Changes

In December 2007, I wrote a piece about how the Maltese were embracing Facebook, using comments from my online friends as the primer for the article. Fast forward two years and those twelve thousand subscribers have grown more than ten-fold, to around 120,000. Malta is right up there with the top 20 countries in terms of proportionate take up of the leading social media network.

In the past 12 months, what's been perhaps more significant than the number of local social media users is the way people have started to use the new Web 2.0 tools to go beyond just interacting with friends. There has been an exponential growth in the number of local Facebook groups and pages promoting events, businesses and a raft of social issues and causes. In many instances, it has been a set of new voices rising above the parapet - not just on Facebook, but also on blogs, YouTube and Twitter.

We enter 2010 on the crest of an increasingly mainstream social web. In many countries, the recession has spurred consumers to adopt social technologies to become more market-savvy, improve their overall education and brand themselves better to find new jobs to replace the ones they have lost. Many corporate brands waded into social media marketing as core budgets got slashed, seeking innovation and better return on their investments in new media campaigns.

Results have been mixed, as businesses continue to struggle with two-way, interactive communication media that challenge the traditional one-way broadcasting model. The larger social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn have started to share data, raising concerns about online privacy and data ownership - but also helping consumers social experience spread from site to site, enabling them to access their friends’ opinions, and recommendations in real time. We are living in a new era of disintermediation and user-generated content, where citizen journalists are more trusted and influential than traditional broadcasters. In many US cities, newspapers have folded and people increasingly rely on the 'read-write web' for the most basic of information. Real-time data is now searchable by the major search engines. People produce content, connect and share with each other at an increased pace, increasingly relying on mobile devices and getting closer to the smart mobs envisaged by Howard Rheingold.

What does this mean to the way we live our lives on these islands? Particularly to the way we interact with individuals and institutions? How deep are the changes that social media appears to be triggering? Are the local rumblings online about censorship laws, politics, religion, murtali, customer service and bad restaurants the tip of the iceberg, the shape of things to come? Or will the Maltese simply end up using social media in the way Neil Postman postulated about TV all those years ago, to 'amuse ourselves to death'on Farmville or some other online application? To what extent can social media enable an alternative model of living, working and networking for people in Malta, and contribute towards a change in power structures on the islands?

These questions are at the heart of my research. We unconsciously think of Malta as a 'special case'. We're islanders, a law unto our own, deeply stubborn, conservative, seemingly entrenched in bi-polar, traditional, enduring power systems. You can attribute this to our size. Or to our success story - we're survivors with an enviable 'quality of life' that continues to attract new tribes. We now have access to new tools that can enable the opinions of those we trust to potentially matter more than those of our traditional intermediaries - print media, TV, radio, the Church, people in traditional positions of power with corresponding real life networks and social capital.

Will the social web lead to an eventual flow of power from a small band of people in Malta to a much larger number of individuals who are web literate? Or will we just subsume what is now alternative into the mainstream or the mundane?

It's going to be an interesting couple of years.

Space

As a child, I thought Boxing Day was about a noble and violent sport. It was with considerable disappointment that I gradually realised that the day had less to do with fisticuffs on a black and white TV than boxing up presents for the ‘less wealthy' and 'social inferiors.'

Nothing much remains in Malta of this very Anglo-Saxon tradition, despite years of colonisation. The day after Christmas is now about unwrapped presents, headache management and gentle anti-climax. While yesterday I was woken up by a child squealing at a bulging sock on his bed, this morning was met with black coffee and a quiet shower. It would all have been pretty stereotypical were it not for the fact that my wife had work to do. As freelancers, we are the exception to the rule that dictates that most of Malta is on holiday till January 4th. So by 9.15, Jacob and I were blinking at a watery sun over the runway at the Old Luqa airport and my wife was starting her copy writing assignment for a flying school.

