This is more or less mirrored by my use of the internet, thriving with billions of pieces of information, all linked together, sometimes without any logical scheme, and it’s easy to get lost. On time I was looking at the Napoleone Bonaparte page on Wikipedia and ended up reading about projects for the fourth generation nuclear power plants.

Let’s be honest: with all its mind-bogglingly possibilities, internet is anyway just another place to muck about. It’s always the same old story: the telephone allows you to communicate with people and hear their voices from all over the world, but then you will probably just call your buddy who lives two miles away and comment on the latest football match.

Today, Facebook is the most accessed website in the world, more than the Holy Google itself: it looks like people just can’t go on with their lives without knowing what pudding your cousin’s best friend’s brother in law ate this morning or what incredible, uberfun party your ex attended (and of course you weren’t invited to).

It’s really about our own nature: since the stone age and before those nice hairy ancestors of ours loved to live in small groups, communities, and now that we shave and our frenetic lives have cut out most of the leisure time, it’s just normal for technology to come in our aid providing us with new means to interact with people. I mean, of course nothing can compare to hanging out with your buddies for a beer, or dating your girlfriend, but in our fast paced life is good to be able to stay in touch with friends everywhere without too much of a hassle.

This however generated an unsettling issue: internet addiction. We have actual rehabilitation centres bristling with poor souls who are desperate for their internet fix. Twitter, Facebook, mySpace, Second Life: these are the new drugs of the third millennium. These addicts lose their jobs, their friends and give up on their real life in favour of a fake one where they can be someone else, erasing all the problems and not worrying about any consequence.

The question is: what’s the boundary between healthy and distorted? How can someone find out if he has a problem? How is it possible to help?
As always, education is probably the best way of dealing with these problems. In the globally connected world of today, kids (and adults as well) should be addressed with these issues, explaining how serious can be the consequences of an obsessed relation with the web. Family and friends can also provide invaluable aid to help those who already find themselves stuck in this vicious circle.

So, in the end, do I believe in those e-things?
No, I don’t believe in them and I don’t think they are as life-enhancing as they pretend to be, but I still take advantage of using them because they can be useful, and because with such small time to muck about, being a geek can just be hard at times.

One of the positive aspects in our line of work, though, is our ability to dig our own hole – or to build our own hell. Once we daily achieve our publishing-news-for-my-Latvian-grandmother mission, our team is usually left free to come up with ideas, projects, crazy scripts to fulfill the same mission only in different forms.

2009 was the year of a main big challenge while 2010 will propose many different ones, not all of them being small. Here are my perspectives.

I want a following not an end.

Keeping the team spirit up and raising.

Our team is demanding – you have no idea. They always want more challenges, more fun, more projects. Some of them have been with us for more than three years and they start to wonder if there would not be greener grass over the fence. Some have left and will be replaced soon. Others just want to stay as long as possible without getting bored in the process. In 2010, we’ll have to take care of them, with the little management possibilities (trainings, events, crazy projects) available in the institutional world. More than ever, it will be “management with a smile” but the smile should never become a grim. We’ll work on our processes and workflows. Synopsis and schedule will stay, since they do work as reliable and efficient tools, but we always look for better way to do things. This means team-workshops, trials and errors.

Amongst the things I’d like us to improve:

• shorter synopses (and, therefore, shorter articles)
• better posts on this blog
• better spreading of all the material we produce
• better coverage of the Plenary sessions.

Food for thought, as they say.

On a more personal quest, I’d love to integrate, in a way or another, Google Wave in our daily workflow. Like the whole Internet, I am yet to be convinced on the usability of the tool. But I am convinced this unusual live cooperative stuff can fit with our unusual 22 language team. Unfortunately, we can’t set it up on our current PC configurations. Maybe a good excuse to decree a new era of working from home?

Improving the current website

The end of the Elections Communication campaign took us back two years with the (scheduled from the beginning) closure of the Elections section. No more comments, debates, polls. The flagship website is like a supertanker: powerful and reliable, with a huge capacity, but slow to move. We already expressed our needs to the tech team. They laughed a lot, at first, and when they understood we were dead serious, they started to worry. Now, they are coding, and developing and we will work with them to add some features to the European Parliament’s website in the months to come. Yes: months. This is the frustrating part – those things take damned too long.

