It’s a bit like cluedo. The postman shot the cuckoo in Manikata on day 1. The bus driver shot the lapwing in Bugibba on day 2. Odds are on for the panel beater shooting the flamingo in Bidnija on day 3. #closetheseason #flagrant #josephzommkelmtek
– Hello 119?
– Bongu. X’gara?
– Sparaw ghasfur iehor.
– X’inhu beccun?
– Le lapwing
– X’inhu?
– Lapwing. Illegali jisparawlu.
– Ijja imma miet?
– Le dan kemm laqtuh imma imwegga’.
– Allura ma hix flagranti.
– X’ma hix?
– Flagranti.
– Mela xinhu flagranti?
– Flagranti kieku zvojtah fuqu per ezempju.
– Xi zvojta?
– Is-senter hux. Jew qatel xi 400 ghasfur.
– Int qed tiggennen?
– Le qed insegwi li qalli Galdes.
– Ok . siehbi.
The results of the European Elections are drawing a clear picture for the current leaders of the Union. A mixed Eurosceptic vote has registered a substantial growth. I call it mixed eurosceptic because I too, like many others, find it hard to lump the messages being sent out by the Tspiras’ leftist eurosceptics in Greece, the Spanish left eurosceptics, Nigel Farage’s UKIP and Marine Le Pen’s Front National.
Most of these parties do have a common thread of anti-EU establishment of sorts. In their minds, the European project is not working and needs to change fast. Marine Le Pen managed to remove the racist image (at least image) that had held FN down for so long a time and this led her party to garner one fourth of the EU vote in France.
To these parties one has also to add the alarming rise of far-right movements – eurosceptic but in their own intolerant way. The neo-Nazis have won a seat in Germany, Jobbik is going strong in Hungary and across the continent such extreme rightist ideas have registered a surge that cannot be ignored. In Malta too, Normal Lowell’s Imperium almost pipped Alternattiva Demokratika to the third place in party vote counts.
From UKIP to Jobbik the votes are easily translatable to a message on a European dimension. They are not only a political but also a social and cultural message to the European project – they too are a response from the young European demos to the “elites” (or if you like “perceived elites”) in Europe. Also one has to bear in mind that the European average turnout has been weak, very weak, with Slovakia reaching a miserable 19% in turnout.
Did Malta fit into the general message sending on a European dimension? Can one ask Simon Busuttil to resign in the same manner as Nigel Clegg will be asked to do following the result? I strongly doubt it. To start off with my example, Nigel Clegg put his neck on the line for Europe. He insisted on discussing European matters and on facing off Mr Farage in public debates – risking all for the European message. The UK result spelled a huge defeat for the Liberal Democrat and there is a clear nexus to a European dimension of that defeat. Apart from insisting on the inclusion of a referendum on Europe, Farage rightly asked for Clegg’s head on a plate following his party’s remarkable result.
The problem with the Maltese vote is that there are little or no considerations of the European dimension and of what parties stand for in Europe. In this perspective Lowell’s Imperium and the eclectic Alleanza ghal Bidla stand out as the glaring exception – being the two parties that really went out on a European ticket with a sort of European agenda. The rest of the parties – even an unwilling Alternattiva Demokratika – were content to make this election a rerun extension of a general election.
Muscat’s Labour drummed up the core of the critical mass he had built to add on to the momentum of the landslide electoral victory a little more than a year ago. Seeing such a lovely opportunity fall on his lap Muscat could not resist using this election to browbeat his opponent to submission – what better than an opposition in disarray for a longer period? Was there any European message to be read in the Labour vote? Not really. Much rhetoric about being the best in Europe would turn out to seem even more frivolous when the results poured out with a resounding support for the king of eurosceptics in the Labour camp: Alfred Sant.
Blogging in inewsmalta this morning Sant concluded his post with a strong eurosceptic message about the possible failure of the European project (blaming the elites in the process). Neither did the line-up of Labour candidates augur well for any medicine to the euroscepticism. Labour remained at best cool about the whole idea of Europe. It was an inconvenient step that had to be taken in its stride of national political growth. The European project has not so much been accepted by Labour (no U-turn there) but rather pragmatically assimilated in its program of growth for the “movement”. It is a tool to be used at will to be able to play with the popularity figures back at home. And it’s working for now.
