But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I totally forget that in “normal” life I’m an official for the European Parliament. Questions from friends and family are here to remind me my “duties”. This summer, I also read a very interesting book: Jean Monnet’s memoirs.

Jean Monnet (on the left) with Robert Schuman © Conseil de l'Europe, Strasbourg - Source: Fondation Jean Monnet pour l'Europe

You’re going to think I’m a Euro geek… Well, maybe a bit, even if the reason for this reading was simply that I got this book as a gift from our Secretary General, and I hate getting a book without reading it.

Now that I’ve read it, it would be a shame not to share this experience. I doubt a lot of people will enjoy these 800 pages written in French… Here are a few quotes that I found particularly interesting, and which can be the starting point of more extensive reflexions.

• “I was convinced that we can’t go forward without a certain disorder“: It’s good to be organized, as I am… but a certain disorder is probably necessary to be creative. I’ll try to make use of this in the next months!

• “Sovereign states are not any more the framework where today’s problems can be solved“; “The aim of the Council of the EU is to find a common view and not to look for compromises between national interests“: interesting enough in today’s context, where every country is trying to get the best possible deal for itself in Brussels… Don’t we forget our common interest while doing that? And how to make people interested in what Europe does if the focus stays purely national?

• “People only accept change when it’s absolutely necessary, and they see this necessity only in crises“: Well, that’s just a bit of hope in the crisis Europe is facing (I mean the question of the sense and aim of the EU, not the economic crisis)”The difficulties were not in the things but in the spirits”: Hey, that’s why communication is so important!

• “Institutions, once created, have their own force which goes beyond people’s will. But only the people can change and enrich the things the institutions then transmit to future generations“: Nothing to add, that defines the limits and potentialities of our role as civil servants.

• “Nothing can be really finished, and it’s a talent to know where to stop before too much care destroys the balance achieved“: This quote made me think about perfectionism and helped me to become aware of certain problems in the way I deal with my daily work. I discussed it with my colleague Anete, who explained me the Pareto principle. That made me think about efficiency at work…

Is he our new guru?

The meeting was, in my opinion, very interesting since the guy knew very well what he was talking about and gave straight answers to the questions we brought up – even if he was perhaps a tad less unambiguous on privacy issues. But I won’t blame him, he was representing his company, was up front about that and we shouldn’t forget it. He gave useful insights on how Facebook is going to develop, what other institutions do and what we, the European Parliament, could do to improve our Facebook-presence.

I picked up some facts and statistics to give an overview of where we stand in the Facebook-galaxy (some of them come from our boss, Steve).

I was sitting next to Fred, our graphist, during the meeting... This is the way he takes notes. Well, my notes are so boring compared to that...

We can be proud of what we do on social media, for sure:

• As far as we can tell, the European Parliament is Europe’s highest ranking public political institution on Facebook
• The European Parliament page brings together the largest online community interested in EU politics – the second one being an unofficial EU page with about 43 000 fans.
• In the world rankings of public political institutions on Facebook, the European Parliament seems to be second only to the White House
• The European Parliament is the indisputable world leader in the use of Facebook by a parliamentary institution

But, nevertheless, we shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too much and forget going on… because our 75 000 fans are nothing compared too:

• 272 000 on the Democracy UK page, which was launched to debate political issues at a national level.
• 455 000 fans/friends of all MEPs on Facebook (It’s even probably more than 500 000 now)
• 9.3 millions fans for Obama
• 9.6 millions fans for Lady Gaga
• 400 million Facebook users worldwide
• 500 million EU citizens
• 500 billion minutes spent on Facebook every month in the world

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.

IS IT an addiction?! Thanks to Fluxy for the pciture on Flickr @ http://bit.ly/brf29N

I considered myself a “frequent social media user”, with some incipient risk of addiction. Since I read this blog from tech company Retrevo that relieved me. I’m NOT in the top risk category. Apparently, I don’t present the most visible signs of what researchers call “obsession with checking in with their social media circles throughout the day and even the night”.  