And there are also all the back office aspects that our dear readers and users don’t see. It’s amazing the amount of things we do manually – just because when we decided it would be a good idea to propose them online, the DIY way was the fastest. But as features accumulate, the time to call for automation has come. We’d like to be able to aggregate different products on a specific subject (say, stories and videos and slideshows and press releases) in a same place in one click for all 22 languages. We’d like to make life easier for our editors, so they write more and edit less.

We’ll try to report on our doubts, insights, creativity flashes and best intuitions on this blog. Don’t expect any concrete outcomes before at least two full years.

Designing a new website

While the current European Parliament website is still trendy and doesn’t look too “made in 1996″, it is actually an old website by the Internet standards, as it is older than six months. We’ve been instructed to conceive a full new website, based on the best forecasts and trends of how and what the Internet medium will evolve and become. Not an easy one. 2010 will be dedicated to meetings with external experts, workshops with internal users and, even if we don’t exactly know how yet, to getting some feedback from actual visitors and users of the website. We’ll try to report on our doubts, insights, creativity flashes and best intuitions on this blog. Don’t expect any concrete outcomes before at least two full years.

Staying alive online

We’ve created many profiles and platforms outside the main website. I remember some bets were taken, few months ago, on our intention to keep them alive after the Elections. Well, they’re all are (and some of our readers owe us some drinks…). We’ll keep them alive, but we still have to find our own personal and unique way to do so. More food for thoughts and more debates to come on those online social media.

I’ll stop here. I don’t want to scare our editors any more, the huge majority having already left for holidays somewhere in the EU or beyond (and possibly being currently stuck in a train blocked by the snow or in an airport full of delayed planes). I’ll take my chance with the train soon to visit my French family in the Alps. On a personal note, 2010 promises me what we call an “heureux événement” in French. I wish you all as many good surprises, challenges and “bouleversements” as the many ones that, I’ve been told, await me on the way.

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année à toutes et à tous.

See you on this blog in January 2010.

GUEST BLOGGER: Today is a big day in the life of the ep-webeditors blog. Nay, a rite of passage, a coming of age, an arrival in the sunlit uplands of Parliament bloggerdom. Today, our big boss, Jaume, Director and EP official spokesman, no less, appears for the first time on this blog. What’s more, he wants to talk about us! I read words like: “mischievious”, “smurfs”, “irresponsible” – but I’m reading nothing into it! Anyway, as they say, we are honoured to welcome onto our humble stage… The Director.

Keeping up without being killed in the attempt

One of the scariest moments in the professional life of the European Parliament’s Media Director comes when the people in charge of the Web Communication team storm in his office with the faces of mischievous children and a folder marked “new project” under their arms. It could be anything ranging from some doubtless vital overhaul of the website’s on line archives to the appearance on his desk of a group of strange blue-and-yellow little dolls resembling overweight smurfs that answer to the cryptic name of “YaBs”.

When the Director is introduced to a new internet project is a double test for him. Firstly, in relation to his capability or incapability to understand what the topic is. The Director is aware that he needs to understand at least one out of every three concepts and avoid letting his facial expression unmask his enormous ongoing neuronal effort.

Nevertheless the Director soon developed the conviction that a poor knowledge of the topic in question is often an advantage when it comes to proposing solutions which are acceptable for all the parties involved.

Secondly, because he will feel obliged to decide where to set the limits when it comes to accepting undoubtedly attractive proposals that however do not always reflect the degree of seriousness required of institutions such as the European Parliament.

The famous T-Shirts for the new website's launch

With regard to the first challenge, the Director is already the lucky survivor of a similar experience when, some years ago, he supervised the construction of a new press room full of electronic gizmos, hardware and software. Sounding intelligent in permanent discussion with audiovisual technicians, IT experts, architects and representatives of the press is not something you generally learn in any prestigious European Academy, nor would this ability be requested in a European Personnel selection competition.

Nevertheless the Director soon developed the conviction that a poor knowledge of the topic in question is often an advantage when it comes to proposing solutions which are acceptable for all the parties involved.

The second challenge is much more complicated because web teams, following their instinct and their duty, are continuously proposing tools that in most cases have “just arrived from the other side of the Atlantic” and which haven’t quite been used yet in institutional communication, let alone in Parliamentary communication. The Director will find himself quickly trapped between a rock and a hard place. The rock being those who rightly think that we have to adapt to new times – “Boss, Obama is doing this” – and the hard place being our hierarchy in the Parliament who do not necessarily accept ipso facto,the use of tools that don’t seem to correspond, a priori, to the solemnity of the Parliament.