The PN could have had a strong base and message on a European level. It should have been relatively easy to boost past credentials within the European project. There were valiant efforts towards the end of the campaign to weave European values and meaning into the reasons for voting for their candidates. On the whole though the PN is still playing to the tune of the massive Labour machine where the campaign is concerned. It played into the hands of the “negativity” spin by trying to force their hand too early – and failed to consider that a huge chunk of the electorate is still voting emotionally (sadly a kind of vote that the PN itself had groomed all too often with campaigns based on “taste” and “guilt by association”).
So in the end the Maltese European vote strongly resembled a photo competition on Facebook. You know the kind right? It’s when you receive a message from a friend telling you that their daughter is currently enrolled in a competition for “The Girl Best Dressed as a Pumpkin” or when an acquaintance who plays in some rock band that you never heard of asks you to vote for his band so they can get some money being offered by some company to record an album.
Admit it. Most times you ignore the request but if you actually bother to go to the Facebook page and vote then your vote has nothing to do with assessing the qualities of the different baby pumpkin girls or bands taking part in the competition. Not really no. You are just voting out of some twisted sense of duty to your friend – at worst a sense of guilt and obligation.
You’ve seen it before time and time again. Given how the MEP campaign unfolded in Malta we had a very similar scenario. The two main parties ended up sending their “vote for me” request, practically asking their core to confirm their allegiance or obligation towards their basic party of choice. Muscat’s movement worked wonders for this purpose. Busuttil has not had enough time nor a good enough performance until now to convince those who deserted the PN ship a year ago.
In the end the Maltese MEP vote was largely based on allegiances to ideas that were shaped in the 2013 national elections. There is little that is European in the Maltese vote – no message for the elites in Europe much to the chagrin of Alfred Sant and his 50,000+ voters. 10 years into European membership and we are still very much an island adrift from the general currents and issues that are at play in Europe
The World Wide Web turns 25 today. As Sir Tim Berners Lee makes a move to try to keep the “web we want”, the current state of affairs is such that the social media revolution is still the main motor behind the spread of the web worldwide. The availability of immediate information as well as the empowerment of citizens has gained momentum to the extent that the amount of data being exchanged about immediate events has increased exponentially.
Ellen De Generes’ selfie at the last Oscar Award ceremony threatened the whole infrastructure of twitter – an information superload. It’s not just the pink news that is doing it. Breaking world wide news is now seasoned with the input from literally millions of netizens – all giving their slant or take on what is going on. We are used to seeing major news sites asking for “on the ground” information – cue the BBC’s now standard box on a news item asking whether “you are on site” and whether you can provide immediate information.
The social media have also been at the core of the revolutions that swept across the Arab world and more recently in the Ukraine. Whether it is a natural disaster such as a tsunami or earthquake, or a human tragedy – a shootout, a crash – the social media is on the front-line. There is a problem though, and it is becoming more and more dangerous.
The lack of control over what is and is not published when it comes to netizen input means that a rumour or a conjecture can rapidly spread across the net and be treated as a truth. We are already familiar with fake deaths of stars that quickly go viral and before you know it the news is taken as being true. The problem is exacerbated when it comes to news from trouble zones such as we have recently seen in Syria or Ukraine and is with regard to crucial information such as the presence of snipers or attackers.
This problem is now being studied by researchers at five different European universities who are trying to develop an algorithm that filters online rumours and chooses the true (or potentially true) from the false.
Five European universities are working on a social media lie detector in an attempt to verify online rumors. The technology developed in the wake of the London riots is set to help not only journalists and the private sector, but also governments.
Researchers, led by Sheffield University in England, are cooperating on the system, which could automatically ascertain if a rumor can be verified and whether it originates from a reliable source. It will attempt to filter reliable factual information from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
The project called PHEME is being funded by the European Union and has already been in development for three years. It is named after the Greek mythological character of Pheme, who was famed for spreading rumors. [REUTERS]
The filter will try to label information as being either speculation, controversy, disinformation or misinformation. The system will try and use three different factors to establish the accuracy of a nugget of information. It will examine the information itself (lexical, syntactic and semantic), and then cross-reference the information with a trust worthy data source and the dissemination of information.