Believe it or not, the most dangerous symptom of the syndrome, according to scientists, is interrupting sexual activity (or, as Retrovo delicately phrases it, “intimate moments”), to check your Facebook or Twitter account. According to Retrevo, 11% among young users (under 25) do it regularly. Yes, that’s right, check their fourth chart, third green column from the left… My theory “the youngest, the best” is totally in crisis now.

Another bad sign is if you check your account(s) as soon as you wake up in the morning, sure that there will be somebody even more zealous than you who already posted something. This is a very contagious virus, since it strikes 48% of social media users. Not me.  I’m the kind of girl that avoids any interaction with the world (real or virtual) before 9.00h.

But then, it comes to the third, unmistakable symptom: are you ready to interrupt a dinner for an electronic message? YES! Yes, I am! I am able to start a 2 hours conversation on the phone while starting to eat and I completely forget about my dinner. But then the phone is quite old school isn’t it? I mean, I wouldn’t consider it as “social media”, but more as “social life” addiction.

Naturally, all this left me burning with curiosity… I started to wonder if my colleagues were those kind of very bad addicts, or just we all belong to the old school. Here the result of my Flash Survey 19-04-2010.

Sex and the ex

Definitely happy to discover that the majority of us don’t open Facebook during our “intimate moments”. Only one admits to having had “a chat” while making love.

Worth a mention, the case of “an ex insisting on checking if she got a text to her phone during sex”: maybe a sufficient reason to break up. (ed. How reliable is such information about an ex, I wonder?)

Otherwise, numbers talk clear: we are below the average, with 14 out of 15 answering an unambiguous “NO” to the question.

Night-book?

Unit below the average also there, but with some more positive answers: 1/3 of us check Facebook “during sleepless nights”, when they wake up (no Dan, not everybody does!), or before going to bed. It is, surprisingly, a 80% male majority. Maybe girls have something better to do at night?

Ex are recurrent presences in this poll: “My ex was sticking to Facebook as soon as she woke up. And I would have killed her!”. Poor guy… Take comfort from your colleague who had to deal with the sex-SMS-ex.

Dinner and phone, a popular combination

1/3 of us check Facebook “during sleepless nights”, when they wake up, or before going to bed.

Yes, we’re definitely the old school. Most of us allow interruption of dinner by the phone, but internet is not mentioned at all: we don’t have “our computer at the dining table”.

Some people “try to avoid it” (the phone), meaning that it’s a very frequent practice. Only 5 say a convinced “NO”, whereas the others – knowing that they could be judged under the Fine Dining Etiquette rules – answer a timid “no, unless…”.

No ex this time, but a very liberated family: ” I was always thought those families that wouldn’t answer the phone during dinner were strange. Would they rather have the phone ringing off the hook than answering?!”

And now comes the best…

Eh eh. You thought you were sane, didn’t you? That, despite the hours spent in front of the screen, all the pictures of your school mates you have been browsing, the dangerous chats with the ex, despite Twitter and MySpace entering your adult life, YOU are still immune. I did. Till I got at the end of the article:

“56% of social media users need to check Facebook at least once a day. Even more impressive are the 12% who check in every couple of hours”

Every couple of hours??? What if it’s every couple of minutes??? My god…THAT’s a SYMPTOM! Unless, unless…you have a good excuse…a good excuse like

“I use it for work”

And, uff, I have it. Do you?!

The network is spreading

We don’t claim the scientific method or the statistical sophistication of Fleishman Hillard, but we have some rough and ready figures on how many MEPs are using social media – and it seems the numbers are well up since the elections. Doubtless increasing every day as well…

So, here we go:

Twitter

We found 230 MEPs with Twitter feeds.  That’s just over 31% of the membership of the EP. Collectively, they have over 114,000 followers.  If you want information on who is most followed, most active, etc., the euro-twitter aggregation site europatweets.eu offers some statistics (for which I take no responsibility).

Twitter is of course currently having another of its moments in the limelight, thanks to its role in helping people deal with myriad difficulties caused by the air traffic ban (see Tibo’s post mentioning this and his praise for Eurocontrol’s exemplary efforts on Twitter), and many MEPs have been using their Twitter feeds to tell stories of travel disruption, seek/give information or occasionally vent some frustration.