Back in time it all started with something as innocent as overseeing the redesign of the main website so that it paid more attention to the ordinary citizen and less to European experts. But then it was about launching the new website surrounded by people in black t-shirts with surreal messages on them such as “A hemicycle is not half a bike”, or as militant as “Who cares for Europe? I do”.

In less than five years the way the European Parliament communicates has dramatically changed. It has become more modern, more accessible and more plural. Probably more coherent as well. But there is still a lot to be done and to be improved, especially if we don’t want to miss the train of the internet – one that resembles a Japanese bullet train.

Next came the production of audiovisual content (“Why should a Parliament be able to send press releases but not videos?”), or organising chats with the Parliament’s President. Later, taking advantage of the everything-is-possible principle of the European elections, a (partial) transition to full Web 2.0 interactivity took place. The Parliament explored social networks, blogs, wikipedia, online questions and debates. It also had viral campaigns with hysterical girls and gregarious cyclists and the use of all kinds of multimedia platforms. The majority of these instruments have demonstrated that they are valid and, after the elections, have been integrated with almost no discussion in the spectrum of the communication services of the Parliament.

In less than five years the way the European Parliament communicates has dramatically changed. It has become more modern, more accessible and more plural. Probably more coherent as well. But there is still a lot to be done and to be improved, especially if we don’t want to miss the train of the internet – one that resembles a Japanese bullet train.

Don’t worry. One of these days the Director’s desk will be filled once more with strange projects and his screen with intriguing slideshows. All the while, several expectant eyes in his office will try to guess from his face if he understands anything of what he sees, if he likes what he sees – and if he will be irresponsible enough to accept it.

But next time I will tell them the truth, I promise.

Sometimes you have to look at the world as it is

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.

There is the usual one of course, between people with access to the internet and those without, but it is probably fair to say that, at least in the developed world, no-one need be cut off from the internet, any more than anyone need be cut off from TV or a telephone. No, the important digital divides now lie between the different ways in which people experience the internet. That’s why I mention my own difficult “reintegration” after the break – it made me think about what kind of internet user I am and how that is quite different from other people, including many I work with.

Disclosure: I am white, male, British, university-educated, mid-forties.  So now you know. I am not “generation Y“, I don’t think I ever used a computer at school, and at university I wrote all my essays longhand.  However, when I watch the television (which is not that often, but apparently more often than Generation Y’ers) I notice from the current crop of ”nostalgia” programming (70s and 80s) that my generation is in charge of the (mainstream) media. I further note that Obama is not that much older than me. So perhaps my generation is in charge of the world too. Closer to home, I work daily with computers and the internet, I like gadgets. So how do I use the internet?

The important digital divides now lie between the different ways in which people experience the internet

Email is integral to everyday life also outside work, but most non-professional messages are dross (i.e. advertising). Just a small minority actually get any attention, but these are mostly unimportant and/or unofficial.  I still want my electricity bill in the post. On paper.

I check news sites, often provoked to do so by the two or three automatic newsletters I have signed up for. But, if I’m honest, it’s always the same two or three sites and I still want the “proper” news regularly (meaning the BBC, TV or radio). I still subscribe to paper magazines – which I actually read, but almost never buy newspapers.

The only news where the web really dominates for me is tech news.  That seems appropriate.

I buy things online – books, music, travel tickets, car hire – but only from big, well-known companies. I research offline purchases too, but most real things I want to touch before I buy.  I can’t bring myself to feel comfortable about eBay.

And of course, I find things out from the internet: weather, location, addresses and phone numbers, missing facts, quotes, dates… “Look it up” is something which now basically means “google it”.

So far, so Web 1.0… So what about the much-vaunted social media, Web 2.0 and all that? I share photos and the odd video online, but for me this is an operation, not a spontaneous  everyday mobile experience (like in the adverts). Yes, Facebook and Twitter are on my every day must-check list, but I realise that I am largely a spectator. I want my “friends” to be people I know, and at least feel friendly towards. I like to see what they are up too and, because I know them, don’t see this as voyeurism. I love checking out the cool online videos and websites (here’s one from this week) people link to – this is the greatest use of social networks for me.  Increasingly, though, I realise that 95% of the tweets I follow are just boring (I could cut down to following about five people with few regrets, those who (as we used to say back home) “only say something if they’ve got something to say”). So I consume social media, but it occurs to me more and more that I struggle for inspiration as to what to post myself.  This just doesn’t seem to be an issue for many others, but for me it just doesn’t come naturally to tell people about the trivia of my life, and I so want my updates and tweets to be interesting and pertinent that I self-censor almost anything I might put for fear of wasting people’s time.  That leaves “professional” updates and tweets, but even there I feel the need to moderate the volume for fear of inundating friends and/or spoiling the personal nature of Facebook (no such qualms with Twitter).

