Deep Web?

Let me do some maths today. I have been an editor of the EP website since the beginning of 2007. We write one or two stories per day, let us make it average: one and a half, times three years, be it 200 working days per year (minus holidays etc.), and we get: 1.5 x 3 x 200 = 900. (Correct me if I am wrong – have never been really into figures, square roots and all this stuff). This makes it nine hundred pages, more or less of a standard A4 content. Do you think the same? Yes, it could be few good books (at least in size). Ok, I am one of these folks who like the idea of ever publishing a very own book.

Louis Montoyer (1749, Mariemont, Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium – 5 June 1811, Vienna) was an 18th century Belgian-Austrian architect, principally active in Brussels and Vienna. Mr Montoyer was so generous and gave his name to the street where your dear editors spend their busiest hours. More then two centuries later his buildings are still around in Brussels. But what will happen with all the megabytes of texts that saturate the internet in every minute? Where will go all the blog entries, tweets, threads, chats, emails, reviews and comments flowing the Net with the constant clicking of qwerty, azerty, katakana, hiragana, Braille, quertz and Mandarin simplified keyboards? Just imagine:

AD 3010. Space ARCHEO Service report, subject: recovery of an ancient memory bank; cultural profiling: …our services managed to decipher partially erased data on the magnetic disc cylinder excavated from the debris in the BXL LUX quarter. Layer age: around year 2000. On the basis of the content of the best preserved folder named SPAM (Ju.k M.il), our anthropologists assume that around the year 2000 the humanity was preoccupied with constant distance and time measurement. Over 60% of the messages constitute a commercial offer of synthetic chemicals that are supposed to alter sensory perception of length, expressed in inches, probably a sort of simple hallucinogen drug. Blue, rhomboidal shape and large variety of synonyms for this substance that appear in the communications seems to confirm the drug hypothesis.  All of the data samples show that humans who created these inscriptions, univocally tended to prefer longer distances over the shorter ones. This fact may explain a progressive alienation of the human being documented by the authors of the last millennium.

The remaining 40 per cent of the messages retrieved from the data cylinder talk about replication of time measurement. Chronometric ROLFX instruments in the form of a wristwatch are the replicas of the master watch. The mother watch represents the most probably a certain form of feudal power articulated by the large crown ornament. The same royal ornament appears on the replica models, very likely as a complementing symbol of fiefdom. Our scientists believe that by setting the exact time on its replicas, the holder of the master ROLFX device could control life activity of the remaining members of his guild. Furthermore, data analysis has not shown any sort of cooptation by force. The membership in the ROLFX replicants guild was voluntary and even slightly elitist, due to the relatively high financial contribution to be paid in order to own the ROLFX replica…

 Since May 2006, when our communication services have been cloistered or maybe garrisoned (it is a civil service though) a good furlong away from the political epicentre marked with a ASP/PHS* crossroads, we hardly have a chance to nab a bite of this tasteful cultural richness of our continent. Fortunately my colleagues go home and come back bringing bagfuls of local delicacies, going some considerable way to compensate.

 Anyway, my friend navigated her way, using those mysterious hieroglyphs** drawn upon the walls of the Brussels temple of democracy: a tree (the Tree of Knowledge??), a steam car (Thomas!!!?) a challenge worth if not Champollion, then at least Young Indiana Jones.

 So she took another desperate turn and suddenly she came across a tall, white headed man in his sixties. You know the feeling very well: “crumbs! I am sure I met this guy before, I know him quite well, right, he must be one of my dad’s friends from the Ministry…” So she sent him a polite smile, asked “How are you?”, and when he acknowledged her back, they went on friendly small-talk for a while and wished one another a good evening.

 The man walked away and she noticed her colleague who has watched the whole scene. “Wow, he said, I am surprised you and Mr Prime Minister know each other so well”. The nice “dad’s friend” was Jerzy Buzek, now the President of the European Parliament.

 This time we knew exactly whom we are meeting. If you can measure the importance of the person with time you have to wait for the interview, over three months after the elections there was no doubt I went to talk with the head of the Parliament.

In fact, the new Cabinet just wished to wait until after the inaugural speech of Mr Buzek on September plenary. And then we had all that jazz about Lisbon. It is hard to ask questions with your breath held. And even harder to answer them, I presume.

 The Irish said yes on Saturday, then on Wednesday, we could see Mr Buzek on TV when Polish President eventually signed the Treaty with a biro because his fountain pen broke up in front of the cams; next Saturday he was in Prague, to find out, that Vaclav Klaus find another excuse not to do it… and then on Monday our photographer and the author walked in President’s office on the eleventh floor to talk.

 ”This is a properly working pen”, said Mr Buzek in jest pointing at the silver nib on top of the pile of the documents on his desk when we sat around with a dictaphone and a camera. Then he went on talking about the long-awaited signature in Warsaw…

Now a little quiz: what question did I ask Mr Buzek first?

You can read the interview on our website.

We need quotes. There are the red cells carrying precious oxygen of wit through the bloodstream of our discourse. A good quote is like peanut butter on your toast, a drip of tabasco in your Bloody Mary, a seventh-level spell you cast upon your readers, the primo mobile of your text, the salt of the earth, Amen.

A wall in Dublin (photo: author)

We fish for quotes in sometimes troubled and muddy waters in the pool of politics’ opinion. We comb the internet, we sieve through the piles of parliamentary reports. We run here our own little Bletchley Park where, in forage for an ultra-quote, we listen to endless hours of speeches of the Members, from Adamou to Zwiefka, from Cohn-Bendit to Farage.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest, said guess or google who. The politicians we interview try hard to be both. We do support them – wholeheartedly and philanthropically – for a common good.

Once we pin down an attractive quote and before we pin it up on our page it has to be translated into 22 languages. Good luck, but remember, that a hemicycle is not half a bike. Here you can observe a sprout of so called internal culture: we evoke this meant-to-be-funny-haha slogan from EP website launch campaign in 2005 to boast to our colleagues that we can translate nearly anything. 

Some unidentified misogynist polyglot insisted that translations, like women, could be either faithful or beautiful. This time, for a change, I believe, the Members would support the Editors engaged in their daily struggle between sense and sex appeal. 

Some of my colleagues announced some time ago an internal Web Communication contest for the quintessential empty quote. We have a universal winner. I would daresay it can be applied to the very craftsmanship of quoting and to the art of being quoted. And here goes, the quintessential quotoid: enormous progress has been made, but there is still a lot to do.