In other words, PHEME promises to be the first frontier at combating online fraud and misconceptions although it will not entirely replace human judgement. The ultimate arbiter of what can or cannot be considered as potentially true will remain the gatekeepers at the newsdesks. What PHEME does is simplify their task – particularly as the new is live when it would be more time-consuming to follow leads – and provide a probability.ù
Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Pratchett are all attributed different versions of the quote “A lie can travel half way around the world before the truth can put its shoes/pants/boots on.” With PHEME’s help the time gap might be shorter…
The truth, if I lie.
)
Lil Facebook nistħajlu Paceville. Saru jitkellmu dwaru qisu kull ma ssib fih huwa ħażin u ta’ min jistmerru. Qatt ma nitgħallmu jaħasra. L-ingliżi jgħidu “a bad worker blames his tools”. Ma nafx jekk hemmx frażi ekwivalenti bil-Malti. Issa pero forsi sibt rokna tal-internet fejn insir naf. Dan l-aħħar skoprejt grupp ġdid fuq facebook. Jismu “kelma kelma” hu huwa vjaġġ ta’ tkixxif … fejn wieħed jista’ kuljum jiskopri perli ta’ għarfien ġodda dwar l-ilsien li tagħtna ommna. Ilsien pajjiżna biex niftehmu. U f’dawn il-jiem fejn qażżu il-kukuzzli bil-posts politiċi, dak li għandu x’joffri il-kittieb ta’ “kelma kelma” (qaluli min hu pero ma nafx jieħux gost li insemmih b’ismu allura jieħu prosit anonimu għalissa) huwa oasi ta’ wens.
Jekk trid tkun taf għalfejn nużaw l-espressjoni “qishom id-di u d-do” jew kemm hemm modi differenti biex tgħid “blu jew aħmar” fittex issieħeb fil-grupp. L-indirizz virtwali tiegħu huwa dan: http://www.facebook.com/kelmakelma.mt
Saħħiet.
I chose midnight last Sunday as the time and day to deactivate my Facebook account. My personal Facebook account that is, if anything such as a personal Facebook account really exists. I’ve been asked “Why?” and been warned “Don’t” as though the issue of whether or not to have a FB account is a matter of life and death. Meanwhile the bliss of deleting the FB app from both my iPhone and the iPad was followed by a tiny semblance of withdrawal symptoms – would I be suddenly “out of the loop”?
Deactivation is not deletion. I still have the option to reactivate and log back in as though nothing ever happened. “We were on a break”. But why deactivate? I don’t have one reason. I have a series of unordered thoughts that have been running through my head for a while and here they are in no particular order (that’s the unordered bit).
1. The Not So Social Network
When Mr Mark Zuckerberg decided that Facebook should go public he added a letter to the IPO (initial public offering) application that he filed. In that letter he spoke in glowing terms of Facebook’s mission. Facebook is not a company he said. Facebook has a social mission, he said. The mission, he said, was to make the world more open and connected. Connections, change, networking. The long, long letter is full of this kind of vision. It was Google’s “Do no Evil” with an added bout of logorrhea. You would not be investing in a company but in a social mission. Zuckerberg did not tell us why Caritas, AA, the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontières – to mention a few – haven’t yet listed their social missions on some stock exchange.
But hey. This is the internet. The internet is now linked to financial bubbles and at 38 dollars a share buying a part of facebook just meant going along with the trend/myth of dot com investments. Kudos to Mr Zuckerberg for managing to sell his “social mission”. In one week facebook shares have plummeted and “16 million dollars have been shed in market capitalisation”. I don’t know if that is good or bad. I don’t care. I just find the idea that Facebook has any kind of social mission in mind very very risible.
The first thing I don’t like about Facebook is the way it is about anything other than your ability to control the spread of information about yourself. Sure, you choose what to put on Facebook but then again – do you? There is a huge gap between the promise of freedom of networking and the constant impulse of FB to get you to share, share, share.
The first thing I don’t like about Facebook is that it is sharing via force feeding.
2. The Sheep’R’Us
When you first registered on Facebook it was to be connected. Then we added and added friends. Then, at a time when Google Circles were still a pie in the sky we had no way to distinguish between your College Alumni, your Sport Friends and the freaks who post weird stuff on walls late at night. For a while it got interesting. Campaigns went viral on facebook, the like button provided instant gratification that had not been seen on the internet since the early days of Yahoo Categories and we just posted and posted. Faster internet meant more possibilities of “sharing” video, photo, apps. And the games? Do you remember the first time you opened Farmville, spent five minutes trying to grow some shit then wondering “what the fuck?”. Some people still use farmville.
