of the other end are the same. Equally important, it looks good but not overwhelmingly so. It was expensive but only when compared to an old Kodak instamatic. It is funny and somewhat cuddly, cute but not perfect. You can just see the humans behind it. What do you see behind the “i”s? Probably Steve Jobs, gaunt certainly, but perfectly turned out in his Bauhausian (that word again) black sweater and 501s, smiling pitifully at you.

And now, I will proceed to prove my point.

Where on earth would Macs be most popular? Ever stopped to consider what kinds of people actually buy Macs? The answer is now in thanks to the good people of Royal Pingdom and, in retrospect, it’s absolutely predictable: it is the Swiss…

Being the earthly equivalent of the iPad, the only country in the world that actually looks like its postcards, it is only natural that Switzerland would go Mac (and, I suspect, “i” too).  I love Switzerland but the main feeling i get when im there is one sadness… The perfection can get to you inunexpected and not always pleasant ways. After all i have visited Swiss villages with more psychiatrists than food stores  (to judge from the signs on the doors).

The Swiss then, followed by…? Why Luxembourg of course, the pocket Switzerland. The US comes third but I will disregard it because of the size of its population. Fourth position? Well, Iceland… And it doesn’t get better, Canada comes next, then Australia and New Zealand, then Norway, Denmark and, rounding up the top ten, Singapore, the homeland of perfection by decree, the uhm iPod shuffle of the real world…

Switzerland is painfully cute and so is Luxembourg and so, i am sure, are Iceland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia or Singapore. They are, as the French would put it “bien taillés” just as everything Apple is (très) “bien taillé”.

My Nokia is definitely not “bien taillé”, but its sort of good looking in a human-scale kind of way, it didn’t cost me the earth and when it smiles at me it doesn’t send a shiver down my back. I kind of like it too.

It is, of course, a silly claim. First of all these “revolutions” happen for reasons totally unconnected to the existence or not of the social media. They would have happened regardless just as countless other revolts and revolutions, happened before the age of the internet. But that is a point that has already been debated to death online, especially after the Iranian “twitter revolution” of some time ago.

Equally, there is no point in denying that at least at the margins, Twitter and maybe also Facebook et al do play a certain role in setting up the demonstrations or, more importantly perhaps, laying the groundwork.

Twitter, Facebook and other Social media certainly must facilitate to a certain point the uprising, and perhaps, more importantly, may provide an additional forum for all those who subsequently take to the streets to find, connect to and network with like-minded people. To deny that would be just as naïve as to claim that nothing would have or could have happened without these online facilitators.

In fact a piece of evidence has now surfaced to show that there is something to the hoopla: It turns out that just as the revolt was gathering steam in Egypt, the government, among other measures, literally pulled the plug on the web. In short, on the 27th of January, internet traffic all but stopped. As the Associated Press put it in flawless Hollywood-speak, “about a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead”.

That the web can be disruptive is something governments realised from the earliest days. That it can be throttled is something they gradually realised and armed themselves to do, legally at first and technologically more gradually and that by the way applies to government and governments in our self proclaimed Free World just as much if not more so than in other parts of the globe. That the web can actually be killed, or at least placed in an induced comma when it gets too annoying is something that is far more recent.

Yet Egypt shows that it can be done, even if apparently there was no specific infrastructure for it to happen, something along the lines of the proposed internet  ”kill-switch” in the United States (speaking of bad timing…). Yet in Egypt there seems to have been no kill-switch: the government just leant on the web, and the web, or rather the providers, and the web went dead…

This must surely be one of the lessons the outside world draws from recent events: the web can be killed, it has now been proven. The second lesson, especially for us net-centric people, is that the revolution seems to be continuing regardless…

As every reader of this blog probably knows, slacktivism isn’t activism because the real activists created the word as a disparaging comment. Also, because it involves no true action, other than pressing a button, maybe occasionally going to the lengths of participating in a poll or posting a comment on this or that website or blog or, even more shockingly and therefore rarely, donating a few cents.