So, you might say, if I’m so reticent about talking about myself online, why am I telling you all of this?

Because I need an example.  I do not claim to represent my generation, but I also suspect that I am not untypical: a web-consumer, but not usually a huge web-explorer; a frequent user, but cautious about getting stung; attracted by social media, but not instinctive or natural about opening up my life to all online. The internet is an extra dimension, but not a natural habitat. I am not clueless, but I am not as clued up as many who surround me (thank goodness). I am a digital immigrant (like Svetla’s mother-in-law).

The pressure is always to be cutting edge, to be doing the latest thing, surfing the latest trend.  We need to do that, but we cannot do ONLY that.

None of this is how it’s supposed to be.  Breathless opinionistas and bloggers imply that all web users are spontaneous and opinionated online, smart, faddy, creative, uninhibited, keen to interact, desperate to be heard. They are supposed to be citizens of the world, talking to the world and listening to the world. They flock to the latest hit online video or cool website, aggregate content with their RSS browsers, and share their every move with their friends (whom in their case they probably do not actually know) in real time, tweeting on their mobile phones.

Of course, many, many people are doing exactly that, and more.

But many more aren’t.  The internet is like society in general, made up of people with very different online lifestyles.  People have their groups and their habitual haunts, their comfort zones and their downtime, their professional worlds and their private lives. Some people are young, energetic, adventurous, maybe also gullible, impulsive and fickle, others are more staid, constant, cautious, but perhaps also more stable and committed.

Where am I going with all this?  I suppose it’s no more than a question of trying to stand back for a moment, relativising and remembering that even online the European Parliament has to talk to everyone.  Catering to one world (good thing), must not exclude catering to others (also good thing). The pressure is always to be cutting edge, to be doing the latest thing, surfing the latest trend.  We need to do that, but we cannot do only that.  If our notion of digital democracy is to focus ALL our efforts on Facebook and Twitter (or whatever’s next), we win plaudits from the in-crowd online, but we arguably open up a digital divide of our own, cutting off an otherwise completely sentient crowd of people (I know many of them) who may have heard of Facebook and Twitter, but still think it’s a bit of a waste of time. They exist, yes, they use the internet, and they vote…

This is a huge simplification of course. As we found during the election campaign, different online and traditional media are not sealed off from each other, but feed off each other constantly. Nevertheless, we should not forget that in the great big world of the internet, people still organise themselves into their own little worlds. One of our jobs is not to limit ourselves to yet another little world of our own.

Do I overstate my case?

The cyberspace is also a home to crime, starting with hate speech and ending with paedophilia. But there’s also a grey zone in between that is cluttered with petabytes of irrelevant publicly available private content. Is social media making us waste our time, loose identity and in reality become anti-social?

Increasingly polluted internet

The consumers’ mankind has increasingly polluted the soil, water, air and the space. No surprise that the cyberspace – a copy of real life – is not immune. A huge part of the content the mankind is uploading and consuming is a digital trash.

The cyberspace is clogged with sex, porn and Britney Spears, we are flooded with meaningless Wats up? Hit/poke Me back; Check out my profile And Let me know Do you like me; Good morning twitterland, angry comment entries and in some cases misleading information. Is internet becoming a cyber junkyard with tiny islands of real content here and there?

What do we want?

We want fun, easy money and overnight fame. We need faster, more powerful and bigger capacity gizmos. We are buying more equipment than we need: just as our wardrobes with all those clothes our terabyte hard drives are packed with data we would never use.

We are snapping auto-mode shots with DSLRs, uploading billions of photos and constantly updating our “statuses” online. Yes, there already are kids who feel nervous if they’d spend 30 minutes without updating their “I had my breakfast” messages across multiple social networks.

We want easy digestible information that is prêt à consommer. We like to quickly copy paste, not to create. We need to shout louder than others and use dirty tricks to “optimize” our ability to be heard and seen, thus depreciating the value of digital content and reducing possibilities to find relevant information. As you are only accountable if you breach law, content doesn’t really matter, what matters is the number of views and the traffic you get.