Facebook

A majority of MEPs have Facebook profiles! We found 401, that’s 55% of them. That’s a comfortable co-decision qualified majority… Unlike Fleishman Hillard, we haven’t got the research firepower to try to assess “extensive” users of social networks, but I think we can assume that the total we found represents a significant increase over the 33% who “used social networks extensively” before the elections.

A majority of MEPs have Facebook profiles! That’s a  qualified majority.

Altogether, and very interestingly for anyone thinking in terms of a burgeoning EP online community, these members have well over 450,000 fans, but, of course, fairly spread out between them.  (We couldn’t help noticing though that almost 90,000 of the total were fans of just two members, but otherwise the numbers are quite even.)

Facebook is the social media platform which seems to offer us the greatest possibilities at present. The number of fans (or, as it now says, “people who like this”) of the EP Facebook page is growing steadily, and stands at 66,640 at the beginning of the day I write this, which also happens to be the page’s first birthday! We are also seeing an increasing level of interaction on the page from fans, and, it is good to observe, from MEPs who wish to join in the debates they see occurring there.

Personally, I can’t find anyone else in the EU institutional framework, or in the wider “official” European parliamentary world, who has built up a number of fans approaching this. (That said, I am not going to compare the page with, say Britney Spears or Barack Obama – 2.6 and 8.0 million fans respectively – but that’s different, right?) So, perhaps, embryonically, the EP Facebook page stands as good a chance as anyone at offering one place where the mythical European public sphere to start taking shape online. Now, moreover, that we know about all those members – and all their fans – it seems all the more clear that the time has come to start getting serious about developing the links and interaction between them all, and maybe creating a kind of institutional hub for their conversation.

But that is another, very interesting, story and doubtless material for many more posts in the future. Back to business.

Blogs

Last in our research, we found 282 MEP bloggers, which is about 38%. I admit to wondering whether we found everything, but do note that the FH study had MEP “extensive” bloggers at 24%.

****

MEPs are increasingly engaging via social media. This must have momentous implications for our own institutional online strategy in the future.

So there you go, just some quick figures. Many thanks to the doughty trainees for their valuable efforts on this. As I said, I don’t pretend it is “scientific” research and I am going to be cautious about getting into more detail, which might be rather spurious. The key thing is we know that, yes, MEPs are increasingly engaging via social media, that a critical mass is surely being reached and that this will have momentous implications for our own institutional online strategy in the future. More anon, no doubt.

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.

Do we want to stay isolated at the top of the EP ivory tower in Brussels? Or do we want to be open to Europe? Photo by Annette Poro on Flickr

When I applied for a competition three years ago, I was just finishing my studies, searching for a job in France. I had no connection in Brussels, no idea about how it is to work for the European institutions. The competition was a great opportunity, a big adventure for me. Month after month, it became more and more real. The final result gave me the chance to come to Brussels. Otherwise, I would probably have never come. I would have stayed at a local level, communicating for municipalities or regional authorities (an extremely interesting job, which was very complementary what I now do in Brussels).

The only thing I would like to wish to people is to take the opportunity, to go ahead and to enjoy the same experience. Europe needs young, creative and dynamic people. Europe needs people from all over its territory, not only from Brussels. And Europe is there for citizens, Europe should base on its citizens. EU institutions should be open institutions, accessible to everyone. Brussels shouldn’t be too far away in the heads of millions of citizens who could have the skills and the desire to work for the institutions!

Europe needs people from all over its territory.

I see the open competitions as the lung of the European institutions. They have – in my opinion – two aims.

The first one is to recruit specialists from different sectors. A lot of them are already in Brussels, working in or around the institutions. EU needs their skills, their commitment and their knowledge of its functioning and issues.

The second one is to attract citizens from the four corners of Europe. If we want institutions not in their ivory tower, closer to the people, if we want to destroy the bad image of “those in Brussels”, if we want to go to the citizen, we should first open our doors to them.