As almost everyone involved in this affair, including many of the speakers in the recent PDFEU forum in Barcelona, agrees, slacktivism is a bad thing. It is also generally considered as ineffective, but that can be misleading. Slacktivism can have a real impact and can also come from far more traditional quarters than many people think, such as the Press or even political discourse.

An example: everyone engaged in EU communications of any form, be it our Facebook page (incidentally, a wake-up call for Messrs Gates and Ballmer: MS Word thinks “Facebook” is a typographical error, and I won’t even mention “slacktivism”) or more formal means of communication is exposed to a very particular kind of slacktivism: the anti-EU kind.

To stay with the Facebook example, we post on this or that issue that has been debated or acted upon by the EP and what normally happens is that the truly engaged fans will post a comment that responds and, indeed, corresponds to the post, often offering ideas or solutions rather than simple commentary.But the slacktivist is rarely far behind. There are those, for example, who hate certain member states, third countries, peoples or ethnic groups and make sure they say it loud and clear in almost every single post, even if they are ostensibly participating on a discussion on occasional import duties for Aruban pimpled mangoes.

And then there are those who hate the EU pure and simple. They will make their point clear while discussing about the mangoes but they will also always pull one of the great slacktivist coups of modern times: the permanent, unremitting, brain-washing use of the same clichés, over and over again, until they are ingrained in the mind of the reader and become self-evident truths rendering all political discourse essentially impossible. We all know them: the “undemocratic EU”, its “unelected oficials” and assorted “elites”, the “wasteful” EU budget, the “overpaid”, “lazy” and so on “eurocrats” and other “fat-cats”… They may or may not have a point on one or another particular issue, I won’t argue about that here, but this is depressing.

If activism is fighting on the streets for something you believe in and slacktivism is clicking on the web for something that has attracted your attention, in the EU context, this clichéctivism is poison. And it is exactly countering this particular poison that is, directly or indirectly central to the task anyone engaged in communicating Europe.

Its poison for three reasons: it is usually false, it is easy to absorb and transform into an internalised self-evident truth and it is pervasive, deployable in any form of media from the classic written press where it first appeared to the most arcane reaches of Web 2.0 Is it slacktivism though? It is on both counts, “slack” as well as “activism”.

Slack because it is much easier to say “unelected officials” than to enter a full discussion on the EU decision making process and as such it also made that much easier for the unwary reader to digest. It is as easy and as lazy as clicking the proverbial button.

Activism because most of its practitioners, be they journalists or “analysts”, are self-evidently well informed enough to know that pointing out that Institution officials are unelected is ridiculous (how many administration officials are elected in any country in the world?) or that the member state governments in the council and the directly elected EP are the legislators in the EU, while Commissioners are appointed by those same member states and approved by the EP. There are certainly not a few things to criticize in the way the EU works but this isn’t criticism, it’s activism …

And it has stuck. We see this daily, in blogs, website comments and fora such as Facebook, where people who cannot, in good faith, be considered professional propagandists, use exactly the same terminology over and over again destroying whatever political dialogue can be said to exist in such places.

The sound-bite politics of slacktivism preclude thinking, in fact cannot survive thinking and so must ensure there is none involved. And that is, in the end of the day, what makes this and every kind of political slacktivism so dangerous: it doesn’t evolve in the fringes of proper political debate, it replaces it…

In the tavern off the square, a small party of tired travellers is trying to make the most of the exotic fare of this strange town, so often visited yet still so foreign. As they huddle around the long table, stooping exhausted over their steaming bowls of tajine, one of them, we shall call him the Southerner, sees the lonely figure through the tavern’s smoky windows, the man-boy mounting his forlorn guard on the street outside.

The travellers are talking in hushed tones. They have been pondering their mission, the long hours they once more spent in their other scriptorium, the one where for so many years they remain but guests. The Southerner suddenly decides to investigate and excusing hismelf in humble tones he leaves the table for the cold, damp street outside.

Standing discretely in shadows, away from the soft yellow light of the lonely lamp over the tavern’s entrance, he follows the man-boy with his eyes, puffing quietly on his old, stained pipe.