Twitter became the voice of Iranian resistance, but what were you getting among the top entries after clicking the #iranelection couple of weeks ago? Many irrelevant posts decorated with bodies in swimming suits.

Pollution of the virtual world pollutes the real world too. We clog information highways, slow down the internet and yes, we produce CO2, as servers, PCs and networks eat up electricity. We produce 0.2 to 7g of CO2 per Google search, they say.

 We have no more free time, because most of it is spent swallowing information or producing it. You can’t enjoy the moment, because you have to document it and publicise it on the net. That’s the essence of our affluent digital consumer society.

Mass production of information

Let’s face it, much of the information (should we just call it “data”?) we produce is a junk. And the bubble is inflating with exponential speeds.

We have no more free time, because most of it is spent swallowing information or producing it. You can’t enjoy the moment, because you have to document it and publicise it on the net. That’s the essence of our affluent digital consumer society.

We are exhibiting the perfect ourselves rather than spreading ideas we have. It seems that everybody’s shouting, but no one’s listening, because we just can’t keep our attention focused. We keep posting infinite information and are busy running our own reality shows.

We are prosumers of digital content adding “friends”, “fans” and “followers”, but how many of them are genuine ones, not just wanting to increase their own visibility (thanks for the add, who cares)? Are there many people on your list of friends that you’ve never seen after graduating and will probably never see again?

(Anti-)social and (anti-)private media?

If you are not in the cyberspace, you do not exist. Couple of years ago one of my friends was seriously preoccupied that she was “not found by the Google search”. Is person’s value suddenly judged by the number of “friends” on social networks, tags, “likes” and the rating they get? Is it a real life or just a compensation of it?

“It is strange to use my private Facebook account for work purposes”, I said to my German colleague during the election communication campaign. “Private Facebook profile is … a misnomer, like clean coal, or natural plastic”, he said, and that is so true :).

Getting the identity back

Is there a way to separate private from public, but also stop the erosion of privacy online? How can we control our digital shadow and protect ourselves from identity theft? Is leaving a digital footprint good or bad, how can we control it or wipe it off completely? Do we need social networking luddites that would clean up the cyberspace and delete our accounts to protect us from surprises of being tagged? I don’t know, you tell me ;)

P.S. As this entry wasn’t elaborated well enough, I hope its digital footprint won’t be too big and it will be duly recycled into something useful.

Voting from Bali or....quite© Luci Ferrero.

Joanna throwing her vote in Jakarta

Finnish citizen Joanna Chellapermal was basking in the sun along Bali beaches, not even intending to use her right to vote in the EU elections. When suddenly….here she is in Jakarta using precisely that ONE….

She writes:

I had not intended to vote in the EP elections originally. Had I been in Europe it would have been a different story but I was going to be enjoying the beautiful sights of Bali at the time.

Once I arrived in Indonesia I observed how Indonesians were caught up with their own elections. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, had just finished its second democratic parliamentary elections and was preparing for the first round of the presidential elections. Everyone is following the elections – tv stations and newspapers provide daily analysis and debates. My taxi drivers, the people’s political analysts, would have long discussions on the state of the nation and strength of the candidates. My friends in Jakarta would provide me with the latest behind the scenes gossip on the candidates.

I guess it made me question how I as a European take for granted the right to vote in free and fair elections be it on national or European level.

In the end I decided to abandon the sunny beaches of Bali for a few days and to travel to Jakarta to vote at my embassy.

Why? What nudged me? In the end I got caught up in the EP election fever. It did make me feel still connected with Europe somehow although when I talked to European friends abroad I would get mixed reactions. A Finnish friend in Canada said ‘ but the elections are in Europe, what does this have to do with me?’

I tried to find out how many Finns are expected to vote in Jakarta. However for Finnish citizens it was not necessary to register, just to show up at the nearest Finnish embassy with a passport or other I.D document. This can only be to the advantage of such like me.

As I delved into the European election fever, I spoke with NGO activists and representatives of Indonesian parliament to find out if they were aware of what was happening on the European continent or about the biggest trans-European elections. However, I am afraid to say that they were not aware that the EP elections are taking place now. This said many did know that elections will be held this year and some even had read about the low turnout at the last EP elections; all which led to an  interesting discussion comparing the two election processes.