Do you remember the pokes? They too seem to have fucked off to a worse dimension. We were left with walls, posts, and “threads” of absolute bull. Because whether five idiots meet on the street or whether they meet virtually their collective contribution to humanity is just about equal. It’s not like every chat on facebook has to be a Zizek-Hitchens debate but you could sense a collective dumbing down suddenly beginning to take shape. It was not even the “good morning I’m having toast” crowd that finally did it. It was the general feeling that having an opinion suddenly meant that once was right. And facebook reinforced that. Photos, opinions, videos merged into one miasma of a collective skip.
And you got lost in the crowd. The second thing I did not like about Facebook was that anything goes.
3. The Expression Lie
If I do reconnect to Facebook it will be to reconnect a blog to an audience. Unfortunately almost 80% of J’accuse traffic was sourced from Facebook. The worst part of that deal was that readers stopped commenting on the blog. They preferred the comment on Facebook. You tried to integrate the two but it never was the same. Once again you could sense the attention span of readers going berserk – like that of a pack of flies suddenly discovering the morning pile of dogs’ droppings on a suburban pavement. Facebook had created the skim reader. Twitter’s metre of 160 words had become the generally accepted limit for an attention span.
Does Facebook empower with information? Maybe. What we definitely do is form our input channels into a constant monotone dreg. We tend to network with like minds, like ideas and similar opinions. Collectively these little facebook packs will look for information they approve of and enjoy. Before long they will have moulded their own virtual world of inputs where all the news and all the opinion they read stops challenging them, stops provoking them. Their cerebrum has become an added appendix to the senses without any feedback. Colours, sounds and (if it could) tastes. Without the appreciation born of provocation.
Facebook the champion of expression. Fuck that. One big massive unlike.
4. Time
I found it much easier to quit smoking than to quit facebook. Because facebook had become that distracted timefiller. An iphone app that vomits post after post of nonsense skipping from the 1,000 likes to save the orphan in Brobdingag to the viral video of the pope on a loo to the latest breaking news from parliament. Worse still it gave you a reality check. The ugliest quirks that people had managed to keep away from their social interaction were suddenly and inexplicably hung there for all to see. You suddenly had intimate photos – not of breasts or testicles – but of bedrooms and studies. What was previously one’s own sancta sanctorum was suddenly posted and bared for all to see. The weakest of individuals who were unable to master even the most basic rules of social interaction felt “empowered” when they shared their framed certificates in the bedroom, their corny poses by the sea and in some cases they even fought out their personal fights like some UFC Championship battle.
And for every “empowered” citizen struggling to grasp the concepts of basic PR there would be some ruthless, uninhibited facebook voyeur/stalker who would scour the walls for information to snigger at and make fun of. Bitchery too became an art. The packs of supposedly educated wolves were unleashed on the beginners and found it oh so easy to point out to the crude reality of their inexperience with real social interaction. It’s not like it was difficult, and I am guilty of having engaged in the ruthless behaviour myself. Stalkers unleashed on the unknowing victims were like foxes released in a chicken pen. There is no great intelligence required to pull a photo off the wall of some unsuspecting facebook user and to blog about the social shortcomings that have been so unabashedly and unwittingly put on display.
Insofar as politicians and their daily tomfoolery with the medium is concerned there would be no amount of wolves that would suffice to tear the arrogant peacocks to bits. For you’d expect a politician to be able to handle the dos and donts of simple social networking. Still. The time that facebook stole from us can never be recovered with 1,000 other initial public offerings. The fourth thing I do not like about facebook is the amount of time wasted on it before discovering that it is another cynical mirror of our society.
7. Not the full list
There’s more to this list. Much more. But there’s a limit to how long a post can be. I’ll be stopping here for now. Will elaborate later. Do not be surprised if my personal account is reactivated soon. In the meantime J’accuse still has a facebook page where you will find most updates.
I’d like to hear what you think about facebook, privacy and more. I doubt anyone will comment though. You’re probably all busy catching up on facebook.