Like an owl in the dark, the boy has been calling the name of his loved one every few minutes but, high above him, the window looks away cold and indifferent. The hours have been long, the fog is now closing in and the chill is enveloping him, numbing the senses and sinking the heart. Finally, with a tired sigh he sits on the pavement, head in hands. The lonely rose he has been carrying from his distant hometown, a good three days march from the dark alley, is lying in his lap unused as it is unwanted.

The Southerner is moved… Slowly he leaves the door to join his fellow travellers and tell everything. In the glow of the fireplace, Motions and Resolutions pale as the sorry tale of love unrequited unfolds. Two women are among them and, oh the coincidence, one has just been wishing for true love.

The travellers’ hearts quiver. The Tibetan among them lifts his savage yet strangely serene face from his plate and mumbles something. Fra Glute, the iconographer, strokes his beard pensively and the Falcon, the one who had gone away on a secret errand and had only just joined the party the previous day, consults his ancient apple-skin scrolls.

Fra Samsone, of the unruly mane, recently returned from Rome, is as always instantly moved to action while Sister Montana smiles pensively. Their leader, whom they call Fleur-De-Lys, finally nods sagely and forgetting their weariness they all rush to the door, checking their step as they walk out into the darkness, then stand to the side, keeping to the shadows.

The scene is frozen. The boy huddled on the pavement, the travellers, like a Greek chorus, looking on, urging him with their hearts, silently begging the one window to break its silence…

Instead it is the tavern’s door that opens. The innkeeper’s middle-aged sister appears with a tray of glasses, each one filled with her potent fig-wine. One of the travellers, the one who wished for true love, the girl we shall name Leonora, doesn’t bring it to her lips. She has seen true love, she has known it… She rushes to the lovelorn figure and, sitting next to him on the cold pavement, offers him her glass.

The man-boy slowly turns tear-filled eyes to the stranger. As if waking from a long slumber he takes the tiny glass, stares at the strange blonde angel that has swooped down as if from the heavens and his tear-filled eyes thank her silently.

Leonora smiles at him, says something in her strange, lilting voice and then leaves quietly to join the other travellers. It may be true love, but she knows it is not hers to taste.

Minutes, nay seconds pass and, at last, as if prodded by the stranger’s intrusion, the window croaks, then opens. The girl leans over slightly, looking at her lover who is standing now, fired by love and emboldened by the fig poison as he pleads with her.

The travellers, stepping back into the shadows, hold their breaths as Dulcinea makes her appearance then quietly leave the scene to its own heroes returning to the warm glow of the tavern.

But it isn’t to be. The girl’s voice cracks like a whip, shattering the silence of the cold night: “Je n’ ai pas envie”…

It is now late in the night, the dark alley, emptier than ever, is weeping quietly in the soft rain as the travellers prepare to leave, somewhere in the distance a soft song can be heard, a boy’s voice wailing “La donna e mobile”…

Just then the innkeeper’s sister walks triumphantly into the dimly lit room holding something. It is the rose, lovingly wrapped, that the unsung hero had brought from his distant hometown. Unwanted, rebuffed, the flower of love has found a new owner. The middle-aged woman gives it to Leonora.

“From the boy” she whispers and the night blooms.

No, this isn’t one more European’s rant against our transatlantic sister. It actually concerns something entirely different: viral marketing, the unruly cousin of any “proper” communication strategy that seems to have followed the same path with astonishing speed.

I don’t remember exactly when or what my first exposure to viral marketing was, but I’m pretty sure it was some YouTube video a few years ago. I am also almost certain it concerned a car but that’s all I can say. It was however a revelation. It was clever, funny and just a little dangerous. It wouldn’t bring the froth to the mouth of any of the usual defenders of our “public morality”, but you knew that this little clip could never
find a slot on any TV channel on earth. Yet within weeks, days maybe, thousands upon thousands had seen it. More importantly perhaps they had chosen to watch it, rather than have it blasted at them across the living room during the semi-conscious twilight of the ad break.

We saw it all, from the unruly children advertising contraception, to the superhero grannies advertising cars that are hard to steal, to remember just a couple. And I am speaking of viral ads here, not viral videos in general which are quite different: they don’t “sell” anything and in that sense fall outside the scope of this post.