Regarding who my vote went for, once I decided to vote in the elections I was able to find all the information I needed……in a serene wi-fi café in Seminyak called “Grocer & Grind” where I spent considerable time over an espresso searching information on voting and candidates. Finnish websites such as

http://www.vaalit.fi/teksti/index.htm

http://www.europarl.fi/

gave me all the information I needed and the Finnish embassy officials in Jakarta were also very helpful with the information on election times and requirements.

I had a clear idea who to vote for from the beginning. I have seen how dedicated my chosen candidate was to protecting human rights and the environment during her two previous europarliamentary terms.

What struck me in these elections was the use of Facebook and internet in general. My chosen MEP has a facebook site and I was able to share the link with my Finnish Facebook friends some of whom joined her site. To crown it all I was even motivated enough to post a comment on her site. I am dying to tell you who I voted for…..

Never on Sunday? Hmm. Though it was not the first time that I heard an excuse about not voting, it hurt. The reason is difficult to explain. It goes beyond the fact that I work for the European Parliament, beyond my strong faith in the EU. How can I tell people that (whatever) their vote is valuable without being labelled as a brainwashed eurocrat? I am searching to do it through a story… Maybe Europe is an ugly frog that can turn into a prince if we kiss it? No, that’s not it. How is Europe (conveniently?) seen today by many people? As a big bad wolf. That’s it, that’s my story and that’s my reason for voting, however over simplistic it might look to some.

Europe, a big bad wolf? - Photo by dinonikk on Flickr

Once upon a time there was a big bad wolf called Europe (the taurus story is a myth as we all know). While walking in the forests, it devoured all human beings it crossed: bad and good. They made him move to the left, to the middle or to the right -according to where his stomach weighed heavier. Sometimes the human activity inside of him brought the best out of him -some people made him lean to a field and think “why not plant a flower here?”- or the worst -some made him crash all flowers it met on its way… The reactions among the people that were lucky enough to stay out of his stomach varied: others watched him with fear, anger or disgust, while others with awe, astonishment, sympathy or just indifference. Whatever their feeling, they just watched him, unable to take responsibility and act to change a situation that deep down they did not really like. Sometimes they even said “why bother? The big bad wolf is too far to reach me!”. Until the big bad wolf invaded their secret garden and smashed their own flowers. And then they cared but it was a bit too late to act… “The rest is silence” (as Shakespeare would say).

I might be caricaturing, but I am sure you all know what am talking about. Responsibility for our (in)actions. Whether the EU is “too far” and can communicate with us as well as a wild animal, there is no excuse for inactivity. And by inactivity I mean not voting in the forthcoming June elections of the European Parliament. The wolf in my story devoured everybody it met without distinction, without asking for permission, but luckily in today’s democratic world we can have our say as to whom it will absorb via one very valuable but at times disregarded thing: our vote. Am not saying the European Parliament is indeed destroying every good thing on this planet -I believe quite the contrary in fact- but I can accept the idea that there are good and bad people in it, some efficient ones and some inefficient. Just like everywhere else in our society. But it could be that the EU goes into a whole different direction than the one we want it to go. Do we really want to stand by and watch our worst fears turn into reality? It’s up to us to make the reality the way we want it to be… And to have no regrets whatsoever -because, whatever the outcome, at least the not yet born will not blame us for being passive observers.

Lack of knowledge about “complicated EU stuff” and no time to read the online election pages that we work so hard for or the myriads of relevant information available online or on paper?

Lack of knowledge about “complicated EU stuff” and no time to read the online election pages that we work so hard for or the myriads of relevant information available online or on paper? Here is the one thing you need to know in order to vote on 4-7 June, apart of course from the exact date of the election in your country: just like you have representatives in your national parliament, that you elect, you have also representatives in the European Parliament (coldly known as “MEPs” though they are as normal as the rest of us -and by “normal” I mean who laugh and cry too at times and who act according to their beliefs). They represent the citizens of the current 27 EU member states (yes, you too!) and decide on some issues that affect our daily lives -so yes, that would make their selection quite significant. It is as simple as that in my view.

Troubled about who to vote for? The political world obeys no fixed compass. Just follow your heart and choose the ones that you feel will plant the most flowers. Lets make Europe flourish in all possible ways -not only in spring but also in the summer (as of June) and in all the (difficult?) winters to come… Whether we “happily live ever after” (“and go to the sea shore” as Melina Merkouri adds in the unmemorable film “Never on Sunday”) or not is up to nobody else but ourselves.