We watched Liz climb into the Diamond DA40 behind the pilot, and waved, feeling like bit parts in a play. Then the propeller kicked into life and before long we were trying to keep track of a dot in the sky. It was then I realised that about forty years ago, I had spent an entire afternoon in the same location waiting with my father for a plane that never arrived. It was the cue for my own impromptu flight, fuelled by mental snapshots of RAF bombers and silver Camberras, when my father wore a uniform that gently smelt of engine oil and tobacco. I only stopped gabbling when I sensed my child fidget to hide his boredom.

So we went back to watching the clouds from our perch outside the old barracks. Until the little plane dropped out of the sky and the propeller stopped as suddenly as it had sprung into life.

"We should get up there more often," said Liz, as she climbed out over the wing. "You can see the pockets of green and space in Malta that are so difficult to find when you're down here."

Boxing Day is a waiting room for the new year, a penny for your thoughts. And for floating above the clouds to find your personal space outside the box of this island.

Guest blogging by Alex Grech

It is my pleasure to introduce Alex Grech who will be guest blogging here on Wired Malta for the next 48 hours. Alex runs StrategyWorks and Malta InsideOut a site about visiting, living and working in Malta. He's currently conducting PhD research on alternative models for social media networks.

Happy Christmas

Click here for the Christmas edition of the newsletter edited by Toni Sant on the new look aboutmalta.com:

Il-Festi t-Tajba! This is the annual AboutMalta.com newsletter for Christmas. It is with great joy that for the eleventh consecutive Christmas I announce the various wonderful interactive features we’ve put together for all to enjoy during this festive season. We’ve been doing this since Christmas 1998 when MaltaMedia first went online to bring you the world’s first Maltese webcast of the midnight Christmas Mass from Ta’ Pinu in Gozo.

Through AboutMalta.com’s collaboration with the MaltaMedia Online Network we continue to bring you a number of Christmas online goodies, including special podcasts of traditional and contemporary Maltese music with a Christmas theme and a number of freshly produced video clips about Christmas traditions in the Maltese islands. Perhaps this year you’ll even try out a couple of the delicious Christmas recipes we’ve compiled for you. There’s lots more, so sit back and enjoy it all over the coming days.

We are also working on a review of the year 2009. As in previous years, this feature will be made available to the general public after Christmas day. It will also be followed by an elaborate review of the first decade of the 21st century, which I’ll tell you more about in January’s AboutMalta.com newsletter...

To subscribe to the newsletter click here.

Islands

Islands are like a magnet to those that have been away for a while, writes Alex Grech in maltainsideout, a website that shares knowledge and insights about life in Malta:

It’s inevitable that there are more people of Maltese origin living away from Malta than on the islands. They’re increasing by the day, as young people maximise on the opportunities that an EU passport offers and leave in search of work, adventure and fulfilment in the bigger world. It’s a positive thing, and brings renewed energy and much-needed new ideas when some of these people trickle back to the country.

There are two events that bring migrants from the UK and mainland Europe back to Malta in their hundreds. The first is national or EU Parliament elections, with the unique Maltese practice of hugely-subsidised airfares on Air Malta as an incentive for Maltese citizens based abroad to come back and cast their vote. The second is Christmas. You only have to log on to Twitter or see the status on Facebook pages for signs of the Maltese version of ’saudade’ and sheer expectancy as migrants get into countdown mode to reconnect with family and old networks. Luqa airport these days is a traffic jam of tears, squeals and trolleys piled with over-sized luggage.

So for the next 10 days or so, the islands will echo to the migrant tribes. You will find them congregated in huddles in old friends’ homes, in village bars, in organised parties in expensive venues. Eating too much, drinking too much, blinking at the Malta they left behind with new saudade eyes.

Endorsement

If John Dalli is perceived by too many anti-industry forces as a pro-industry Trojan horse at the very heart of EU health policy, he may not win the endorsement he needs from the European Parliament says Reflector, Pharm Exec Europe’s Brussels correspondent:

John Dalli, the little-known nominee for the new post, may be about to prove the industry fears unfounded. The minister from Malta, who is due to take office in the new year, has indicated a strong pro-industry line in his first official utterances.

In a letter to the European Parliament, he makes clear that one of his priorities will be “to make affordable, safe and efficacious medicines available to patients across the EU.” Integrating pharmaceuticals into public health “requires careful management,” he says, and “we must strive to reinvigorate this sector through innovation and enhancing its economic competitiveness.”..