The original viral ad, whichever that was, and the clips that followed by the hundreds, were almost uniformly brilliant. Something you could and would discuss with your friends and colleagues. What was most important however, from a marketing point of view, wasn’t so much the naughtiness, as the nagging sense of disbelief. Is this a “real ad”? Is it the work of some unknown YouTube Kurosawa, toiling away in the family loft when he ought to have a proper job, a family and a… real car? Who knew?

Somehow, at the back of everyone’s conscience it was pretty clear that the “viral”, being as slick as it was, could only be the work of pros and so another theory quickly emerged: that they were produced by advertising companies and then dumped by the customer for being too racy, only to find their way onto the web.

I remember that close to 90% of the discussion wasn’t on the clip itself, brilliant though it was but on whether it was a mistake, a trick, a real ad that had made it to YouTube, whether the company advertised was behind it or not. Yet even that was more suspension of disbelief than outright credulousness. It did get the discussion going though and that was the point.

It was, in short, revolutionary. It probably cost as much as a proper ad to create and then essentially nothing to disseminate. And it was cool in the way Captain Jack Sparrow will always, by definition, be cooler than his redcoat nemesis.

And then within a very, very few years, months maybe, captain Sparrow pulled up a leprous coat-sleeve to reveal the red underneath. No one can have any illusions any more and to crown it all, there are now even “official” virals, with a very basic Google search turning up hundreds of examples.

Let me be clear on one thing. It is neither naughty nor illegitimate. In fact its far more legitimate than a “true” viral in the sense that those putting out “official” virals own up to them from the start, even presenting them in… official press events. In reality, their “viral” aspect is making them available on the web and hoping they are good enough to be spread by people. Maybe that is what viral is all about: encouraging people to spread your message for you because said message is good enough (read funny enough) to merit spreading.

In fact it’s pretty brilliant. If I see something truly good on the web, I will send the link out to my friends. But, come to think of it, I will rarely send it out to everyone I know,  only those I know will appreciate it: I will in a sense do the audience-targeting myself because I know that if I send it to someone who won’t, or can’t, get it, I will end up with an egg on my face.

I did it back when we thought the virals were pirate stuff and I do it now that we know they aren’t exactly that and the rate at which I, in turn, receive viral ads from my friends hasn’t exactly diminished. If anything it has grown proving the value of the medium.

Yet there is something missing. Maybe it’s the titillation of not really knowing if it is real marketing or not that does it. Or maybe the fact that an official viral has to maintain all or most of the decorum expected of a proper ad. The new virals may be good, even very good, but the smoke-and-mirrors magic show has left the scene, the giggly mystery of the country fair magician is lost.

It is like discovering that Sparrow isn’t Teach but Drake, not a really a pirate but a privateer, doing his stuff on a “letter of marque” issued by the throne. Drake was more effective and historically important than the Blackbeard. But whom of the two does every schoolchild know?

An official viral can still be funny and effective as a marketing tool, but it is also like discovering that it’s FIFA employees who blow the vuvuzelas. It somehow takes all the fun out of it and along with the fun maybe, just maybe, it takes away some of the marketing effect. Or does it?

It is therefore telling of the state of the world, that it barely made it to the front page of some media for essentially a single day, before being relegated to more specialised sections, or worse…

Its not that Venter didn’t get his day on the front page. He got it. But that, more or less, was that. Even on the net, a medium supposedly more attuned to the World of Tomorrow,  coverage hasn’t come close to, say, that reserved for the iPad… Was creating life nothing more than an interesting aside? A fait divers that only tickled the odd molecular biology geek?

Strangely enough, the legions of moralising technophobes that usually accompany such scientific leaps with their doom-mongering, so far seem to be silent. People have been going on for a long time about how in this age of instant communications and truly mass media on every conceivable subject and platform our attention span has regressed to preteen levels. Or is there something else at play here?

Strangely enough, the legions of moralising technophobes that usually accompany such scientific leaps with their doom-mongering, so far seem to be silent. People have been going on for a long time about how in this age of instant communications and truly mass media on every conceivable subject and platform our attention span has regressed to preteen levels. Or is there something else at play here?