Mr Hannan's viral video (YouTube)

Who’d have thought it possible? The internet’s most popular video, apparently for rather more than the mythical 15 minutes of fame, at least in the UK, was this week a recording of a three minute speech by a Conservative MEP, sitting as a non-attached member in the European Parliament. 

Yes, that’s a speech by an MEP…  With 1.4 million views at the time of writing (thus in under four days).

The office is buzzing with exchanges, admittedly mainly between the Brits, about how on earth this was possible. Mr Hannan himself seems perplexed, pointing out that he has made many speeches in Parliament, many of them attacking Labour, without any of them making him an internet star. It helps of course that he was speaking directly to the UK Prime Minister, present in the chamber, who just had to sit and listen, but that hardly explains the phenomenon. UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, no oratorical slouch himself, also had a go, but somehow languishes in relative internet anonymity at present. The video, posted on YouTube, has attracted not only views, but also over 9000 comments, many of which call for him to become UK Prime Minister without further ado.

No-one quite knows why one virus catches and another does not, why one rampages through a population and another peters out in short order. It seems however to depend more on the ecosystem than on the virus itself. 

Suffice to say this is an internet communicator’s dream. The snag is that it is difficult to explain why it happened. Doubtless a spot of zeitgeist: there is no doubt that Mr Hannan voices the views of many on the right of politics about the political reaction to the recession being implemented in several countries. This view is supported by the fact that the video seems initially to have caught on with conservatives in the United States, whose views about Mr Brown are unlikely to be as personal and passionate as those of Mr Hannan, but who probably harbour similar feelings about the new US president and his policies. Mr Hannan doubtless also articulates the feelings of a strand of British opinion about their Prime Minister – the YouTube comments confirm this – but he is hardly the only one doing so.

Others have pointed out that the form of the speech, dictated by the rules and habits of the European Parliament, where speakers have brief, but uninterrupted, opportunities to distill their thoughts, lends itself very well to the YouTube format. Had he taken the floor for ten minutes, or suffered constant heckling or interruption, the video would have suffered considerably.

But we’re still not there, are we? Such considerations cannot really explain the extraordinary phenomenon we have witnessed. And I’m sorry, I can’t buy all the slightly heated stuff in the commentariat about Mr Hannan’s popularity representing some kind of mass groundswell of opinion against the liberal media establishment – even if there are many interesting points to be made about how the internet communicates political opinion independently of traditional media. The secret – and the mystery – are in the word which describes what has happened: viral. No-one quite knows why one virus catches and another does not, why one rampages through a population and another peters out in short order. It seems however to depend more on the ecosystem than on the virus itself. What we do know is that once a virus starts to spread, it does so exponentially. Thus it was with Mr Hannan. Most people have surely seen the video not so much because of its intrinsic merits but because hundreds of thousands of others had. It started off speaking powerfully to a small but influential group, but ended up, like the proverbial modern celebrity, by being famous for being famous. (That did not stop it, of course, from speaking powerfully to many of its later viewers too.)

This is not a reflection on the quality of the speech, without doubt a good one, though not one even its speaker considers exceptional, but on why it spread, which is a different question. As this episode shows, viral effects like this are surprises, they happen as often as not out of the blue, as surprising for their originators as for anyone else. What the initial spark was is unclear, but what is clear is that once the fire caught hold, it rampaged.

Whatever the explanations though, in terms of outcomes, Mr Hannan’s experience holds many lessons. First, it is more and more possible for political messages to reach a mass public without the intermediation of the organisations and individuals known collectively as the media. Possible, but not yet reliably so.

Second, traditional media ideas about what people are interested in and/or willing to consume in terms of political news are not always a reliable guide to reality. Exciteable internet chatter about the traditional media “suppressing” Mr Hannan’s speech is clearly wide of the mark, even the man himself started from the assumption that no-one very much would be interested. Few would have predicted, including among those now enthusing, that a three minute speech by an MEP would be of such great interest. Yet it sold like hot cakes.

How should the institution’s press and information services react to an event such as that we have seen this week? 

