Thinking allowed
Not the 8 o’clock news
The process of the hearings of designated commissionners, which starts today and will go on until Tuesday 19 January, gives me a good opportunity to illustrate some of the biggest difficulties in our job as web-editors for the European Parliament website.
The “new” old generation
Bare facts are always the best way to prove you are right. And the fact is that – since I have my internet connection - I am off the list of daily newspaper subscribers. To be precise – no subscription papers or magazines arrive in my mailbox. But I am still a subscriber of the same [...]
Different meanings for different media
The different supports – press, radio, TV, internet have different uses and meanings according to different temporal and spatial contexts. Is it the same effect when we read an article in a newspaper, when we hear a radio programme about it, when we watch a television programme or we read a blog in the internet? We can [...]
Sand in the shoes
In today’s constantly-developing society where information technology not only forces its way into public, but also private life, reading and communication culture is changing: one can read a book on the Internet, or on the Amazon Kindle. One might wonder where the human touch has gone, when we used to attend literature classes and dip [...]
“Casus Belli”
We asked our three trainees (Lady, Lelde and Indre) to tell us a bit about their relationship with the medias. After all, they belong to the e-generation and could maybe teach us a thing or two about contemporary media. Well, guess what? Lady choose to talk about her family instead…
We are all history-makers
I was thankful when someone once told me that “when you surround yourself with people who never want to advance in life, you will be exactly like them”. “You have to surround yourself with people who have a plan in life, in other words with people who are “a life”, because when one has no [...]
Surfing (other) European parliaments
“We should insist on the use of new technologies during elections in order to boost turnout. It is also time to open a debate on European political parties”: with his over 1100 Facebook friends and his 69 years, the president of the European Parliament has been already defined ‘the Facebook president’. His inagural speech inspired [...]
Be media friendly
European Parliament can sometimes work in a media unfriendly way. Take an example of a plenary debates. MEPs discuss the hot issue one day but the resolution to the topic is adopted the day after. Would you like to write an full article on the concrete problem with a concrete solution that was adopted? Wait [...]
Big worlds and small worlds
This is probably exactly the wrong place, indeed a self-contradictory place, to hint at heretically relativising thoughts, but being away far from Brussels for a few weeks has made me reflect on digital divides of various sorts.
The history of the world is the world’s court of justice – Friedrich Von Schiller
Moscow and Warsaw have been trading verbal blows over the circumstances of the outbreak of WW II – the opening of which began 70 years ago this week. To anyone who follows the European Parliament it seems that historical disputes are never far from the surface. The arrival of countries from central and Eastern Europe [...]
Where are the shamans?
Summertime allows relax chats in the corridors. The mind wanders around while colleagues get sun burns on all possible European coasts. Even Brussels looks like a friendly city, half emptied by its inhabitants and now occupied by cohort of tourists. Our team is relaxing, taking languages courses and preparing September. And me? I am sharing with you a story full of curse, volcano and Hawaiian god.
…And how can we go greener
Last week I wrote about where does the EP stand in green standards. This week, some tips on what can WE do to make the Parliament greener. And also, some fresh news about what is going to happen soon…thanks to EMAS that revealed it exclusively to us! In our corridors… I want to believe that [...]
How green do we go?
Call it post-election annihilation. Or maybe we were too concentrated to catch the new MEPs in the corridors to be able to notice anything else. The fact is, the ‘Green week’ of the European Parliament passed relatively unnoticed, if it was not for a Green official that made me test the ecopassenger tool, a very [...]
Still no equal representation in Parliament
Next week the newly elected MEPs will flock to Strasbourg for the inaugural session of the Parliament. Among them approximately 35% female Members. A slight increase compared to the previous legislature (until recently Parliament had 31% female MEPs) but way too little to be able to speak of an equal representation, after all 52% of EU’s [...]
User-generated cyber-trash
There’s a grey zone of cyberspace cluttered with petabytes of irrelevant publicly available private content. Is social media making us waste time and in reality become anti-social?
Now what?
The emerging consensus is that the campaign went well. Speaking parochially, we believe the online part of it particularly so. Of course, indulging in a feelgood factor for a while is fine, but the time is coming now for some serious evaluation. What worked, what didn’t, what did but wasn’t worth it…
Post-electoral depression
Nothing matters any more. The day-to-day work seems quite boring. What’s the aim of the articles we write, if not to increase the turnout in the elections?
My mama told me so
Dear reader, our team is coming up with a lot of new antics to ensure that our website is attractive to the reader and to make sure every European citizen is informed about what the European Parliament is doing for him and her! Hence, we are all looking forward to the eve of 7 June [...]
To be a digital non-citizen
“Svetla, what is a blog?” asked recently my mother in law. She is one of those who possess an always switched off mobile phone. She doesn’t write e-mails and uses the laptop for typing her own translations of French poetry. The fact that I work as an online editor makes me look in her eyes [...]
20 years after communism: two films
It was fascinating to attend this week a conference of public sector communicators from across Europe, including a discussion of how to communicate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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