Maybe, just maybe, it is because, in fact, this goes way beyond “such scientific leaps”. In fact there has probably never been a scientific leap of this magnitude.

Fire? Pah, its everywhere… Sooner or later someone would have figured it out. The wheel? Well, deciding that something roundish could help with the everyday drudgery of hauling your fillet-mignon de Mammouth to the cave can’t have been that hard. Computers? 3D TV? The iPad? 22 language simultaneous translation? Not bad, but…

But life? Life?? This is something that not even those great techno – oracles of the past couple of centuries, Jules Verne in the 19th and Star Trek in the 20th, had predicted. Star-Trek, which is really what we should all aspire to has its share of artificial life forms, often entirely indistinguishable from the real kind, but they are mechanical, souped-up robots or holograms, not “life” in the biological sense of the word.

Venter et al created something entirely different. Sure, some will point out that they injected synthetic DNA into an existing, natural, cell. But what is a cell without its DNA… More or less nothing: it’s the DNA that does it and as Venter himself put it, with that strange little smile of his, this is the first organism whose parent is a computer. A computer, it has to be said, that is owned by none other than Craig Venter himself who is also said to be filing patent after patent, in order to ensure the commercial viability of the whole enterprise.

After all the puny bacterium is, indeed, just that: puny. It also seems to have no useful application. Others will, must, surely follow and the quicker they do the better. Oh of course people will say that care is needed and some safeguards are necessary. We don’t want some grey goo overtaking the planet (at least not before space colonisation begins) or who knows what other horror. Horrors will certainly be cooked-up by those who specialise in such things, but let’s be optimistic. As for those who will say that man was not meant to create life… well, sorry folks.

The real question then, is what we do with this. Like a small child given one of those fantastic but outrageously complicated 16+ Lego sets, mankind has to think hard. But not too long please. Pondering the philosophical aspects is essential, but it will only take us so far. Venter himself has spoken of creating a bacterium that will suck in pollution and spew fuel at the other end, which is a perfectly good idea. It also serves to illustrate how much damage humanity has been doing to the planet that its first use of its newfound powers should have to be something like this. We have to hope that things even more amazing will follow.

But then if one thing is already clear, it has to be that many wonderful things will indeed come of it but we don’t yet know what. Who would have told Alan Turing or the builders of the Colossus that a few decades later we would be speaking of the iPad? Who would have told Mendel, for that matter, where his tinkering with peas would lead humanity a couple of centuries later (and yes, Venter was the first to get there too).

This post was initially going to be about how technology seems stuck in a rut. About a certain anger at how the return of 3D film-making was trumpeted as the greatest technological marvel of the past decade, when the minds that created it might have been better employed elsewhere to the greater benefit of society. Then Venter spoke.

Up to now, there was only one Creation. From now on there are two.

It is therefore reasonable that it should have its own measuring instrument, to measure the response of public opinion to the measures it proposes (or has already taken). That instrument is the Eurobarometer, not just an instrument but a true institution of, well, institutional Europe.

Almost every other day a new Eurobarometer survey will appear informing us about what the citizenry in the EU and the candidate countries believes on this or that issue.

“Since 1973, the European Commission has been monitoring the evolution of public opinion in the Member States, thus helping the preparation of texts, decision-making and the evaluation of its work”, our confreres over at the Commission’ Communication Directorate General, proudly announce on the Eurobarometer homepage and in many ways it is more or less that. Indeed, the astute follower of EU matters cannot help but be impressed by how close policy seems to reflect the opinions of those surveyed by the Eurobarometer – and vice versa.

Worthy as it is though, Eurobarometer rarely touches upon the truly interesting questions. Well, the questions that interest me, those that usually the Press relegates to the newspapers’ “odd news” section

Admittedly, sometimes it does manage to intrigue, even titillate me in the all the right ways. To take just the most recent crop of surveys, Eurobarometer informed us that, for example, “53% of Europeans surveyed still believe that antibiotics are effective against viruses” (“still”…?) or that one in four Europeans are, physically “almost completely inactive” (I am not one of them, I blink every now and then)

Even better, it has found that almost two thirds of all Europeans no longer have all of their teeth and fully 15% have “experienced difficulties, over the last twelve months, in chewing, biting or eating food”…

Yet something is still lacking, that scintilla of pure genius still eludes the Eurobarometer. For example, they never asked the One question Ipsos, a professional polling outfit, did ask, “Have aliens already arrived?”