Third, though politicians and institutions cannot necessarily predict such viral effects, they can certainly not afford to ignore them either. This applies to those with a message, those with a counter-message and those whose job it is simply to inform the public about what happens in the European Parliament. Mr Hannan’s new-found exposure is great for him, of course, and great also for the European Parliament, but it remains only a part of the political and institutional story of that day. In the comments column on YouTube, several ask about Mr Brown’s response, there are requests that it be posted. There were of course other speakers in the debate. Though many are simply delighted or horrified, according to taste, to hear Mr Hannan’s words, for others, with a broad interest in the issues, the speech could be a way into the wider discussion. Thus, for his political opponents, it is vital to be able to react in kind, posting counter views, the Brown response, etc. (No. 10 Downing Street is, for the record, keen on internet communication – I watched with fascination its Twitter coverage of Mr Brown’s world tour this week). But for the Institution itself, and this is where your friendly neighbourhood web-editors come in, the key is to provide the back up information to satisfy the interest and curiosity aroused at such times. Where can internet users find the Brown reply, where can they listen to the other interventions in the debate, when, where, why and in what context did this debate take place? All this information is available on the EP website, and the entire debate, or separate parts of it, can be watched and/or downloaded (that indeed is where Mr Hannan’s video comes from). Unfortunately, as yet, some work is still required of the user, we cannot provide a url for particular video extracts from the session (though the facility is under development).

But as well as the technical possibilities and constraints, there are issues about organisation to be considered. How should the institution’s press and information services react to an event such as that we have seen this week? To me it seems clear that there is a job to be done, that of satisfying the interest in the Parliament generated by what occurred. Yes, this means providing the information on our website, but in the networked internet of today, it is also important to go where the punters are. Mr Hannan was, note, seen not on Parliament’s website – though he could have been – but on YouTube. Thus, Parliament too needs to be there, not only with an institutional presence in its own right (coming very soon to EUTube, by the way), but also in the comments columns, blogs and forums, responding to the express needs of users. There are limits, of course, both in terms of sheer manpower and in terms of the content, which must remain institutional (objective, accurate, reliable, non-partisan, etc.), but there can no longer be any excuses for not trying.

The story begins with a boy and a new bike.  Boy takes bike out for first time, falls off, breaks brake lever, becomes distraught.  Boy’s father thus called upon to act as emergency bicycle repair man in emotionally heightened atmosphere.  All seems clear enough, but a seemingly insuperable obstacle is encountered: how to get the bike handgrips off (without destroying them), so that everything else can get off and get put back on.  In my day, (for, yes, the father I am he) bike handgrips were either sticky tape for the pros or fairly rigid plasticky things for kids which just slid off – often so easily that they would slide off disconcertingly when you were riding.  I hadn’t really thought about it much since, but upon examination modern handgrips are soft, tactile and rubbery and seem fused with the handlebar within, a maddening obstacle to the business in hand.  They simply don’t budge a millimetre.  Cut to next scene: father trying to suppress excessively open expressions of extreme frustration while boy looks on asking: “are you going to fix it soon?”

Enter the trusty MacBook.  Who knows?  Maybe a google search on “how to remove bicycle handgrips” will produce a miracle cure… Naturally hundreds of search results, but it is obvious that I am on potentially fertile terrain, with all manner of bicycle maintenance websites appearing.  However, most suggest squirting compressed air under the handgrips.  Yeah, as if I’ve got a fully equipped bicycle repair workshop in my Brussels house.  Then, bizarrely, some guy somewhere in darkest Wisconsin or the like brings up the surprising qualities of hairspray.  Sure…  There are some strange folk out there, it seems.

But no, onward search reveals other bike web-people extolling the virtues of hairspray.  It lubricates when wet but sticks when dry.  Just get a screwdriver under the handgrip, squirt in a little hairspray and Bob’s your uncle. Reverse the process to put it back on.  Guess what? It works like a dream!  It is astounding, miraculous, the bike was fixed in no time and the father was a beaming hero to his son, which is how it should be.

But imagine this before the internet.  How would I EVER have discovered a trick like that – knowledge possessed by a baseball cap wearing resident of the small-town American Midwest?  It’s truly mind-blowing.  It made me think that the internet really is what those slightly weird nerdy-academic types claim: the third great information revolution in human history, after the invention of writing and then of printing, a transformation in how information can reach the place it is needed.  Information need only exist in one place – even in darkest Wisconsin – and anyone, even a frustrated Brussels would-be bicycle repair man, can simply go and get it.  

Of course, that’s old hat now, and we’re all supposed to be excited about Web 2.0 or the semantic web or whatever, but for me right now it is hairspray and handgrips which best sum up the miracle of the internet.

Watch a video revealing this secret (I found this later – this time a guy in Winfield, Illinois, gratifyingly actually wearing my imagined baseball cap) right here and see it work before your eyes!