The European institutions have been too much separated from Europe in the last decades. Let’s hope it will change. Is the reform of the EPSO system (which organizes the competitions) a step in the right direction? I don’t know. Wait and see, and good luck to all the competitors!

And yet… and yet research by at least one organisation, Pingdom, seems to show that the truth is a little different. For most social networking sites, the average user age turns out to be closer to 40 than to 20. In their own words “social media isn’t dominated by the youngest, often most tech-savvy generations, but rather by what has to be referred to as middle-aged people (although at the younger end of that spectrum)” or, to be exact, exactly 37 years old.

Looking at the results of the Pingdom survey in greater detail, four websites, classmates.com, LinkedIn.com, Delicious.com and Slashdot.org have average users older than 40. The, relatively speaking, geriatric ward, is “classmates” which, of course, seeks to reunite long lost former classmates and has an average user age of almost 45.

Speaking of Slashdot.com, “news for nerds”… Its nerd/geek credentials truly are beyond reproach, as witnessed by the recent message: “Magicjack lost a lawsuit against Boing Boing when the judge declared the legal action a SLAPP”.

At the other end, Bebo has the lowest average age of users, just 28 years and the highest number of female users, nearly 70% followed by myspace and classmates.com.

Closer to home for us here at webcom, Facebook users are a respectable 38, while Twitter‘s an even more respectable 39 (on an aside, the site processed more than a billion tweets for the first time in December). On the whole, Pingdom found that most social networkers are 35 to 44 years old and, by a modest margin mostly women. Indeed, over the 19 sites used in Pingdom’s research women represent 53% of users and men 47%.

Indeed, the over 35 age group represents about 57% of all social media users, while the under 25s just 24%, most of them in the under 18 age range. With only 9% doing the social media thing, the 18 to 24s, the age band most people probably refer to as the “young” when it comes to treating them as a target group for activities like voting or even shopping, are one of the two most under represented groups in social media. They only beat the over 65s who log in last at 3%.

Obviously, what is missing from this is depth of time: what would returning to the survey in say 5 or ten years show? Will it be greater penetration of the truly young or a continuously ageing customer base for a media that is habitually described as crucial for reaching out to the… young?

So the question is there. Despite everything people tend to believe, are the “social media” a middle age affair?

Discuss…

PS. In case you are still wondering, SLAPP means Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. What that means is not for me to answer…

Our production on this blog - from July 2008

As communication geeks (and freaks), we always look at the stats. How many people did read this article? What was the traffic on the hearings website?

But we don’t look at ourselves that much… What about changing the point of view and take us, member of the web communication unit of the European Parliament, as target? Let our readers rest for a while, let them in peace. And let’s make a little assessment of our own production on this blog.

First statement: 201 posts have been posted on this blog since July 2008. A quite great amount if we look at the fact that it really started in February 2009, in the run up to the European elections. Since then, 176 posts have been posted, which makes about one every two days. The record is for October last year with 41 posts – which makes twice posts a working day!

EP officials are also thinking creatures, not only blind machines (or am I misinterpreting?)

Second statement: Guess what? The most used category is called “At work“, with more than 35 % of the posts. Not a big surprise since this blog is run by a team of professionals… The second category is “Thinking allowed“, which shows that EP officials are also thinking creatures, not only blind machines (or am I misinterpreting?). Personal posts aren’t that popular, but for that, we have our personal blogs, don’t we?

Third statement: Who’s writing on this blog? It’s very unequal. On average, every editor wrote 5 posts. But if we take out the three most prolific writers (who account for more than half of the posts, with a special mention for the first one who wrote… 53 posts), the average falls to 2.4 posts per person… Some people didn’t write anything, some others only every six months. C’mon guys, our readers would like to know a little bit more about you! (By the way, I’m not very prolific either…)

It’s quite difficult to analyse these figures… There are very different opinions in the team about this blog, perhaps also different views of how it should look like and why it is important in our communication strategy. And, as in every team and for every project, there are some frontrunners and some stragglers. But maybe we could write a post asking colleagues about how they consider this blog?