Many will rush to exclaim “but of course” and think of more than one celebrity (or pet) that cannot possibly have entirely terran DNA, while others will, sadly, smirk.

But back to the poll. On the whole, one participant (you will notice I was careful to avoid using the word human) in five stated that aliens do indeed live among us. The list is headed by the Indians, almost evenly balanced between believers and non-believers at 45% Vs 55%. The Chinese follow with 42% and then the Japanese and the Koreans. The first Europeans to figure on the list are the Italians, right after the Koreans with 25% and, at this point it is useful to point out that it is some of the world’s most ancient civilisations that seem to know… (not to mention John Carpenter).

Elsewhere in Europe, only 8% of the Dutch and Belgians and 9% of the French seem to have somehow stumbled upon the truth while a rather extraordinary 84% in the UK answered that aliens do not inhabit the earth.

Ipsos points out that “Those who believe that “alien beings have come to earth and walk amongst us in our communities disguised as us” (20%) are more likely to be men (22%) compared to women (17%), under the age of 35 (25%) compared to those aged 35-54 (16%) and those over the age of 55 (11%) and those more likely to be higher educated (22%) compared to those who are lower or middle educated (19%). There is virtually no difference in terms of income level (lower 22%, higher 20% or middle 19%) and marital status (married 19% versus other 21%).”

The poll, Ipsos points out, is based on “an international sample of 24,077 adults aged 18-64″ “interviewed in a total of 22 countries representing 75% of the world’s GDP”…

Eurobarometer…. eat your heart out

It is actually true – to a certain extent, although of course we all know that we aren’t talking of a particularly large extent, probably not half as large as we sometimes believe it to be. And it isn’t just because of the Big Brother state and its continuing tendency to become ever more big brotherly.

What I’m talking about here is a little different. The question isn’t how limited the true extent of our freedom really is, but how limited our actual inbred, genetically encoded need for that “freedom” sometimes proves to be.

Up there...

In quantitative terms, it is exactly… 7%. That, it seems, is the percentage of our daily life that a third party, an outside observer, Big Brother, might describe as “unpredictable”.

At least that is what a survey published in Science and reported by arstechnica would seem to suggest. In concrete terms researchers dug up customer location data held by cell-phone service providers and effectively tracked, retroactively, the movements of their customers. What they found is simple: 93% of said movements were, well, predictable. People, it seems tend to stay within a well-defined, relatively small area almost all the time.

As arstechnica puts it, “All users were roughly equally predictable, regardless of the size of their typical travelled region. Everyone seemed to have a set area that they rarely left, and that area was always travelled in a very regular way—even the jet-setters appear to rarely deviate from their travel patterns”, thus, “Regardless of how widely they travelled, the researchers could adequately predict their locations, 93 percent of the time”.

... or down here?

Thus, the article concludes, “this research has a variety of practical implications”. I’m sure it does but, to be honest, I don’t want to know. Some “implications” might indeed be practical, like the better town planning suggested by the article. Some others might also be practical but to be honest I shudder to think to whom they might be “practical”…

Actually though, this brings to mind an observation by Gerald Durrell, one of the great ambassadors of the animal kingdom to humanity. Contrary to popular belief, he had noticed that most animals, even birds, don’t really roam the wild all that much and certainly not by choice. If they can get what they need, essentially food and a mate, within a fairly limited area, they are happy to stick to that area for the rest of their lives.

Which brings to mind… myself. I don’t consider myself all that predictable and, despite everything my phone might think, my life is actually quite adventurous.

For example, it would be tempting to assume that I always have my lunch at the EP’s ground floor canteen at 12:45 day in, day out, come what may. Well no, it isn’t true at all. I am after all a real individual, a free person so I occasionally surprise my cell-phone and go to the 12th floor canteen.

Call it my 7% moment.