But Dalli is not yet a shoo-in. As a member of the centre-right European People’s Party, he can expect support from the centre-right majority in the parliament. But there was wide parliamentary backing for putting pharmaceuticals into the health commissioner’s portfolio, and the intention was not to make life easier for drug firms. Nor do the patient groups and health activists that have long lobbied for this change expect to see the switch subverted by the new man in charge.

If Dalli is perceived by too many anti-industry forces as a pro-industry Trojan horse at the very heart of EU health policy, he may not win the endorsement he needs from the parliament, when he faces MEPs in January before a crucial vote on the new Commission. This should make the parliament’s routine hearings of commissioners-designate just a little bit more interesting than normal...

The heartbeat of Malta

Nick Redmayne of The Telegraph is 'swiftly conquered' by the historical and cultural charm of Valletta:

Mention Malta at a dinner party and eyes glaze over. Associations with mass tourism are ingrained – either as a fly-and-bop-till-you-drop centre for clubbers or a winter haunt for retired couples. It's true that despite the island's steadfast defiance in the face of Ottoman armies and the Luftwaffe, a later invasion of mass-market tourism did indeed make an unopposed landfall elsewhere in Malta. However, Valletta's bastions have endured and the city remains unconquered, a surprise of Baroque delight characterised by history, architecture and fine art..

It's November now and Valletta is enjoying "the summer of St Martin", twinkling morning light playing over the Triton Fountain. A benign mêlée of bright yellow charabancs of a certain age, all polished and sporting such proud epithets as "Leyland", "Perkins" and, reassuringly, "Old But Strong", patrol the city gate. Inside, Valletta measures about 600 by 900 metres, the EU's smallest capital, enclosing a resident population of only 6,500.

My first daylight impressions are of ornate limestone façades fronting six or seven-storey buildings, enclosed balconies and occasional open walkways peopled by those in need of a smoke. At ground level, shopfront signs (Muscat, Pace, Luigi) reveal Arabic and Italian influences – Maltese is close to colloquial Arab dialect, and Sicily is just 90 minutes away by ferry...

Romance in a cactus garden

Poitr Adamczyk, who played the part of Pope John Paul II spent three days in Malta shooting a Polish romantic comedy:

..Contacted by telephone in Poland, Mr Adamczyk said that a week after he left Malta he was already yearning to be back. "I already miss Malta because during the days I spent there I was under the spell of its people and its beauty. "I didn't know the island had such a long and fascinating history. Now I am looking forward to seeing the historic places when I visit next..

After the filming in Malta was over, Mr Adamcyzk stayed on for a hectic day on a photo shoot for a Polish fashion magazine called Gala, which is similar to Vogue, Vanity Fair and Viva. Loosely translated into English, the name of the Polish film shot in Malta is Don't Lie Darling. The ending of the film - a romantic comedy - had to be shot in a cactus garden on an island in the Mediterranean, according to Krystyna Mikulanka, Malta's honorary consul in Poland.

"So in September I came here to look for a cactus garden and for several other locations where the film company could put together the footage it had in mind," Ms Mikulanka explained during an interview. "Believe it or not I found what is considered to be the third largest cactus garden in the Mediterranean. This forms part of Derek Garden Centre, in Qormi. Some of the cacti are over 80 years old.

"Initially, the production company was thinking of filming the final part of the movie in Majorca but when I showed them what Malta could offer, they decided to film here. "Towards the end of the film, the main actor, Poitr Adamczyk, tells his lover he has managed to make her wish come true by taking her to a cactus garden in a Mediterranean island called Malta," Ms Mikulanka said.

Part of the footage was shot at the Upper Barrakka Gardens in Valletta. While shooting at Ghajn Tuffieha, Lech Walesa, a former President of Poland and leader of the Solidarnosc trade union, literally walked onto the set, appearing briefly in the film..."Mr Walesa came up to me asking why I hadn't told him earlier about the lure of this island. He said he will be holidaying here with his wife, next year."